Presented by Dylan Rodríguez (Black Study and Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside)
Defying some recent academic, philanthropic, nonprofit, and state-crafting expropriations and rebranding of “abolition” as funding stream, career path, and voluntaristic public-facing identity, to take the creative-destructive imperative of abolition seriously may mean losing and/or severing organizational, epistemic, and ideological attachments to the guarantees of (certain kinds of) sociality and order that are inscribed on both institutions and “our” own varied attachments to institutionality (from state and sexuality to citizenship and subjectivity). Lingering in the abolition imperative, there is a persistent and endless collectively reimagined objective, that is, a mirage or collective dream of something on the other side of tyranny and terror, a something that slips and escapes definitive description even as it must actively be saturated with insurgent people’s audacious, wild, autonomous imaginations.
Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001.
