4.3: Positions in the Field

Abolition and Liberation 

To further our thinking about ideas of abolition and liberation we must turn our concern towards historic and systematic ways Euro-dominated societies have coalesced oppressive plantation systems in an attempt to physically, psychologically, and metaphorically extract and utilize Black bodies so that they might perform labor within places of subjection. Several ideas support this concern and uphold a reading of these systems that view the Black body as an object to be possessed, a location/landscape of possession, or a machine/technology laboring in and out of place. This approach warrants inclusion of Black Geography as a theoretic means of critically assessing the Black body in site/sight and as in object/site of labor. By critically analyzing Black performances of labor within oppressive/subjective states, we see first, the creation and manifestation of Euro standards of ontologies and epistemologies that promote and cultivate social and cultural violence that produce and sustain oppressions they attempt to cure. Second, we become aware that bodies perform ontological and epistemological labor and losing track of the body’s capability for material production within site/sight of the systems of oppression it exists within perpetuates oppression by reproducing the failure to see the body as a being/being in labor. Finally, while we must acknowledge and define the systems of oppression that labor to extract the Black body’s ontological and epistemological essence, we must also labor to understand and produce ideas of liberation that imagine otherwise, counter, and imaginative ways of subversively achieving liberation and freedom while within site/sight. To imagine how bodies historically viewed as objects perform liberation as negation, dispossession, and fugitivity, a turn towards Surveillance theories becomes fecund at analyzing ways these forms of resistance might unfold. 

 In order to begin to understand the dominant theories that structure Abolition studies that work complementarity with Surveillance theories we must first begin with defining some key Black Liberation Theories, positions, and schools of thought, while simultaneously identifying their concerns within notions of Black Geography Studies. This enables an understanding of Abolition Studies and its complement, Surveillance theories, allowing us to arrive at a synthesis of scholars employing liberatory frameworks that draw from both or either to promote, advance, and sustain ideas of Black liberation that support and expand subversive ways of achieving liberation and freedom. This approach will foster other ways of critically understanding, assessing, and practicing Black Radical Liberatory methods that aim at negation, fugitivity, dispossession, and ultimately, alternative ways of being as a manifestation of Black abolition methods and practices.

In “Black Pluralities of Black Geographies,” Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright produce a coherent and round analysis of Black Geographies by tracing Black geographical expressions realized through three spatially situated Black socio-political movements that spanned the twentieth century. The authors are transparent about their goals and method: “Black social movements materialize in response to the always-renewing forms of oppression Black populations face…comparing Black Geographies is a necessary aspect of realizing Black struggle, as comparison helps identify the various directions such struggle can take.[1] From this grounding, the authors provide an account of Garveyism, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA). The authors acknowledge that the incessant renewal of racial oppression instantiates new material responses from Black social movements and uses this to draw comparisons between the ways each movement worked to realize liberation through Black geographic struggles.

Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Photo of Marcus Garvey, 1941. (CCO; author unknown via NYPL)

First, Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association labored to create a modern sovereign nation-state comprised of African descendants re-inhabiting Africa. Their desire for sovereignty was fueled by their aspiration to implement a modern form of industry, science, and gendered practices that were racially uplifting, affirming, and concentrated within Africa. In comparison, the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense labored to build autonomous communities within Black-centered territories of the U.S. Their aspiration was communal autonomy that would also provide stability and protection of Black people. This was realized through an ethic of autonomy that turned to the people of the movement to provide the community’s needs (education, self-protection, healthcare, nutrition, subsistence) without interference from the U.S. Government. Finally, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA) was a coalitional government of Pan-Africanists looking to build a sovereign nation-state within territorial boundaries of the U.S. PGRNA’s aims were also sovereignty and they aspired to create African socialism based on cooperative communities. Like Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, they aspired to realize separate governments peopled by Black Americans to create an independent nation-state; the difference is they sought to remain within the U.S. and instead work to establish a separate five-state nation within the boundaries of the U.S. Through the summation of these three radical Black political movements, we see that liberation ideas ranged in aspirations, but their ultimate goals were always freedom and liberation from Euro social-political systems that perpetuate and manifest oppression. These movements also sought to utilize and draw from the inherent ontological and epistemological wealth and labor of Black people, believing that Black people can and should be free to govern themselves wholly and separately from Euro systems and institutions.

While these movements provide a rich ground to think and theorize Black ideas of liberation geographically for these particular movements, they fail to accommodate and realize intersectional spatialities or Black queer spaces and space-making. We must be careful when naming a practice of Black Geographies that is not expansive enough to accommodate the intersectional identities of Black Folk. For example, in the summary of the three movements more care and attention could have been applied for the ways each utilized gender as a method and technology to realize liberation. Women’s labor and role was instrumental within the movements, which was acknowledged, but the analysis failed to consider how women’s engendered presence and the absence of a queer presence problematized Black geographies as only existing as a masculine space. In “Black Geographic Possibilities,” Latoya Eaves, argues that Black geographies are “an intervention into the discipline by presenting knowledge of racialized spaces, bodies, and landscapes, undergirded by and perpetuated through colonial legacies, pushing the boundaries of critical geographies research.”[2] As such, Eaves argues, they should also be spaces where all dynamics of power are revealed and explored, which includes gendered and sexual matrices of power. Eaves states,

concepts of both race and sexuality should be understood as the foundation of relations of power producing a series of unequal relationships among and between peoples and places. Often, racialized places are related through bodies cast into specific logics of spatial representations and rely merely on monolithic racial renderings.[3]

In “The Spatialities of Intersectional Thinking: Fashioning Feminist Geographic Futures,” Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria instruct us that “the interlocking violence of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism constitute spatial formation,” thus “feminist (and all) geographers are well-served to consider intersectionality in their scholarly work and activism.”[4]

It is necessary to trace these divergent approaches and concerns within Black Geography Liberation Theories when thinking about abolition and including the tensions afoot within the historic conversation, so as not to perpetuate a single narrative or understanding of liberation. Doing so would advance the social and cultural violence that works against ideas and notions of freedom and true abolition. Being attendant and holding the contrary ideas that liberation advances liberation for all Black bodies and maintains Black Geography’s ability to problematize discussions of liberation within dominant conversations of geographic discourse. This problematizing must be allowed to accompany any notion of abolition, but our understanding should not end there. Equally important is an understanding and application of surveillance theory, as bodies rendered in site/sight demands a critical discussion surrounding how a body is rendered in place–how is the body viewed, recorded, understood, marked/unmarked in site/sight, and likewise how might the body counter or resist as an assertion of agency and/or resistance. Liberation is always sought for the Black body, and as such, practices of surveillance and how bodies are surveilled as a matter of their social, racial, class, gender, or sexual identity becomes of paramount concern when thinking about abolition and liberation.

Racial Capitalism and Abolition Geography within Prison/Abolition Studies

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Ruth Wilson Gilmore lecturing at Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2012. (CC BY-SA; Stephan Röhl via Wikipedia Commons)

We might begin to understand some of the dominant theories of Abolition Studies by way of racial capitalism and abolition geography within Prison/Abolition Studies. In “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore begins by drawing the connection between the carceral, racial capitalism, and the body. Freedom, Gilmore argues, is shaped by planetary movements of people and relationships, and racial capitalism’s desire to convert objects and desire into money, which is rooted in the technology of converting people who are in the prime of their lives into people who are capable of laboring—they can move, they can make and do things, they are able to take care of other people and other things.[5] This relegates those who labor and exist outside of the desire of racial capitalism to move/make/do/care as unfree and in excess. In order to help us think about the ability for those who are in excess of racial capitalism to be extracted and deemed unfree we must start with the understanding that bodies are places.[6] This enables the carceral state to make bodies into territories capable of extraction, which leads to annihilation of space over time. From here we arrive at abolition geography, which Gilmore states “starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.”[7] Abolitionist critique is animated by the incessant nature of human sacrifice to remain, unchanged, redistributing and replacing and repairing itself over time-space. As such, Gilmore calls us then to understand that

If unfinished liberation is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghost, but rather the processes of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.[8]

Moreover, Gilmore draws on “abolition democracy” and “ontological totality” to provide an understanding of the ontological work freedom entails:

freedom is not simply the absence of enslavement as a legal and property form. Rather, the undoing of bondage—abolition—is quite literally to change places: to destroy the geography of slavery by mixing their labor with the external world to change the world and thereby themselves—as it were, habitation as nature—even if geometrically speaking they hadn’t moved far [if] at all.[9]

If bodies are places, and people are places or small territories, then abolition is also people’s ability to change their place, their body, to labor on behalf of their body in ways that change their external and internal world. As such, carceral systems are those that extract the capacity for people to change and labor on behalf of their body in ways that allow internal and external change.[10] Gilmore raises a concern: in order to extract worth from those that labor and the land they labor on and through, the dominant enact political, economic, and cultural technologies and institutions that locally, nationally, and internationally dominate, extract, oppress, and incarcerate. Gilmore is also keen to observe a key component to abolition democracy and ontological totality, which we will return to, that oppressed people, as witnesses through the Black experience, never relent to power and continue to produce an otherwise life even in their perilousness.

We might turn here to surveillance studies to further understand and compare the ways it complements Abolition Geography as a way to consider fugitive acts of abolition and freedom, for as Simone Browne “thinks through the multiplicities of blackness,” she also provides us with ways of viewing how “with certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living under a routinized surveillance.”[11] This move is important because it is without argument that to be extracted into a carceral system and institution is to first be surveilled so as to initiate one's need to be and opportunities for one’s extraction. To provide some grounding within the discourse of surveillance studies, Browne provides a few key definitions that are useful to foster our complementary reading and understanding of surveillance studies within Black abolition and liberation theories.

First, racial surveillance is defined as “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place.’”[12]  Browne further explains that her use of the term connotes experiences where surveillance is coupled with opportunities to enact and reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance.”[13] Browne unpacks the definition of surveillance through the etymology of -sur and -veillance and then precedes to define sousveillance. Accordingly, surveillance comes from the root -veillance, which means to watch, and sur, which means from above.[14] Combined, it means oversight. Sousveillance, in comparison, Browne explains, means to watch or observe from the inverse of surveillance—not from above and a position of power, but from a position that is without power.[15] It is likened to the recent phenomena of laypeople recording with small handheld devices.[16] Browne further unpacks the common, present use of sousveillance and connotes it as a way of seeing so that it may be extended into dark sousveillance, which she maps as “an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices.”[17] Browne states, “[d]ark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being,” and as such it is a “site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance, where the tools of social control in plantation surveillance or lantern laws in city spaces and beyond were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.”[18]

We might perform a complementary and comparative reading of Abolition/Prison studies and Surveillance studies by noticing where they converge and diverge. On the one hand, Abolition/Prison studies locates ideas of liberation in and through one’s ability to own their body and manifest change over their internal and external bodies. This is complemented, on the other hand with surveillance studies where instead of the concern being the ability of the body to manifest change over its environment, liberation is theorized through the lens of what it means to be seen, watched within place, place also referring to the body. Surveillance renders bodies out of place, unfree and as carceral, corporal problems of excess. But, to return to and complement the concerns we noted above that were raised by Gilmore, the ability to perform countersurveillance or sousveillance, where the dominant’s power and ways of seeing and watching are essentially neutralized by countersurveillance activities, provides opportunities for abolition democracy and ontological totality.

Under this rubric, dark sousveillance maintains the ability to speak to Black ontologies and epistemologies of living with, in, and through anti-Black surveillance and provides ways of responding to, challenging, and confronting the scene of subjection carceral sites/sights inflicted on Black bodies. Brown states, “[a]s a way of knowing, dark sousveillance speaks not only to observing those in authority (the slave patroller or the plantation overseer, for instance) but also to the use of a keen and experiential insight of plantation surveillance in order to resist it. [19] In this sense, dark sousveillance performs abolition democracy and ontological totality through its ability to perform acts of landscape fungibility. This echoes Tiffany Lethabo King’s Black fungibility as a spatial analytic. King states, “[a]s a flexible analytic, Black fungibility also functions as a mode of critique and an alternative reading practice that reroutes lines of inquiry around humanist assumptions and aspirations that pull critique toward incorporation into categories like labor(er).”[20]

If we return to where we began, with Black Liberation Theories and the concerns of Black Geography Studies we find ground to investigate further. Common to all discourses of Black Liberation and Black Geography Studies are notions of freedom and liberation from Euro social-political systems that perpetuate and manifest oppression and the desire to make an intervention into Geography studies where dynamics of power are explored and observed. Black Geography Studies labors towards producing knowledge of spatialized systems of oppression that perpetuate colonial legacies of power, as well as other matrices of power based on gender, sex, and heritage. As we traced through the radical Black socio-political movements, Black liberation is often aspired through ideas and notions of autonomy, sovereignty of the body, collective self-governing that is removed from anti-Black institutions and systems and is driven by a fungibility that imagines Blackness otherwise.

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Endnotes

[1] Bledsoe, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright. “The Pluralities of Black Geographies.” Antipode, vol 51, no. 2, 2019, 420.

[2] Eaves, Latoya E. “Black Geographic Possibilities On a Queer Black South.” Southeastern Geographer, 57(1) 2017, 84.

[3] Ibid, 87.

[4] Mollett, Sharlene, and Caroline Faria. “The Spatialities of Intersectional Thinking: Fashioning

Feminist Geographic Futures.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 25, no. 4, 2018, 566.

[5] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” Futures of Black

Radicalism. Verso, 2017, 226.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 227.

[8] Ibid, 228.

[9] Ibid, 231.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, 8.

[12] Ibid, 16.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 19.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 21.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 11.

^[20] King, Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly): Fungibility.” Antipode, 2016, 1023.