Their limits offense props up Black out-of-placeness that relies on unspoken attitudinal practices born of slavery. Acts of transgression in places Black people and their literature should not be is the first step towards abolishing their reliance on slave logics.

- I think this works against black people reading framework/limits offense like t-tactics too because it talks about how black institutions also use out of placeness

There are histories and stories of places throughout the Americas, even in putatively Black countries, where Black people know not to go, even today. Now that tourism has replaced the plantation as the primary sources of revenue in many of these regions, places frequented by tourists (who are almost always assumed to be white), like certain higher-end bars and restaurants, are often off limits to Black people. These new plantations by the sea, as Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel Prize-winning writer and artist, called them, are shaped by the long history of the older plantation model still.16 In many countries beaches and parks are also off limits, if only informally, as are the neighbourhoods of the small-pocketed descendants of white plantocracy, even after all these years. The gated condominium and time-share communities that have sprung up share similar dynamics. Black people only show up in these places as (service) labour, as police and private police, or, on rare occasions, as exceptionally rich individuals whose wealth buys access normally denied. But by and large Black people retain an outsider status in such spaces.

These are places where the police will question Black people for just being present. These are places where Black out-of-placeness is a signal of the long and enduring history of Black subjection. And in a post-slavery world, these are places where the unspoken attitudinal practices of slavery, fully born from the plantation’s womb, still fashion social relations. Black people know these places and share stories of them among themselves. Black people know the attitudes of these places too. Black people feel, deep in their bones, that these places should not exist. In short, these are places worthy of abolition. The plantation’s afterlife extends to these places, and it also helps to set and manage the social relations that shapes our interactions within them.

To fully comprehend Black people’s desire for abolition as a politics worth fighting for and as a philosophy orienting how we live together in the future, it is important to note all the ways in which the history of Black enslavement in the Americas continues to shape our current existence. The afterlife of slavery is in part a set of social relations between Black and white people in which it is often assumed that Black people should practice some form of subordination. Black people continue to resist forms of ownership, subordination, and possession in both conscious and unconscious ways—by ourselves and others. Black people have had to actively work to refuse and resist being reduced in this way, in order to exist in a world perceived to be made for white fulfilment only.