Joy James: Neilly Series Lecture

The River Campus Libraries and Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies invite you to attend a Neilly Author Series talk from Joy James, the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, on her most recent books In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities and New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner.

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love is an analysis and meditation on our intellectual, political, and ethical capacities to confront structural violence, domination, and alienation. James’s talk will touch on feminism, abolition, and genocide, expanding on these ideas through New Bones Abolition, where she more fully explores the concept of the “captive maternal” and the transitions from caretaker to protester or movement-maker to matronage and war resistance.

Joy James is the author of Resisting State Violence; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; Transcending the Talented Tenth; and Seeking the Beloved Community. And she is editor of The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; Warfare in the American Homeland; The Angela Y. David Reader; and coeditor of the Black Feminist Reader.

Creator of the digital Harriet Tubman Literary Circle at the University of Texas at Austin, James has published numerous articles on political theory, police, prison and slavery abolition, radicalizing feminisms, diasporic anti-Black racism and U.S. politics. She also writes on the “captive maternal” through the lens of "The Womb of Western Theory."

The 2023–24 season of the Neilly Series is dedicated to creation of the Department of Black Studies. In celebration of the department’s inaugural year, the books highlighted in this season’s Neilly talks will feature Black authors and a variety of perspectives on racism, freedom, and the Black experience.