In the US, calls for prison abolition have gained momentum in recent years and have reinforced
the distinction between reform (developing less violent methods of policing, for example) and
abolition (creating a world where policing is not necessary). Abolition as an alternative to reform
animates many justice movements that seek to eradicate structural inequality. Abolitionist
geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a self-described “drama school doctoral-program dropout,”
integrates political and artistic labors, noting, via Karl Marx, that “By mixing our labor with the
earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That’s what drama is;
that’s what geography is: making history, making worlds.”1 The notion that performance is
world-making, as advanced in the formative scholarship of Dorinne Kondo, is moving quickly
from a galvanizing and activating premise to a given (though no less radical) assumption for
scholars of theatre, performance, and dance studies. Kondo’s theory2 entwines aesthetic, social,
and political domains of experience and integrates analysis of artistic and cultural production
into a larger project of naming and resisting the ongoing devastations of what Gilmore calls
never-not racial capitalism. For this special issue on “Abolition and Performance,” Theatre
Journal invites submissions that consider how abolition and its historical and theoretical
concerns of the plantation, carcerality, and liberation shift our understandings of performance as
world-making, un-making, and re-making.
Plantation logics and their afterlives in the criminal punishment system rely upon regimes of
authority that enact subordination, incapacitation, and extraction intended towards world-ending.
We could, alongside Katherine McKittrick and others, think of these regimes as choreographies
of space, time, bodies, energy, and breath.3 Sociopolitical engines of the plantationocene – labor
extraction, racialization, and capital accumulation – intersect histories of performance and their
aesthetics and economies. Simultaneously, we could pay attention to what McKittrick has called
“plantation futures.”4 In such futures-lived-now, the plantation, the prison, and other spaces of
enclosure may not always be separable from affirmative instantiations of sovereignty for
oppressed peoples. Carceral aesthetics, as recently developed by Nicole R. Fleetwood, is one
example of holding both the violences and futures of these sites together.5 For this special issue,
we ask how might performance offer insights into relations of freedom and un-freedom;
practices of thingification, disposability, and non-humanity; enactments of property, ownership,
and communality; and reassertions of white supremacy, such as white deputization? What are the
relationships between performance and organizing, protesting, policing, the criminal punishment
system, and alternative structures of justice?
Abolition discourse often emphasizes class struggle and its interlocking alignments with racial,
gender, and sexual liberation, coming out of the Black Radical tradition and its thinkers’ and
movers’ relationships to global Black freedom movements, such as W.E.B. DuBois’s call for
abolition democracy during the Reconstruction Era. Criminalization and incarceration
disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous people in the Americas and are widespread tools
for asserting hierarchies of dominance globally as part of the afterlives of both slavery and
colonialism. As the “intimacies” of globalization, following Lisa Lowe, touch myriad
geographies, temporalities, and socialities, so too does abolition travel, overlapping in rhetorical
and political usage with anticolonization.6 Abolition movements, practices, legislation,
resistance, figures, and events are all of relevance to this call, and the journal welcomes
submissions with transnational frameworks, understanding the project of liberation to be a broad
one that is nonetheless articulated in specific times and places using the resources available.
This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal coeditor Ariel Nereson. We will consider
both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for short
provocations, video and/or photo essays, and other creative, multimedia material for our online
platform (500-2,000 words). For information about submission,
visit: https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines
Submissions for the print journal (6,000-9,000 words) and for the online platform (500-2,000
words) should reach us no later than December 1, 2023.
Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal.
Editor Ariel Nereson (anereson@buffalo.edu) and Online Editor Tarryn Chun (tchun@nd.edu)
welcome questions and inquiries.
1 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Brooklyn: Verso,
2022), 26, 28.
2 Dorinne Kondo, World-Making: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2018).
3 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
4 Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1-15. For plantations
as sites of sovereignty and futurity, see also Eve Dunbar, “Genres of Enslavement: Ruptured
Temporalities of Black Unfreedom and the Resurfacing Plantation” (The South Atlantic
Quarterly 121, no. 1 [2022]: 53-73) and Julius B. Fleming Jr., “Transforming Geographies of
Black Time: How the Free Southern Theater Used the Plantation for Civil Rights Activism”
(American Literature 91, no. 3 [2019]: 587-617).
5 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2020).
6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). For
another transnational framework of the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, see Rinaldo
Walcott, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Windsor, Ontario:
Biblioasis, 2021).
Jazmin Llana