Abolition’s Speculative Gestures: Becoming Ungovernable to the Time-space of the State

Jenna Wilson
English
UC Riverside

By analyzing a diverse archive, my dissertation investigates how criminalized communities destabilize the temporal and spatial schemas of the carceral state through what I call “speculative gestures” of abolition. Drawing on Black anarchist thought and queer of color critique, I argue that abolition is an existing, precarious reality staged through improvisatory subversion. Funding will support research travel to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MRUS) and Eastern State Penitentiary, which house the primary documents for two chapters of the dissertation. Using the exhibits, archives, and experiences at Eastern State Penitentiary and MRUS, I consider how the mis-use of an object or a space articulates an iterative and creative praxis that refuses to operate on the state’s terms. The method of mis-use is activated when objects and spaces are appropriated and mobilized in service of anti-state counter-narratives. I then analyze the guided tours offered at both sites to weigh their narrative composition against two competing narratological impulses of historiography: the demobilizing force of counterinsurgent historiography on the one hand, and the insurgent counter-narratives of collective storytelling on the other. This work theorizes abolition not merely as a future goal, but as a persistent practice of spatial and narrative rupture.