Writing as Sedition

Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies. Her scholarship attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production and to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. She is working on a book-length project that examines literature and performance to explore the ways black folks manage racial terror through a sense of humor endowed with black feminist affects like curiosity or a sense of political legitimacy imagined to be possible even among morally, materially, and politically opposing figures. Recent collaborative projects also include a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns as well as a co-edited double-volume anthology entitled Abolition Feminisms (Haymarket Books).

Malav Kanuga is a cultural anthropologist trained in ethnographic and archival studies of space, culture, and power, as well as uneven development in an internationalist and historical framework. As an urban researcher and as an activist, his work on the cultures and histories of popular mobilization and imagination attends to the articulations and resistances to domination and hierarchy in the urban and social lifeworlds of racial capitalism.

His current research focuses on and accompanies organizing around carcerality, freedom, and public democratic media citizenship. He is interested in how and what communities communicate as they mobilize, and how movements leverage established as well as grassroots media opportunities to change narratives shaping both the policies governing consent and constraint, and the politics and legacies of liberation.

Allan E. S. Lumba is a cultural and social historian of Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This new project has recently received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).

This working group seeks to explore the internationalist histories and global possibilities of abolitionist intellectual and social movements. We frame our questions from Angela Davis’ findings that the prison industrial complex was historically rooted in colonial and imperial forms of a global order, Ruth Gilmore and Katherine McKittrick’s insight that carcerality remains crucial to present-day racial capitalist accumulation, and Harsha Walia’s notion that imperial displacement and migrant mass detention remains the true origins of the so-called “border crisis.”