Abolition: Theory and Practice

This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenthand

nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come

to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and

early twenty-first centuries.

In the first half of the class, we will consider abolition in England and its colonies, Haiti,

Cuba, and the U.S. In so doing we will examine both primary sources from abolitionist print

culture (narratives by fugitives from slavery, speeches, poems, and polemical tracts), as well as

secondary sources by historians, literary critics, and political theorists. In the second half, we

will likewise read writing by activists (some incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and some

not) alongside journalism and scholarship from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral

studies. Across both periods, Black writers will take up the bulk of our attention.