- 286 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship
Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.
Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology.
Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Justice Is Not an Event
- Chapter One: Accumulation: The Excessive Present, the Middle Passage, and the Juridical Event
- Chapter Two: Perforation: Inhabitation and the Vulnerability of the Law
- An Interlude on Method, or Abolition Is Not a Metaphor
- Chapter Three: Witnessing: Impossible Recovery, Failed Recognition, and the Obligation of Risk
- Chapter Four: Breath: Aspiration, Ungendered Mothering, and Im/Possible Futures
- Coda: On Thinking the Impossible
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
- Author Biography