Book Cover

Love and Abolition

The Social Life of Black Queer Performance

Alison Rose Reed

262 pp. 6 x 9
7 illustrations
Pub Date: February, 2022

Subjects: Black Studies
Literary Studies, American
American Studies

Series: Black Performance and Cultural Criticism

order Hardcover $129.95   ISBN: 978-0-8142-1506-7
order Paperback $36.95   ISBN: 978-0-8142-5819-4
Order PDF ebook$36.95   ISBN: 978-0-8142-8189-5

“One of the contributions Love and Abolition makes to scholarship and activism are the countless moments when Reed’s more polemical argumentation and analysis provoke new opportunities for research and thought. … Like all great manifestos, Reed’s provocations open up new worlds for thought and action. At the same time, her analysis of affect and abolition offer urgent and necessary interventions to feminist studies, queer studies, and Black studies.” —Stephen Dillon, The Journal of African American History

“With her deep investigation into the historical and present-day manifestations of abolition, together with her incisive analysis of Black queer performance’s rootedness in social transformation and careful attention to embodiment, Alison Rose Reed makes clear the specific ways that Black queer art invests in love as an abolitionist practice. She has done a great service for all of us who believe in the freedom strokes necessary—and available—in the here and now.” —Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment

“Taking its cues from ‘queer networks of creative solidarity,’ Love and Abolition stages a valuable dialogue between performance studies and abolitionist scholarship. Reed puts forward an interpretive framework for engaging how radical practices of care shape and are shaped by Black radical traditions of both conflict and collaboration.” —Felice D. Blake, author of Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature

“Passionately argued, Love and Abolition is a compelling exploration of the power of Black queer performances to forge affective landscapes that rebel against carceral psychology, while inspiring new ways of being in and for the world. Performance, in this project, is a domain in which the impossible and the unthinkable become tangible and doable. More than rehearsing tough and tender love, it makes it in the here and now of an urgently abolitionist present.” —Joshua Chambers-Letson, author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

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.

Author Photo

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

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue          Abolition (Is) Now!

Introduction    Abolition Literature: Calling on Tough and Tender Love

Chapter 1        Listening for Emmett Till: James Baldwin, Laurie Carlos, and Black Love as Survival

Chapter 2        Transforming Harm into Healing: Ntozake Shange and the Combahee River Collective

Chapter 3        Concrete Utopias: Activating Spirit in the Performance Worlds of Sharon Bridgforth and Josefina Báez

Chapter 4        Love in the Streets: Stephanie Leigh Batiste, vanessa german, and Vigils for State Violence

Chapter 5        Contraband Love: Humanities Behind Bars and Abolition Pedagogy

Epilogue          Abolition as Renegade Presence

Appendix        Abolitionist Resources

Bibliography

Index

These images also appear in the book in black and white.

A woman in a white sundress is standing in front of a tree and looking off to the side. There are two wooden chairs in front of her, and she’s resting one hand on the top of each chair.

Figure 1. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones on the set of “The love conjure/blues Text Installation-Altar Film.” Photograph by Wura-Natasha Ogunji and digital editing by Jendog Lonewolf. Image courtesy of Sharon Bridgforth.


A two-panel image of the same scene as Figure 1, except the top panel now has two faint, faded images of the woman standing on either side of the chairs, setting an offering on their seats. The bottom panel is the same scene again, but with two images of the woman, again faint and faded, standing on either side of the chairs, looking at the items she placed on them in the top panel.

Figure 2. Two juxtaposed screenshots of Omi Osun Joni L. Jones in “The love conjure/blues Text Installation-Altar Film.” Image used with permission of Sharon Bridgforth.


Image with two screenshots, each with two panels. Top screenshot shows a student dancing in a parking lot in the left panel, and a woman looking down in the right panel. Bottom screenshot shows same student dancing in the parking lot, this time bent over backwards. The same woman is on the right panel again, this time with a pained expression mid-speech.

Figure 3. Two juxtaposed screenshots from Stacks of Obits performance in Germany. Batiste performs alongside video of UC Santa Barbara student krump dancers, here, Miriam “Ace” Burnett. Image used with permission of Stephanie Leigh Batiste.


Image with two screenshots, each with two panels. The top screenshot shows the Stocker Street intersection in the left panel; the right panel shows the same woman from Figure 3 emoting and gesticulating, with one arm up. The bottom screenshot shows the same intersection in the left panel. The right panel shows the same woman as the top screenshot, only this time both of her arms are down and she has a more solemn facial expression.

Figure 4. Two juxtaposed screenshots from Stacks of Obits performance in Germany. The slideshow to Batiste’s left returns to this snapshot of a Stocker Street intersection. Photographs of Los Angeles by Stephanie Leigh Batiste. Image used with permission of Batiste.


Image with two screenshots, each with two panels. The top screenshot shows the Metro newspaper in the left panel, and the top headline is “Gunfight at Shopping Mall.” In the right panel is the same woman from Figures 3 and 4, and she’s standing in front of a slideshow presentation, which shows the newspaper clipping from the left panel. She’s speaking passionately with one arm raised, and the text from the clipping is projected onto her face and upper body. The bottom screenshot shows the Crenshaw Street intersection in the left panel; the right panel now shows the woman looking outwards, and more solemn.

Figure 5.Two juxtaposed screenshots from Stacks of Obits performance in Germany. Slides including archival material and photographs of Los Angeles by Stephanie Leigh Batiste. Image used with permission of Batiste.


Image of a two-story home painted bright blue and covered in art from top to bottom. The words “WE ARE ALL HERE TOGETHER” adorn the mosaic artwork on the second-floor balcony.

Figure 6. ARThouse, Homewood, PA. Image courtesy of vanessa german.


Image of the corner of the house from Figure 6. Both the side and the front of the house are now decorated with string lights.

Figure 7. “Night of Illumination for Orlando.” Photograph by Erika Beras. Image used with permission of vanessa german and Erika Beras.

Related Titles:

Book Cover

The Queer Limit of Black Memory

Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution

Matt Richardson

Book Cover

Staging Black Fugitivity

Stacie Selmon McCormick

Book Cover

Black Love, Black Hate

Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature

Felice D. Blake