Resisting Antiblackness Without Imperial or Progressive Institutions

Louis-Georges Schwartz

A review of James, Joy. New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner. Common Notions, 2023.

In New Bones Abolition, Joy James presents a collection of ten essays on the politics of abolition organized around Erica Garner’s political life. Erica Garner was the daughter of Eric Garner, who was lynched by New York City police using a prohibited choke hold on Staten on July 17, 2014. Eric Garner’s murder was one of a series of police lynchings across the US that led to months of nationwide popular resistance against the war waged on Black communities by the state and capital. In addition to demanding the elimination of racist police, or carceral society, or even racial capitalism, James’s abolition seeks the end of Antiblackness, full stop. Erica Garner’s work around her father’s death went from seeking justice for the family via the justice system to organizing the streets and voters against police lynchings of Black people. James understands Garner as a “Captive Maternal,” and articulates a network of supplementary analytic concepts such as “maroonage,” the “doula” function, “agape,” and “war resistance.” She uses these concepts to reveal Garner’s passage from caregiver to a rebel seeking full-spectrum social transformation over the course of her short career as a public figure. In James’s account, Garner does not give up care giving as she develops, she turns care into a praxis on a national scale. New Bones begins with three chapters on various kinds of contemporary abolition in the academic context, which James knows well: she is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. The middle three chapters focus on Erica Garner’s political activity and death. The final three chapters deal with federal and international legal action against the police lynching of Black people in the US in the context of a broader movement to abolish Antiblackness and its world.

Throughout New Bones, James locates meaningful politics, collective activity capable of bringing about the social transformation necessary to end Antiblackness, outside of the state, outside of the institutions of racial capitalism, and the beyond the walled garden of the statist university. Bourgeois institutions structurally reproduce Antiblackness, and hold Captive Maternals in bondage. ‘Captive Maternals’ is James’s term for caregivers in proletarian communities suffering the acute contradictions of racial capitalism. Captive Maternals transform ethical and often familial projects of ministering, protecting, educating, and providing into political projects aimed at changing the conditions that put communities in harm’s way and overturning the system that dispossesses them. James emphasizes the complex metamorphoses in the careers of captive maternals through a set of examples which includes Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Mamie Till-Mobley. She shows the ways that love for family and immediate community can be turned into agape, which she defines as “political love,” radicalizing, and to a certain extent secularizing Dr. King’s development of the term’s classical Greek and Christian-theological meaning, transmuting it into a radical form of racial solidarity that transcends the sympathy of radicalized individuals for their group, and becomes the very bond through which the beloved community elaborates itself. Although it is not a major theme in the book, the paradigm of agape might be used to explain Till-Mobley’s decision to have an open casket funeral for her fourteen-year-old son, Emmett Till, and allow Jet magazine photographers to take and publish photographs. In so doing she created an image event out of love and grief for her son that garnered global solidarity for resistance against the war on Black people in the United Sates (209-10).

The phrase “captive maternal” suggests the ethical difficulties of enslaved mothers played out in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and developed by Afropessimist scholars such as Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, among others: enslaved people were forced to reproduce, with their children forced into bondage. Their work of maternity was structurally linked to the reproduction of chattel slavery. Against the excruciating contradiction connecting the generational reproduction of a people to the reproduction of their enslavement, James proposes “maroonage,” the construction of a community premised on self-liberation, which enables Captive Maternals to both provide care in a way that does not reproduce Antiblackness, and to resist colonial capitalism. Maroonage distances Captive Maternals from the world of Antiblackness which confines them, and enables them to transform the maintenance of communities harmed by exploitation and racism into militancy. 

The reproduction of capitalist societies operates through a contradiction: the labor power of the proletariat is necessary to the continuation of the everyday life of class domination, but capital supports neither the daily reproduction of the worker’s capacity to work nor the reproduction of new generations of laborers. It abandons the proletariat to care for itself. That contradiction is even more intense for Black and otherwise racialized layers of the proletariat. Some are condemned to social death by being permanently excluded from the pool of labor necessary to the valorization of capital. The assault on Black communities James’s “war resisters” defend against can be understood as a capitalist project: the ruling class sees the populations it has dispossessed as absolutely unnecessary to their own economic needs and therefore as disposable, and seeks to liquidate them—an eliminationist drive expressed in, for example, police lynching in the United States, and genocide in Palestine.  One can see the ways capital fragments the proletariat through differential abandonment in James’s account of Erica Garner’s death.

New Bones Abolition proceeds through a series of analytic narratives instead of a set of classical arguments. Captive Maternals and the rest of James’s theoretical figures name the political actions and formations that oppose the brutal war the bourgeoisie wages on Black people through violence, social fragmentation, and abandonment. Concepts such as Captive Maternals and war resisters name types of agents or characters in James’s social stories, while others, such as maroonage name collective organizations of care. All of these figures arise as responses to social divisions between Black communities and white supremacist bourgeois society, and to social divisions within Black communities themselves, whence their tremendous force within analytic narratives wherein the possibility of politics arises from fragmentation.

After three years of activism following her father’s murder in 2014, Garner died of a heart attack in December of 2017. James points out that that was Garner’s second known heart attack, the first came during or just after the birth of her son, Eric, earlier in 2017 (161). Because the general medical crisis in the United States is unevenly distributed, Black women are almost twenty-five percent more likely to have a pregnancy related heart attack during childbirth (“Black Women”) and more than twice as likely to die of complications around childbirth (Johnson). 

Garner’s activism began with petitioning the court for more information on her father’s death, calling for state legislation banning choke holds, and demanding the formation of investigative committees in the house of representatives, along with attempts to ensure that Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who murdered her father, was fired and prosecuted. From the beginning, Garner sought to keep the focus on ways to prevent police violence. She moved from mainstream abolitionist tactics that operate within the apparatus of liberal democracy to forming collectives that operated at the system’s margins, organizing die-ins on Staten Island, and participating in actions for Black victims of police lynchings in other cities. James understands Garner’s campaign work for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 democratic primaries as an attempt to take a radical abolitionist point of view onto the empire’s biggest political platform: presidential elections. Garner refused to acquiesce to bourgeois society’s demand that all politics be electoral, and refused to adhere to certain norms of decorum. At the end of the summer of 2016, Garner would leave a nationally televised town hall on police lynchings when she found out that she would not be able to address then President Barack Obama directly. On her way out, she confronted Obama offstage. He responded by criticizing her unwillingness to hew to the rules of respectability and deference the liberal mainstream demands. Garner insisted she had been “railroaded” (129-32).   

When she promoted Sanders, she ensured that no one would interfere with her style of expression or with the content of what she had to say. Garner platformed the needs of the movement she was helping to build in New York City and those with which she worked in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore. Garner’s function in the Bernie Sanders campaign was to draw attention to an emerging, national, Black proletarian political community born in the streets despite the fact that the state and the media-owning class sought to erase that community by masking it with the liberalism of the petty bourgeois Black Lives Matter organization. Garner helped to birth a new political body outside of state institutions, and forced those institutions to recognize it. In this sense James calls her a doula (140-48).

James clarifies the separation between dispossessed communities and bourgeois institutions when she reflects on an academic conference on abolition at Princeton, where professors and graduate students mainly practiced state feminism and liberal abolition while New Jersey State Troopers gathered at the door of the auditorium as James gave a presentation on Assata Shakur. Shakur is a former member of the Black Liberation Army who escaped from prison and fled the US in 1979 after being accused of killing a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973. The State Troopers Fraternal Association has aggressively opposed any attempts to seek a pardon for Shakur, and actively lobbied to have her extradited from Cuba. Their appearance was clearly meant as an intimidating and silencing show of force, yet James’s colleagues showed her no sign of solidarity, despite the fact that the very integrity of the institution to which they were beholden was being challenged by the violence of empire. Although the topic of the conference was abolition (from a conventional academic perspective), those in attendance refused to resist or even acknowledge a clear example of the war against Black politics that radical abolition seeks to end. 

Politics did briefly emerge at the conference when, during a Q and A, a professor from a vocational college pointed out that all the papers at the conference were presented by scholars from elite institutions who were shielded from the “vulnerabilities and violence stalking her own students” (44). Other than a prominent professor who chastised the speaker for not being appreciative, James was the only one to answer the woman, affirming her critique, and pointing out abolitionist conferences at ruling-class schools had been normalized. Both James and the professor from the vocational college acted as doulas. The risk James ran by giving a paper that got the menacing attention and attendance of police, birthed a living political moment in the space of the conference, in part by making palpable the other attendees’ unwillingness to respond to anything outside the context of the statist university (the presence of troopers palpable, and the concerns of working-class students). Although academics often style themselves as political, and some from underrepresented groups call their presence in the institution inherently political, university spaces themselves are structured to prevent open confrontation, intellectual or otherwise, deadening any gestures toward social transformation. The conversion of the academic conference into a live political space was completed by the vocational college professor who made the event’s class structure explicit. James begins the narrative of her colleague’s intervention by pointing out that “[d]issonance for the gathering appeared not to stem from police, but from a young Black woman who questioned the function and purpose, the very relevance, of the conference” (44). James goes on to say that she intervened when the woman was chastised by “a prominent Black professor” (44). James pointed out that abolitionist conferences had at elite universities had become the national norm. James concludes the episode by saying that “Captive Maternals … confront homelessness poverty, police violence, and incarceration … within the material realm of struggle and scarcity … realms distanced from or present as abstractions to the elite universities and colleges” (44). It is hard for James’s reader not to read the opening of political space in the solidarity between two Captive Maternals: James and the other woman professor against the conference that failed to show solidarity with James against the police. Although a theory of politics as choosing sides in social rifts remains implicit in James’s analytic narratives, she makes the power of such a theory deeply felt by those versed in contemporary thinking about social transformation.

As is well-known, US academics tend to mistake solidarity for an affect, and moments when people facing concrete material problems open rifts within groups striving for abstractly defined justice are frowned upon because they give rise to indecorous feelings; yet it is only by working in such rifts that real politics can be born. It is only by insisting on attending to those willing to speak in situations where speech involves bodily risk that theory can become praxis (42-45). 

New Bones begins by analyzing various styles of Black feminism in terms of their relationship to the social institutions that subjugate Black life: centrist Black feminism seeks equity between Black people, Black women in particular, and bourgeois whites, without necessarily opposing the imperial state and capitalist economy. The feminism of Captive Maternals refuses to let the care work required by feminist politics, or any struggle for liberation, reproduce the very forces that create inequity. James points out certain radicalized Black feminists’ agape in attempts to channel the energy of feminist organizing against the world of oppression instead of seeking accommodation within that world. James notes that there is not necessarily an antagonism between Captive Maternals and other forms of Black feminism. They have different projects. Centrist Black feminism seeks what might be called reform, while Captive Maternals engage in forms of revolutionary struggle. Black feminisms also operate in different sites: more liberal actors operate in places James calls “epicenters,” such as universities, the halls government, and courtrooms, for instance, while Captive Maternals operate in “hypocenters,” such as communal gatherings, and the streets where the state wages war against Black people (39).  Elsewhere, James insists that

Captive Maternals are a function, not an identity. . . . Captive Maternals are flawed. They/we salvage, but they/we are not saviors. They/we are practitioners. Some practice the art of political alchemy to transpose exhaustion, exploitation, and resentments into protests and rebellions. Some live long lives (rest in peace, Harry Belafonte). Some die rapidly at the hands of others (rest in power, Breonna Taylor). What would and could we do over centuries of frustrations, savage trauma, and outrage through endurance against lynching, state violence, rape, and police murder? Create a womb to push out a mutation that would confront our antagonists and force said antagonists to stop feeding on our lives and deaths. (“Captive Maternal”)

New Bones makes it clear that part of the captive maternal function is to politicize the central institutions of colonial capitalism by manifesting within them the agency of collective bodies born outside, in hypocenters, on the US street. Although she does not say so in New Bones,James’s insistence on bringing in collectives excluded by both imperial and ‘progressive’ institutions in order to create political situations must be read as a constant attention to the question of what conditions would make social transformation possible. 

I strongly recommend New Bones Abolition to general readers interested in abolition, to social organizers, and especially to academics and teachers for classroom adoption. We live in a time when radical works are being excluded from high schools and universities, and I cannot think of a book more useful to students of political theory, social science, Black studies, or American Studies. In terms of James’s oeuvre, New Bones seems to be the second in a trilogy beginning with In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (Divided Publishing, 2022) and ending (?) with the forthcoming The Captive Maternal: Antifascist Renegades, Runaways and Rebels (Pluto Press, 2026), and as such is a crucial step in the articulation of her concepts. The book would be invaluable for the study of contemporary abolition, the movement for black lives, the study of US policing, and contemporary history.

Works Cited

“Black Women Have the Highest Risk of Pregnancy-Related Heart Problems in the US.” Journal of the American Heart Association Report, American Heart Association, 16 Dec. 2020, https://newsroom.heart.org/news/black-women-have-the-highest-risk-of-pregnancy-related-heart-problems-in-the-us.

James, Joy. “The Captive Maternal Is a Function, Not an Identity Marker.” Scalawag, 28 April 2023, https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/04/captive-maternal-joy-james/.

–––. In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities. Divided Publishing, 2022.

Johnson, Akilah. “For Some Black Women, the Fear of Death Shadows the Joy of Birth.” Washington Post, 14 Dec. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/black-women-pregnancy-mortality-fear/.