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ABSTRACT
This article examines embodied abolition as the affective practices of liberation that helps one to survive the carceral apocalypse, the ongoing apocalyptic conditions of carcerality that will necessitate an end of the carceral state. By conducting an ethnographic study of Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown's podcast How to Survive the End of the World, I explore how podcast(ing), as a digital space that can extend beyond spatiotemporal boundaries, can be a site that activates social change. I argue that their podcast encourages anticarceral ways of forming community and calls for us to practice freer ways of being, knowing, and learning for the carceral apocalypse. I explore how Autumn and adrienne's podcast utilizes aspects of embodied abolition, such as intimacy and communal practices, to demonstrate the embodied practices necessary for abolition.
Notes
1 Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, “Trailer,” How to Survive the End of the World, November 7, 2017, https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2017/11/7/1st-this-is-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-world.
2 Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, How to Survive the End of the World, https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/.
3 For further reading on abolition, see, AK Wright, “Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (forthcoming).
4 Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 98.
5 Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 228.
6 I am not arguing that the sole act of listening to a podcast is abolition. Abolition necessitates ongoing organizing in prisons, detention centers, and other places where individuals are held. It requires political activism and education. Rather, I am expanding our understanding of abolition to spaces that encourage individuals to transform their relationship(s) with their bodies, learn about social issues, and ultimately change their communities.
7 I use the term podcast(ing) to note its existence as object in movement, the episodes created, and the act of creation itself. In the fluidity of its existence, podcast(ing) is both noun and verb. I call those who engage with the show participants over listeners. Though a podcast is a platform meant for individuals to listen to the audio produced and that is how I engage with HSEW, I wish to expand our understanding of what spaces podcasts produce. For example, as a rejection of ableism, the term “participants” names that some individuals do not “listen” to podcasts but may read transcripts, watch live shows with captions, attend live shows, comment on social media posts, and/or leave voice notes for the hosts. Thus, this term is more inclusive and expansive for my work.
8 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 42.
9 Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, “Decolonize the Body,” How to Survive the End of the World, December 27, 2017, https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2017/12/27/decolonize-the-body; Autumn Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha Gets Us Together,” How to Survive the End of the World, March 20, 2019, https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2019/3/20/4sh0hgcse6axeitqxx4hbjhhr9idt4.
10 Markus Lundström and Tomas Poletti Lundström, “Podcast Ethnography,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 24, no. 3 (2020): 290.
11 Ibid. Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann, Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 13.
12 Kaba, We Do This ’til We Free Us, 4.
13 Spinelli and Dann, Podcasting, 9.
14 Patreon is an online platform that allows supporters of content creators to support the creators by paying monthly subscriptions.
15 Lori Kido Lopez, ed., “Introduction,” in Race and Media: Critical Approaches (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 1.
16 Raven Maragh- Lloyd, “Black Twitter as Semi-Enclave,” in Race and Media: Critical Approaches, ed. Lori Kido Lopez (New York: New York University Press), 164–65.
17 Kishonna L. Gray, “Black Gamers’ Resistance,” in Race and Media: Critical Approaches, ed. Lori Kido Lopez (New York: New York University Press), 242.
18 Ibid., 251.
19 Sarah Florini, “The Podcast ‘Chitlin Circuit’: Black Podcasters, Alternative Media, and Audio Enclaves,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22, no. 2 (2015): 210.
20 Ibid., 215.
21 Ibid., 216.
22 Sarah Florini, Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 55.
23 Ibid., 3.
24 Kim Fox, David O. Dowling, and Kyle Miller, “A Curriculum for Blackness: Podcasts as Discursive Cultural Guides, 2010–2020,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 27, no. 2 (2020): 298.
25 Ibid., 314.
26 Spinelli and Dann, Podcasting, 49.
27 Ibid., 67.
28 Ibid., 77.
29 Florini, Beyond Hashtags, 76.
30 Ibid., 182.
31 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 297.
32 Lundström and Lundström, “Podcast Ethnography,” 289.
33 Ibid., 295.
34 Ibid., 291.
35 Ibid., 292.
36 Ibid., 294.
37 These numbers are accurate as of January 2022. See How to Survive the End of the World, https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow; endoftheworldpc, https://www.instagram.com/endoftheworldpc/.
38 “How to Survive the End of the World,” Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/show/2L1l487PAAYFdtiLsTBWbL.
39 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
40 Brown and brown, “Decolonize the Body.”
41 Ibid.
42 Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 147–67.
43 Ibid., 84.
44 Zak Cheney-Rice, “NYPD Union Lawyers Claim Eric Garner Would’ve Died Anyway Because He Was Obese,” Intelligencer, June 14, 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/eric-garner-death-inevitable-says-lawyer.html.
45 Brown and brown, “Decolonize the Body.”
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Here I think of an Audre Lorde quote I reflect upon constantly: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences” (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches [Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984], 84).
49 Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse.”
50 Terrion L. Williamson, ed., “Peoria, Pryor, and Me,” in Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2020), 47 original emphasis.
51 Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse.”
52 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 21.
53 Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse.”
54 Sami Schalk, Bodies Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 87.
55 Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse.”
56 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 65.
57 Ibid., 127.
58 Brown, “Disability Justice for the Apocalypse.”
59 Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, “Live Show, U of M,” How to Survive the End of the World, June 19, 2019, https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2019/6/19/live-show-u-of-m.
60 Haymarket Books, “Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition (Part 1),” YouTube, April 16, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyTOspzD1ZQ.