New Bones Abolition addresses “those of us broken enough to grow new bones” in order to stabilize our political traditions that renew freedom struggles.

Reflecting on police violence, political movements, Black feminism, Erica Garner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, caretakers and compradors, Joy James analyzes the “Captive Maternal,” which emerges from legacies of colonialism, chattel slavery and predatory policing, to explore the stages of resistance and communal rebellion that manifest through war resistance. She recognizes a long line of gendered and ungendered freedom fighters, who, within a racialized and economically-stratified democracy, transform from coerced or conflicted caretakers into builders of movements, who realize the necessity of maroon spaces, and ultimately the inevitability of becoming war resisters that mobilize against genocide and state violence.

New Bones Abolition weaves a narrative of a historically complex and engaged people seeking to quell state violence. James discusses the contributions of the mother Mamie Till-Mobley who held a 1955 open-casket funeral for her fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, murdered by white nationalists; the 1971 rebels at Attica prison; the resilience of political prisoners despite the surplus torture they endured; the emergence of Black feminists as political theorists; human rights advocates seeking abolition; and the radical intellectualism of Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner slain in 2014 by the NYPD. James positions the Captive Maternal within the evolution of contemporary abolition. Her meditation on, and theorizing of, Black radicals and revolutionaries works to honor Agape-driven communities and organizers that deter state/police predatory violence through love, caretaking, protest, movements, marronage, and war resistance.

A speculative novel of anti-imperialist queer imagination set in a science-fictional future that is rooted in the lovingly-portrayed context of the Punjabi global diaspora.

Love and revolution in a crumbling world order . . .

Roma has a full-time job, a mortgage, and a loving family in Queens. Life is good in the center of the Empire, but on the outskirts, soldiers wage a brutal war against a besieged people. When her stepbrother Ranbir entrusts her with a mysterious plant, Roma discovers it’s a startlingly sophisticated piece of bioengineered technology that opens a portal for an extra-terrestrial spirit body that brings news of a liberated future.

While Ranbir joins forces with the spirit body to confront the nucleus of automated warfare, his brother Khushbir has more local concerns, and is organizing the Punjabi farmers’ protest. Meanwhile, Roma is occupied with existential questions about complicity and faith that have her reconsidering her role within this global struggle.

What follows draws Roma and her family onto the frontlines of the resistance – and in Roma’s case, into the path of a woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.

The inaugural issue of the movement-focused and future-forward Abolition Journal quarterly after it was relaunched by the Philadelphia-based Abolition School.

This pilot issue of the revived Abolition Journal is produced by the Philadelphia-based W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction. It brings together two dozen urgent and timely interventions in political debates around abolition and aims to show how this abstract idea manifests itself in our daily lives.

These interventions, authored by a diverse cast of contributors, including academics and attorneys, so-called felons and physicians, artists and educators, and parents, playwrights and poets, explore the everyday experiences that come with trying to live out an abolitionist politics. In the words of the editors, these experiences include “the daily victories and errands, reflections and runarounds, gestures and drama, habits and heartbreaks, setbacks and surrenders, excuses and evasions, breakdowns and breakthroughs.”

The issue curates a variety of content, including political essays, short stories, poetry, interviews, and speeches, each resonating and reflecting in their own unique way on the central theme “Everyday Sh!t.” They offer thoughts and reflections on structure, practice, care, and direction to deepen existing movement knowledge and invite new audiences to see themselves mirrored within this work.
Without exception, these are stories of sincere experience mixed with radical poetic visions culled from the issue contributors’ plurality of pasts, presents, and prefigurative futures. Grounded in Philadelphia, yet looking out onto the whole wide world, Abolition Journal aims to reflect the lived complexity that can be messy and self-defeating, but equally authentic and inspiring.

We study the world in order to change it.

What you are holding in your hands is not a finished product. But it is the product of the first year of our work at the Du Bois Movement School. And what a year it has been. The Du Bois Movement School was the product of a particular time and place. We came together amid the long wake of the 2020 rebellions, which mobilized hundreds of thousands nationwide and pushed abolitionist narratives into the mainstream. This raised pressing questions for abolitionists across the country and the world, and more than any other, the question was this: what do we mean when we say abolition?

The system had two responses to this question: co-optation and counterinsurgency. While sectors of the political and media apparatus have embraced the language of abolition (and decolonization) to water down and co-opt them, the state has also subjected revolutionary abolitionists to severe repression—we experienced both in Philly. In this context, we engaged in conversations among movement educators and radical organizers across the city to ask what kind of political education would help to take abolitionist struggles to the next level. We realized that this required not only training in concrete organizing skills but real understanding of the world, history, economics, and power. We realized that we need to study our world if we want to change it.