dianacarmel's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Angela Davis is as brilliant a writer as she is an interviewee.
zosiablue's review
4.0
This is a series of very academic interviews with Angela Davis during the second Bush administration & a nice reminder for me that Trump didn’t invent being evil. I forgot how livid and terrified I was when Bush was elected. And I was right to be.
Anyway, this book won’t be new info for anyone familiar with Davis’s work, but it was nice to remember that:
-the systems are sick & we can’t work within them
-prisons = military = prisons and back again
-we need to think globally when we fight injustice
-mobilization is not the same as organization
-torture and police/military/prison brutality are an extension of what’s already legally acceptable in those systems
Small, irrelevant note - there were tons of typos in this, which is always weird to see! Didn’t detract, so it’s just the same out-of-time feeling you get in elementary school when a teacher accidentally curses.
Anyway, this book won’t be new info for anyone familiar with Davis’s work, but it was nice to remember that:
-the systems are sick & we can’t work within them
-prisons = military = prisons and back again
-we need to think globally when we fight injustice
-mobilization is not the same as organization
-torture and police/military/prison brutality are an extension of what’s already legally acceptable in those systems
Small, irrelevant note - there were tons of typos in this, which is always weird to see! Didn’t detract, so it’s just the same out-of-time feeling you get in elementary school when a teacher accidentally curses.
joymeetsworld's review
informative
slow-paced
5.0
A series of interviews between Angela Davis and Eduardo Mendieta about abolition, race, gender, the prison and military industrial complexes, capitalism, imperialism, and state violence. I decided to reread Abolition Democracy after it came up in a conversation for my job (educating and organizing foundations to give to abolitionist and anti-criminalization organizing and movement building). It had been 15ish years since I first read it, but given the political and media conversation about the "state of U.S. democracy" it also felt especially timely. In the conversations that comprise the book, Angela Davis builds on W.E.B. DuBois' writing that the mere absence of enslavement is insufficient if new institutions are not created in its place, extrapolating his original concept of abolition democracy to guide organizing that both eliminates the prison industrial complex and envisions a world were prisons and punishment are rendered obsolete. Written in the mid-2000's, the content of Davis and Mendieta's conversations are very *of the time* with a heavy focus on the then-recently released photos of Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib prison tortured by U.S. military personnel. However, because of the exponential increase of imprisonment and policing as part of U.S. domestic and foreign policy over the past 17 years, there are unfortunately still relevant theory and organizing implications for much of what Davis shares. Recommended to everyone, especially those looking for something just beyond intro level that includes a gender lens / analysis and stresses the importance of transnational connection in thought and action.