“no progress” narratives are politically debilitating- analyzing granular form of race/capital is crucial to effective resistance. Their certainty is sentimentalism

(Brenna Bhandar, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical , Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

Race and space are mutually constituted across a multiplicity of scales and across distinct if interconnected geographies shaped by crisis and struggle, “power-difference topographies (e.g. North, South) unified by the ineluctable fatalities attending asymmetrical wealth transfers”15—living, mutable legacies of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide but also of the liberatory projects arrayed against strategies of domination. From a variety of angles and cleaving to specific conjunctures, the essays collected in this volume provide an extremely original and fecund spatial translation of an understanding of racism as “always historically specific” and conjunctural,16 manifesting in practices, subjectivities, and regimes that are always “makeshift patchworks” and “contrivances, designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the wherewithal sufficient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and maintenance”—that is to say their reproduction and repair.17 This is a racism that “does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function—with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances to that system.”18 Gilmore’s crucial contribution to critical theories of the nexus of race and capital is to make palpable the violent abstraction and the concrete, sited specificity that attaches to race-making as it operates through and by physical and political space. We cannot rest content with a “sentimental political assertion” about the uninterrupted legacies of slavery (or colonialism), with “the uncritical extension of a partial past to explain a different present.” Abolition geography is a dialectical, not a sentimental proposition. In Gilmore’s words, Instead of imagining the persistent reiteration of static relations, it might be more powerful to analyze relationship dynamics that extend beyond obvious conceptual or spatial boundaries, and then decide what a particular form, old or new, is made of, by trying to make it into something else. This—making something into something else—is what negation is. To do so is to wonder about a form’s present, future-shaping design—something we can discern from the evidence of its constitutive patterns, without being beguiled or distracted by social ancestors we perceive, reasonably or emotionally, in the form’s features.19 Abolition geography, as the determined and determinate negation of specific regimes of racial capitalism, calls for this geographic, historical and materialist sensibility. As Gilmore’s granular and systemic analyses of the mutable strategies of mass incarceration and coalitions of resistance against it demonstrate, a static comprehension of the articulations of race, state, and capital is immensely debilitating. Far from defining an untrammeled continuum, birthed by the transatlantic slave trade and fundamentally unchanged today,20 racial capitalism can be understood and fought only if the historical dialectics of its form are attended to.