Dispatches from behind bars. Political prisoners speak out.The official story is that the United States has no political prisoners. The reality is that there are hundreds of people rounded up, placed behind bars, and kept there for inordinately long sentences because of their political beliefs and activities. A project of abolitionist Josh Davidson and political prisoner Eric King, this book is filled with the experience and wisdom of over thirty current and former...

Our political landscape is crowded with competing voices—claims, demands, grievances, and even acts of violence—all made in the name of some idea of “the people.” This powerful concept has been wielded both to assert democratic sovereignty and to justify exclusion and control. Violent Histories, Livable Futures unpacks this complex dynamic through compelling historical case studies, spanning sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s, post–World War II Guatemala, and the United States in the...

A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon by Eric King is a searing firsthand account from inside the most repressive prison in the United States, a place built not for rehabilitation but for disappearance.The federal supermax ADX Florence is the most secure facility in the United States, a dungeon of isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological disintegration. Here, cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s the design. Built in 199...

In 1995 the Bureau of Prisons opened the ADX, its 'escape-proof' supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. The nation's most secure supermax prison, it was meant to hold the most high-profile prisoners. The 'Alcatraz of the Rockies' has since been home to World Trade Center bombers, Oklahoma City and Boston Marathon bombers, gang leaders, disruptive prisoners, and those deemed 'enemies of the state.' Now, thirty years after the ADX first opened, A Clean Hell offers readers an up close and per...

This book understands the postracial as a genre—like the zombie apocalypse—that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical groun...

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Hearing the Hurt is an examination of how the New Negro movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, provoked and sustained public discourse and deliberation about black culture and identity in the early twentieth century.Borrowing its title from a W. E. B. Du Bois essay, Hearing the Hurt explores the nature of rhetorical invention, performance, and mutation by focusing on the multifaceted issues brought f...

A bold rethinking of public discourse, Public Modalities explores how people shape civic life through protest, media, and identity in an ever-evolving public sphere.This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of “the public” or “public life,” and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map var...

The official story is that the United States has no political prisoners. The reality is that there are hundreds of people rounded up, placed behind bars, and kept there for inordinately long sentences because of their political beliefs and activities. A project of abolitionist Josh Davidson and political prisoner Eric King, this book is filled with the experience and wisdom of over thirty current and former North American political prisoners. It provides first-hand details of prison life a...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A shocking, groundbreaking oral history of the infamous Rikers jail complex and an unflinching portrait of injustice and resilience told by the people whose lives have been forever altered by it“This mesmerizing and gut-wrenching book shows the brutal realities that tens of thousands of people have been forced to navigate, and survive, in America’s most notorious jail.”—Piper Kerman, New York Ti...

'A fascinating journey that illuminates, in often thought-provoking ways, the politics of violence in radical movements' Angela DavisThe son of the FBI's most wanted woman tells the electrifying story of a childhood on the run – and a half-century of revolutionary struggle in AmericaWe all grapple with a past that defines us: culture, religion, a family story. But what happens when you inherit a revolution?Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born ...

Amid music festivals and moon landings, the tumultuous year of 1969 included an infamous case in the annals of criminal justice and Black liberation: the New York City Black Panther 21. Though some among the group had hardly even met one another, the 21 were rounded up by the FBI and New York Police Department in an attempt to disrupt and destroy the organization that was attracting young people around the world. Involving charges of conspiracy to commit violent acts, the Panther 21 trial—...

Thirteen personal accounts of solitary confinement's devastating impact in the United States criminal justice system.Six by ten feet. That's the average size of the cells in which tens of thousands of people incarcerated in the United States linger for weeks, months, and even decades in solitary confinement. With little stimulation and no meaningful human contact, these individuals struggle to preserve their identity, sanity, and even their lives. In thirteen intima...