A bundle of Joy James text.

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love:

Violence is arrayed against me because I’m 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.

New Bones Abolition addresses “those of us broken enough to grow new bones” in order to stabilize our political traditions that renew freedom struggles.

Reflecting on police violence, political movements, Black feminism, Erica Garner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, caretakers and compradors, Joy James analyzes the “Captive Maternal,” which emerges from legacies of colonialism, chattel slavery and predatory policing, to explore the stages of resistance and communal rebellion that manifest through war resistance. She recognizes a long line of gendered and ungendered freedom fighters, who, within a racialized and economically-stratified democracy, transform from coerced or conflicted caretakers into builders of movements, who realize the necessity of maroon spaces, and ultimately the inevitability of becoming war resisters that mobilize against genocide and state violence.

New Bones Abolition weaves a narrative of a historically complex and engaged people seeking to quell state violence. James discusses the contributions of the mother Mamie Till-Mobley who held a 1955 open-casket funeral for her fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, murdered by white nationalists; the 1971 rebels at Attica prison; the resilience of political prisoners despite the surplus torture they endured; the emergence of Black feminists as political theorists; human rights advocates seeking abolition; and the radical intellectualism of Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner slain in 2014 by the NYPD. James positions the Captive Maternal within the evolution of contemporary abolition. Her meditation on, and theorizing of, Black radicals and revolutionaries works to honor Agape-driven communities and organizers that deter state/police predatory violence through love, caretaking, protest, movements, marronage, and war resistance.

Beyond Cop City

Since 1997, the US Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2bn in military equipment to law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the DOD is legally required to make various items of equipment available to local police and school police departments, from flashlights and sandbags, to grenade launchers and armored vehicles. This militarisation has, unsurprisingly, been shown to unjustly impact on Black communities and is associated with increased killings by police . No wonder there have been calls to 'defund the police' echoing across the streets of America.

In Beyond Cop Cities, Joy James and fellow contributors take these calls one step further, highlighting the Stop Cop City movement - one of the most vibrant in the US today. Linking anti-policing and racial justice movement with radical ecological 'forest defender' activism, the Stop Cop City campaign is a grass roots movement which aims to push back on police militarisation by blocking the construction of the Atlanta's Police Public Safety Training Center.

Sharp and concise, including the voices of key figures in the movement along with the mother of murdered activist 'Tortuguita' (shot and killed by Georgia police while protesting), this collection of vital and politically sophisticated writings capture a moment in time, demanding a safer, less brutal, future.