New Bones Abolition is a reminder that state repression is indiscriminate when it comes to genderor generation. The NYPD strangled Eric Garner but his daughter Erica refused to accept defeat. Thank you Dr. Joy James for making sure that the flood lights of history will be aimed in the proper direction.Kalonji Jama Changa, cofounder of Black Power Media, organizer and founder of FTP Movement, and coproducer of Organizing is the New Cool
New Bones Abolitionoffers a series of dialectical engagements with the captive conditions of a racist society alongside an incisive assessment of movement gains, losses, and betrayals. Utilizing the Captive Maternal analytic, Joy James brilliantly maps the continuum from coerced or conflicted caregiving to war resistance against the physical, emotional, and psychological outcomes that are produced under a predatory democracy. We must grow new bones to recoup our generative and reproductive labor from those who enslave and imprison usnew bones that move beyond the rhetorical to materially confront imperialist violence and premature death. James thoughtful and urgent work leaves us with a renewed commitment to the unfinished struggle for Black liberation.Jalessah T. Jackson, founder of the Decolonial Feminist Collective and Access Reproductive Care Southeast Interim Executive Director
From caretaking for those on the frontlines to war resistance against deathly policing and imperialism, Joy James details the myriad forms in which a new bones abolition might learn from the life of Erica Garner and others. A beautiful love letter to those radicalized by trauma, and a clarion call to join them in the struggle for our collective liberation,New Bones Abolitionhonors the ancestors of centuries-long and present-day freedom movements and grounds their legacies as inheritances for the rebels and war resisters among us who are fighting for a future without police and state violence. Charmaine Chua, University of California, Santa Barbara, Global Studies
It is impossible to read more than several pages ofNew Bones Abolitionwithout confronting the long historical terror that saturates the present. This book is animated by the militancy of the Captive Maternal as a vessel of Black radical care and insurgent community, demystifying the liberal/nonprofit hijacking of abolition while illuminating collective experiments in liberation that obliterate and make obsolete the anti-Black statein and beyond the United States. Joy James identifies and dismantles the backdoor liberalism that endorses fraudulent radical identities, organizations, and movements, offering a framework for collective study that builds liberationist analyses in the context of an increasingly multilayered, progressive and reactionary counterinsurgency. I am grateful for this work.Dylan Rodriguez, author ofWhite Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide,University of California, Riverside, Department of Black Study and Department of Media and Cultural Studies
A much needed reflection from the Black radical tradition on the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. By focusing on caregivers in the movement Joy James not only defines new modes of analysis for our movement, but extends much needed recognition of the crucial role that Black women and other caregivers play in the struggle for Black liberation. Above all, this book is a testament to the power and brilliance of our warrior-sister Erica Garner. Michael Bento,#NYCShutItDownand contributor toNo Pasaran! Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis
Praise for Political Theorist Joy James"Transcending the Talented Tenthproposes original analyses of historical portrayals of the African American intelligentsia as a way of understanding the contested terrain on which contemporary black intellectuals work. . . Joy James' work is a pioneering intervention."Angela Y. Davis, authorof Are Prisons Obsolete?, University of California,
Santa Cruz
This extraordinary collection brings us their voices, their ideas, which have been muffled too long.Howard Zinn, author ofA People's History of the United States
"Remarkable...James reveals a radical tradition that could free us all."Robin D. G. Kelley
"Americans have a hard time thinking about race, gender, and class at the same time, especially when intellectuals are in question. But not Joy James. Her refreshing discussion of black thought refuses to stop with men or the highly educated. This [Transcending the Talented Tenth] is what African-American Studies is about in the best sense of the phrase."Nell Irvin Painter, author ofThe History of White People
"A superb collectionboth instructive and inspiring. Joy James is to be complimented for this book and for Imprisoned Intellectuals and her thoughtful introductory essay.Dennis Brutus, poet and former political prisoner of South African Apartheid
These essays detail how the continual intensification of criminalization is grounded in the principles of racism, expropriation, and aggression that centrally organize the land of the ever-diminishing free.Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author ofGolden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Joy James' excellent volume demands our involvement in the struggle.Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations
