Thread by @GCCenterWomen

📢Happening Now!📢

@savannahshange is with us on Zoom giving a talk on "#Abolition as Method: Fieldwork at the End of the World"! If you couldn't join us, we will be live-tweeting the event right here!

@GC_CUNY @HumanitiesGC @cunyGClibrary @GCcunyAnthro @GCUrbanEd @ucsantacruz

1] Be sure to check out @savannahshange's book, "Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco", which will be part of tonight's discussion! Find it at @DukePress here: dukeupress.edu/progressive-dy…

2] “From the perspective of #abolition, the universalizing rhetoric of the liberal state is itself the problem.”

3] “’Social justice’ means living happily ever after with the antiracist, distributive state. #Abolition is a messy break up with the state rending, not reparation.”

4] With her talk, @savannahshange wants to “turn our attention to the policing that happens without a badge or a gun, in the daily interactions between young people and the systems that purport to protect them.”

5] “As a methodological orientation, #abolition is a scholarly practice that seeks to defend Black life, everywhere it is live. In my work, abolitionist anthropology is one name for the conjuncture of antiblackness theory and a critical anthropology of the state.”

6] “Just as utopias are #pedagogical tools that educate our desires and aspirations towards an ideal world, dystopian practice provides an “education of perception,” one that attunes us to death, dispossession and disposability as codices to interpret reality.”

7] “#Abolitionist #anthropology is a Black feminist method. It is an ethic and a scholarly mode that attends to the interface between the multi-sited anti-Black state and those who seek to survive it.”

8] “When “folks don’t know how to deal” with Black girl anger, their default response in the school context was often to displace children from the classroom..."

9] "...belonging was policed in the register of affect: 'does she really want to be here?' 'He doesn’t seem like he is taking this seriously.' 'I don’t believe that apology for a second.' Here, affective performance shapes belonging in and to a state-funded space.”

10] "...place is etched more deeply into the flesh marked as female, even when displacement is a constitutive characteristic of blackness in the first place."

11] “Afrarealism recovers Black girl flesh from its
disposability at the margins of settler democracy and places it/her/me at the center of freedom’s landscape."

12] “If both the carceral and the decolonial engagement with young Black women rely on the same remedy—her performative transparency—then both political projects prioritize their pre-authored frameworks over Black girl self-determination.”

13] "I refuse to write light into dark, to coerce quiet from noise, or to wipe color on to a canvas soaked in Black."

14] @savannahshange leaves us with: "Can we abolish in the classroom? Can we abolish the police in our heads and hearts? Do we have the resources to establish other spaces of relation, those tended by sovereignty and accountability, rather than exclusion and surveillance?"

15] Thank you to @savannahshange for the amazing event! Be sure to keep an eye out for the recorded copy of the talk with the Q&A, and to check out Dr. Shange’s book “Progressive Dystopia” through @DukePress. @GC_CUNY @HumanitiesGC @cunyGClibrary @GCcunyAnthro @GCUrbanEd