Interview with Angela Y. Davis: Law and resistance in the prisons of empire (original) (raw)

Incarceration as Neo-Slavery: A Feminist Analysis of Angela Davis's Rhetoric

Pennsylvania Communication Annual, 2018

This research explores rhetorical strategies employed by Angela Davis to (re)conceptualize liberal freedom as collective freedom and uncover hidden forms of oppression within America's criminal justice system. Criminal justice reform movements have gained increased attention in recent years, most notably through the Black Lives Matter movement, and Davis's rhetoric offers insights into how oppressive discourses can be deconstructed and challenged. Davis's strategies also demonstrate how abolitionist rhetoric from the 19th century has adapted to confront exigencies of the 21st century. This essay aims to understand how Davis relied on rhetorical strategies in two speeches she gave in the mid-2000s. I argue that Davis employed the metaphor of "prison is slavery" by using vivid examples and connecting present circumstances to historical beginnings. She also used contradiction as a rhetorical strategy and provided international comparisons to illuminate possibilities for transformation.

Angela Davis and Critical Theory, from Kant to Abolition

Polity, 2024

This article recovers Angela Davis's archived dissertation project, "Towards a Kantian Theory of Force," from 1969, and places it in conversation with her mature work on prison abolition. It begins by documenting how, as a student of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Davis honed an immanent critique of Kant's problem of freedom as a reflection of the historical contradiction that emerges between the moral claim to universal freedom and the sociohistorical determinates that foreclose its material realization. It next reconstructs her dissertation project, showing how Davis teased this same problematic from Kant's little-explored political philosophy to argue persuasively that the liberal constitutional state's justified use of violence is a primary obstacle to the realization of moral freedom. By reading Davis's early critique in the context of contemporaneous Kant scholarship and in view of her subsequent abolitionist work, the article argues that Davis's early work can help to illuminate not just the central antagonism between freedom and state coercion that is the object of abolitionist critique, but the subjective-moral dimension inherent to its political practice.

Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry

“Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry” imbricates Emanuel Levinas’s ethics of the care-for-the-other and the experience of resistance and capitulation in the context of political prisons. It responds to basic questions: Why, under the paideia of the totalizing system, do we so often come to lose our ethical bearings, our social identities, such that we capitulate in this way? Yet again, why is it that we also so often resist when resistance seems impossible? Through textual analysis of publicly documented memoirs, interviews, letters and of my own experiences, this article analyses the paideia of totalizing systems and illustrates with Levinas not only the indispensability, however occluded, but also the living presence of ethics of the other in the political realm.

Speaking the language of State Violence: An Abolitionist Perspective

2016

To speak the ‘language of state violence’ is for penal abolitionists to insist that irrespective of the conditions, architecture, or general resources available, the prison will always be a place that systematically generates suffering, harm and death. Understanding prisons as a modus operandi of state violence may help abolitionists gain political momentum, for it leads to focus on both ‘institutional’ and ‘structural’ violence. Ultimately Speaking the language of state violence provides a name for penal abolitionists to mobilise around and makes connections between the prison and social inequities.

Cultivating solidarity from the inside-out : abolitionist efforts to trans-gress the prison walls

Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation , 2021

Incarcerated radical intellectuals elucidate the nature of political struggle and its various arenas. Alongside these writers are solidarity groups that propagate their writings and intellectual products. Through a close reading of Black Communist trans prisoner Alyssa V. Hope's legal efforts and writings, this article unearths how a pen-pal relationship transformed into a comprehensive abolitionist community. This case study provides an example of how abolitionists are grappling with the need to support the material needs of marginalised communities while still building otherwise possible worlds separate from a failing welfare state. Mutual aid projects, like the one formed by Hope's supporters, showcase that otherwise possible worlds are not only possible, but they are being created right now before us.