El Jones - Abolitionist Intimacies

Abolitionist Intimacies

Praise for Abolitionist Intimacies

El Jones has gifted us all with a political beacon for liberation and an ethical compass for how to be. This stunning book is a powerful narration of how abolitionist futures are built in the present through Black feminist abolitionist intimacies of witnessing, relationality, organizing, communing, and co-resistance. Abolitionist Intimacies is a searingly lyrical, poignant, and revolutionary must-read; an absolute tour de force that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism
and Border and Rule

Abolitionist Intimacies is an urgently needed text. Drawing from years of organizing experience, Joness work as a Black feminist theorist, activist, and scholar skillfully draws attention to the banal violence of carcerality in Canada and the ongoing work of freedom-oriented struggle. With rigour, theoretical agility, and a grounded sense of integrity, Jones forwards a poetic vision of intimacy, care, and human liberation, sketching out abolitionist futures beyond policing, prisons, and cages.

Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives ,
co-author of Rehearsals for Living

Through poetry, song, memos, journalism, and academic essays informed by the Black feminist tradition and years of work with criminalized and illegalized people, Abolitionist Intimacies makes visible the many injustices of the present while articulating a vision for a caring future free from state, corporate, and interpersonal violence. From cover to cover, El Jones shares a creative approach to abolitionist critique and praxis that, intervention by intervention, works to dismantle and build alternatives to carcerality in the lives of human beings that are targets of structural and interpersonal violence fuelled by white supremacy, racism, sexism, heterosexism, capitalism, and ableism. This book is a must-read for those seeking a clear picture of how the Canadian carceral state operates; the devastating impacts of its laws, institutions, policies, and practices on people and communities pushed to the margins; and what is possible when we come together to collectively resist and build alternative ways of relating to each other to produce real safety and liberation.

Justin Pich, Associate Professor of Criminology at the University
of Ottawa and editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons

A powerful collection of poetry, political analysis, and personal reflection from an inspiring scholar-activist who connects mind, heart, body, and soul to express the meaning of abolition in so-called Canada. El Jones takes her reader from the kitchen table to the prison waiting room, from Angela Davis to Idle No More, from grief to rage to joyous loudness. Refusing to gloss over the complexity of building solidarity against racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, El Jones takes time to linger in those moments of intimacy and care that sustain movements for collective liberation. A must-read for anyone who wants to remember what it means to be human in the face of systemic violence.

Lisa Guenther, Queens National Scholar of Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies, Queens University, and author of
Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

Abolitionist Intimacies is not only an act of resistance but an act of care. In the context of the prison industrial complex and what Jones calls carceral intimacies enacted through coercive power and abuse, El Jones offers the counter-practice of abolitionist intimacies, characterized by love, care, healing, forgiveness insurgent acts within and outside prison walls.

Throughout this book, author and poet El Jones generously articulates what it means to engage in ideas of intimacies by articulating their relationship to state violence at different carceral sites, from prisons to borders, from hospitals to social work. She reminds us: abolition is a global project that includes the fight against militarization, homelessness, poverty, and gender-based violence.

El Jones takes the project of abolition away from institutions and academia and back to grassroots organizing by centring the voices of victims of state violence. She reminds us that prisoners and victims are not separate people and prison abolition is indeed a feminist issue. El Jones turns to living archive, recovering what is lost, erased, and buried, by refusing to forget those we have lost to state violence, to prisons, to banishment. She argues that abolitionist praxis cant be limited to a theoretical act but must be supported by actions towards our collective liberation.

Abolitionist Intimacies responds to the urgent need for abolitionist literature centred on the Canadian prison as a colonial, white supremacist project. Abolitionist Intimacies is an immensely generous contribution to Black feminist abolitionist literature in Canada and to living in abolitionist relationship to the world. As a Black feminist engaged in abolition work in so-called Canada, I see this book recognizing the value of abolition work in spaces beyond academia, where abolition organizing happens every day, particularly created and nurtured by the labour of Black women. This type of abolition work lives in our communities every day and manifests through our refusal to forget, to banish, or dehumanize those confined to prison walls.

Abolitionist Intimacies is a gift of love and care. Abolition work must be truly directed at, produced for, and done with folks who are incarcerated; it must manifest in the ways we resist and ways we overcome.

Marlihan Lopez, co-ordinator at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and co-founder of the Defund the Police Coalition in Montreal

Abolitionist Intimacies EL JONES

Fernwood Publishing
Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2022 El Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Development editing and copyediting: Fazeela Jiwa

Cover design: Evan Marnoch

Design and layout: Brenda Conroy

eBook: tikaebooks.com

Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing

2970 Oxford Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3L 2W4

and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts. We acknowledge the Province of Manitoba for support through the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Book Publishing Tax Credit. We acknowledge the Province of Nova Scotia through the Publishers Assistance Fund and Arts Nova Scotia.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Abolitionist intimacies / by El Jones. Names: Jones, El, 1979- author.

Description: Poems and prose. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220253218 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220253900 | ISBN 9781773635521 (softcover) ISBN 9781773635736 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773635743 (PDF)

Classification: LCC PS8619.O5324 A76 2022 | DDC C811/.6dc23

I dedicate this book to all incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. I wrote to honour all who have lost their lives in this countrys carceral institutions and all who have lost their lives after release due to neglect, lack of resources, ongoing trauma, and systemic violence, including the criminalization of drugs.