Roundtable 2:

Navigating Abolition Geographies

Friday 16 April 2021 ~ 5:00 - 6:30pm Pacific

No recording available

Overview

What geographies frame, inform and help us negotiate the meaning of the carceral state? How can we imagine an uninhibited understanding of abolition? This roundtable features presentations from faculty and students at UC Irvine exploring various modalities of abolition. Following the presentations, the panelists will engage in a conversation that touches on the intersections of their work and thinks through issues of carceral aesthetics, carceral materiality, and the complexity of spatial and geographical abolition.

North County Jail

Sora Han

This paper explores the geography of abolition that emerges around the now-vacant North County Jail in Oakland, CA. It situates the architecture of the jail over the past five decades, from the 1980s when it was built and up to the current time of California’s realignment plan, through the experience of life and desire teeming around it. From this reading, an abolitionist geography emerges as an a priori surround, a sur-round of the dark syncopated glass of the jail’s windows whose looking exceeds panopticism.

Sora Han is the Director of the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program at UC Irvine, and an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society with courtesy appointments in the School of Law and African American Studies. She is currently working on two books: Slavery as Contract: A Study in the Case of Blackness, which brings together poetics, contract law and afro-pessimist theory to think beyond the property metaphor of slavery; and Mu, the First Letter of an Anti-Colonial Alphabet, an experimental text on the “anagrammatic scramble” (Nathaniel Mackey) of the unconscious materiality of abolitionism. Recent publications on these new lines of research include “Slavery as Contract,” in Law and Literature (2016) and “Poetics of Mu” in Textual Practice (2018).

Lyrics Towards a Liberatory Art Praxis

Ella Turenne

How can we imagine carceral spaces as sites of abolitionist practice? Is there room for an abolitionist ontology to live within spaces designed for restriction and confinement? This presentation will offer two accounts from my experiences facilitating arts workshops in juvenile halls in New York and Los Angeles and how they helped shape my perspective on the intersection of abolition and the arts. Through storytelling coupled with critical analysis, the presentation will explore the impact of the arts as an organizing tool, how this can be an instrument to deconstruct carcerality, and ultimately, how it helps us imagine liberation expansively.

Ella Turenne is an artist, entrepreneur, and a student in the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies with an emphasis in Race and Justice Studies at UC Irvine. Her research focuses on black feminist theory and media culture. Turenne's writing has been published in various anthologies including Turning Teaching Inside Out (2013) and Through the Wall (2019). She is the creator and co-host of Fanm on Films, a podcast that highlights the work of Haitian creatives in film and tv. Turenne was a fellow in Leadership L.A., Arts for LA ACTIVATE and is Director of Training and Development for Inspire Justice.

Stories without Finality: Violence, Women, and Punishment

Karma Rose Zavita and Qianru Li

This storytelling session focuses on violence against women in relation to punishment within a transnational context. Moving through spaces of sexual assault and domestic abuse in both the U.S. and China, the two storytellers – Karma Rose and Qianru – invite audience members to this interwoven journey to rethink the impacts of criminalization and incarceration internationally. Through the lens of what Roxane Gay refers to as bad feminism, we knit poetry, creative non-fiction, and academic theory together into a blanket dedicated to survivors of interpersonal trauma. We tell stories of many women. These are stories of blood, tears, bruises, and betrayal; these are stories of ourselves. We seek no pity. We are called to tell these stories. Stories that haven’t been told, cannot be told, and yet have to be told. Additionally, these stories do not have endings. As much as we long for the finality of sexual violence, we recognize that survivorship is an everlasting process. Looking into the abyss of reconciliation, we ask for a revolt against the desire to search for punishment through state-sanctioned violence. This desire for justice is complicated, deeply personal, and most certainly not a linear process. Join us as we work through being bad feminists.

Karma Rose Zavita (she/her) is a Doctoral Student at UC Irvine. Her interests are in gender-based violence, punishment, and community-based research, which were all initially inspired by her participation in the Inside-out Prison Exchange Program and further solidified through personal experiences. She envisions her dissertation will speak to issues of gender-based violence.

Qianru Li (they/them) is a PhD student in Drama at the University of California, Irvine. They practice, document, and study Asian American performance. Their current research centers on the formation of Chinese American identities in relation to disease, police brutality, and intergenerational care.

Imagining Herman Wallace's Library

Ernest Kikuta Chavez

What can we learn from a prisoner’s library? Herman Wallace was a member of the Black Panther Party who spent 41 years in prison alongside Albert Woodfox and Robert King after the three were framed for the murder of a prison guard. Wallace kept a collection of philosophical, historical, and biographical literature in his cell, even though possessing these books was a punishable offense, according to prison rules. In collaboration with artist, Jackie Summel, Wallace’s collection became part of an installation called “Herman’s Library.” By creating a visual representation of this library, I explore the ways in which political thought travels through carceral time and space, weaving together the political prisoner’s vast fugitive imaginary.

As a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law and Society program, Ernest Kikuta Chavez is interested in a critical theory approach to studying punishment. As part of his dissertation research, he explores the social and historical conditions that gave rise to Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, in order to understand how this prison’s various economies of violence come together as slavery’s afterlife.