Feminist Fightback Reading Group: Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation – Part 4

Join Feminist Fightback and friends for our winter reading group, where we will discuss Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s 2022 book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

This series will take place over four sessions:
Monday 31 October – part 1: Whats is to be done?
Monday 28 November – part 2: Race and Space
Monday 30 January – part 3: Prisons, Militarism, and the Anti-State State
Monday 27 February – part 4: Organizing for Abolition

The book is a new collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

Please come having read the text. However due to the length of each part we may focus our attention on specific chapters. Drop us a line if you would like more details and to let us know if you will be joining, so we have an idea of numbers.
feminist.fightback@gmail.com

These will take place in person at Golden Lane Community Centre, Golden Lane Estate, London EC1Y 0SA. The venue is fully accessible. Please arrive at 7.30 for 7.45 start; we will finish at 9.00pm. All genders welcome.