Chair(s)

Amie Doan

Texts

Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022), Chapter 2

James Baldwin, ‘To Be Baptised’ (1972) and other selected prison writing

This session will examine prison abolition in the context of Black radical anti-prison critique. The session will begin with Shelby’s analysis of objections to imprisonment that draw on the link between US chattel slavery and the carceral system. Amie Doan (English) will then guide a discussion on James Baldwin’s essay ‘To Be Baptised’ (1972), first published in the collection No Name in the Street. The essay places Baldwin’s encounters with the US carceral system alongside a panoply of observations on the political tensions of the time. 

Readings will be sent to participants upon registration.