African feminisms for abolitionist futures: archival hauntings in a speculative geography

abstract

The interdependent, collective agency shown by women of African descent reveals the possibility of making Black lives matter, even in the death-worlding structures of carceralism and coloniality. This article emancipates penal abolitionist theorising from whiteness by centring Black political womanhood. I argue that the legacy of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist struggle contributes to an archival haunting of the colonial carceral diaspora.

Methodologically, this article cross-reads three narratives of borderless resistance, considering Claudia Jones, La Mulâtresse Solitude, and Stella Nyanzi as figures who fight and collectivise before, during and after incarceration. To counter the coloniality of time, this article unmoors itself from period-based or ‘tensed’ language. As coloniality remains present for the three, I endeavour to connect their struggles in and for the present and frame their resistance using Black, African, and anticarceral feminist literature. Ultimately, by centring these stories, the article positions today’s abolition as emergent from an African praxis of direct action, anti-capitalist critique and rehumanisation in prisons and colonies.

keywords:

• anticarceral feminism
• critical prison studies
• decolonial feminism
• abolition
• political prisoners

Notes

1 Claudia Jones’s essay Ben Davis: Fighter for Freedom was published in 1954 with an introduction by Eslanda Goode Robeson. This can be found in Jones & Boyce Davies (2011) Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment.

2 Grenfell refers to a London housing block called Grenfell Towers, which in 2017 suffered a tremendous fire due structural neglect, and 72 people died, while 70 were injured; 85% of the deaths were people of colour (Townsend 2020). It was the worst residential fire in the United Kingdom since World War II.

3 Nwando Achebe offered this during her address to Hofstra University in 2020, in which she discussed human rights from an African perspective. Address attended by author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S.M. Rodriguez

S.M. RODRIGUEZ is Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights at the London School of Economies and Political Science. They are a scholar-activist committed to anti-violence in their community and research. Their work spans the concerns of the criminalised, queer, and/or disabled people of African descent and relies on engaged, qualitative methodologies to answer questions of transformative change. They are the author of The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019). Email: [email protected]