'We can enact the future we want now' a black feminist history of abolition
about 5 years in The guardian
From Audre Lorde to George Floyd, Lola Olufemi writes of how abolition has evolved in the US and UK, ahead of the programme Revolution is not a one-time event
At an event held in honour of Malcolm X in 1982, Audre Lorde delivered an address titled Learning from the 60s, during which she proclaimed, “Revolution is not a one-time event.” By this, Lorde meant that revolution belongs to everyone and no one simultaneously; if it is to proceed, it must cease to be the “sole and particular province of anyone particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class.” Revolutions reoccur: they follow each other, making circles of time and all the political demands that push them forward.Lorde’s statement makes clear the purview of the black feminist tradition; nothing must be allowed to remain. We must be prepared for the multi-purpose, multi-layered revolution, in which political ideologies and mantras will, and must, collide.
The word abolition, most commonly understood to describe efforts that sought a legal end to chattel slavery, has a complex history. Many white advocates who deployed the term in the height of the abolitionist movements of the 18th and 19th century were not actually interested in the material emancipation of black life. Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko, for example, intended to awaken the English middle-class to the horrors of slavery, while employing a number of deeply racist and dehumanising tropes to do so. Continue reading...
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