Love and Abolition: The Social Life of Black Queer Performance

In Love and Abolition, Alison Rose Reed traces how the social life of Black queer performance from the 1960s to the present animates the unfinished work of abolition. She grounds social justice-oriented reading and activist practices specifically in the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, with far-reaching implications for how we understand affective response as a mobilizing force for revolutionary change.

Reed identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle systems of coercion, criminalization, and control. Focusing on love as an affective modality and organizing tool rooted in the Black radical tradition's insistence on collective sociality amidst unrelenting state violence, Reed provides fresh readings of visionaries such as James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Bridgforth, and vanessa german. Both abolitionist manifesto and examination of how Black queer performance offers affective modulations of tough and tender love, Love and Abolition ultimately calls for a critical reconsideration of the genre of prison literature--and the role of the humanities--during an age of mass incarceration.

ISBN-13: 9780814258194

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Publication Date: 02-11-2022

Pages: 262

Product Dimensions: 8.98h x 5.98w x 0.79d

Series: Black Performance and Cultural Criticism

Alison Rose Reed is Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University.