Angela Davis
AKA: Angela Y. Davis · Davis
The Record
Davis studied under Marcuse at Brandeis and again in California, and under Adorno in Frankfurt. That places her, unusually, as a direct personal link between the Frankfurt School and contemporary American movement politics rather than a doctrinal one.
She joined the Communist Party USA. UCLA dismissed her from her post over that membership, and in 1970 prosecutors charged her in connection with the Marin County courthouse shootout. A jury acquitted her in 1972, after a campaign that ran on several continents.
The later work is the reason this file matters more than the trial does. From the 1990s she has been the central figure in prison abolition. The prison, she argues, is not a response to crime but a mechanism that absorbs populations racial capitalism has made surplus. Reform that improves prisons entrenches them.
Abolition. Feminism. Now., written in 2021 with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, ties that programme back to Combahee by name. The line from 1968 to the present runs through one person, still writing.
Relationship Ledger
Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2021) closes the circuit this line opened in 1977.
Documents
What Angela Davis wrote, oldest first. The archive argues from these rather than about them, so they are listed with the standpoint and the class of each, and a reader is free to check any of it.
- Abolition. Feminism. Now.Haymarket Books, Chicago
Referenced in
Records whose text names Angela Davis. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- Where woke came fromis mentioned in
- Bettina Apthekeris mentioned in