Abolitionist entanglement: ending the grammars of capture

Abolitionist Entanglement theorizes abolition not only as an activist enterprise for ending prisons and policing but also as the radical potential to undermine the aesthetic, social, political and ontological grammars of capture. Building on Black feminist and literature professor Hortense Spillers’s theoretical articulation of grammars of capture, I consider how these grammars function as the political vernacular through which carceral regimes are both rehearsed and renewed. This dissertation interrogates how such grammars undergird what I term the carceral metaphysics of the subject. Each chapter focuses on aesthetic objects and cinematic interventions made Black radical and queer/trans artists and performers and writers and how their interventions perform a deconstruction the grammars of capture and the carceral metaphysics of the subject by marshalling fugitive forms of aesthetics and untraditional archives. My interdisciplinary and multi-methodological project builds on and extends Black feminist critique, critical animal studies, performance studies, film theory, critical theory and Black studies. I show how abolition is a Black aesthetic, affective and ecological project that is shaped by Black trans theory, the aesthetics of Black radical film and visual art.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference