ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
In this talk followed by a Q&A, Joy James will address writing as political protest and agency, and how all of her work addresses crises in US abolition, feminism, anti-Blackness, academic "radical" vanguards and state violence.
Join us in this unique chance to hear the international acclaimed theorist of the captive maternal, and leading contributor to the study of the (incarcerated) Black radical tradition in the United States discuss her recent book In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (Divided Publishing 2023) and her further most recent publications, New Bones Abolition, Contextualizing Angela Davis and Beyond Cop Cities:
Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Join us in this unique chance to hear the international acclaimed theorist of the captive maternal, and leading contributor to the study of the (incarcerated) Black radical tradition in the United States discuss her recent book In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (Divided Publishing 2023) and her further most recent publications, New Bones Abolition, Contextualizing Angela Davis and Beyond Cop Cities:
Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
The political theorist Joy James teaches at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The New Abolitionists (SUNY Press, 2005) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), James is also author of Resisting State Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Transcending the Talented Tenth (Routledge, 1997), Seeking the Beloved Community (SUNY Press, 2013), New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner (Common Notions, 2023), and Contextualizing Angela Davis (Bloomsbury, 2024).
She is in the UK to deliver the annual Stephen Lawrence Research Centre lecture at De Montfort University.
She is in the UK to deliver the annual Stephen Lawrence Research Centre lecture at De Montfort University.
02:00 pm
Sat, 27 Apr 2024
Upper Gallery
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student and pensioner) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
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