Welcome to Abolition Week 2024.
This year, our focus is Empire, its endless expansion, and the carceral technologies that make it possible. We have invited incarcerated and other systems-impacted writers to explore how the combined forces of Western imperialism and plantation legacies produce carceral logics globally, creating the conditions that fuel genocidal arrangements in the US South, Palestine, and other parts of the world.
Our intimate connection to the South allows us to hold sharpened perspectives on the many ways that carcerality and antiblackness are integral to the white supremacist capitalist imperialism at the very heart of Empire. Therefore, we are always interested in the things that connect us, the ties that bind us together in solidarity in the shadow of that dark heart.
We read about how the corpses left decomposing in the streets of Sudan have changed the migration patterns of eagles, and we can't help but remember that sharks altered their migration routes during the Transatlantic slave trade, trailing the ships and feasting on the flesh of the stolen Africans thrown overboard. We condemn the welcoming of Israeli police by the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program to train US police in the same tactics used against Palestinians on the other side of the world, and we recall that Georgia also houses the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)—once known as the School of the Americas—where Latin American dictators, soldiers, and police are trained to quell resistance against US imperialism in their countries through human rights abuses. We witness the organized effort to roll back child labor laws across the US—particularly in the South—with children discovered working long hours around dangerous machinery in Alabama and Mississippi, and we cannot forget the many thousands of children mining Cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries in our gadgets under "modern-day slavery" in the Congo.
The afterlives of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide can be glimpsed in deadly exchange programs and torturous conditions, not only in the shared counterinsurgency tactics of global policing forces and military institutions but also in the shared cultures of repression necessary to accumulate capital and, by extension, imperial expansion. Book bans, repeals of LGBTQIA+ rights, police violence, anti-protest policies on university campuses and in their surrounding communities, abortion bans, the erosion of public health infrastructure, and exacerbating environmental degradation are all rooted in past epochs that, when revealed, remind us that the sun never sets on imperial violence.
Because of these connections and many others, the pieces in this series intentionally defy the logic of borders—and, by extension, containment—as writers consider the endless nature of Empire and its sinister violence.
read last year's abolition week series
As always, this Abolition Week asks and answers the question "Why abolition?" through a look at some of the conditions of incarceration. In this year's inaugural essay, one strong-willed journalist confronts the specter of Guantánamo Bay. But the specter of Guantánamo Bay is not a specter at all; it's an open wound and an open secret of state-sanctioned post-9/11 horrors. A later personal essay explores the felony murder law currently on the books in 48 states, and one incarcerated writer compels us to consider whether it is a legal form of genocide.
Empire gorges itself, unfurling its many limbs to invade, displace, enslave, exploit, and ravage—leaving a trail of broken bodies, ecological disasters, and psychic wounds. With this understanding, we have curated a collection that indicts the US and Israel as two fangs in the mouth of one settler-colonial beast, traces the roots of Canadian migrant worker exploitation to the Transatlantic slave trade, highlights Kashmiri and Palestinian solidarity and resistance while noting the environmental destruction in both regions, and considers the lasting impact of Western settler-colonial violence and exploitation on the people and lands of Chile.
Agents and figureheads of Empire insulate themselves from criticism and accountability by criminalizing its dissenters. Two of this week's pieces demonstrate how this is evident in the RICO charges laid against Cop City protestors, AI and other forms of state surveillance, and the policing and assault of students protesting their institution's complicity in Palestinian genocide.
Through analysis of politics, popular culture, the prison system, policing, and everyday life, this year's collection features work that connects the dots from one end of the world to the other. They tug at Empire's fraying edges and call attention to its crumbling foundations. Because like all empires before it, this one too will sound its death knell.
This is Abolition Week: Empire Must Die.