Episode 2: Abolition as Praxis with Dylan Rodriguez

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In this episode, Professor and abolitionist scholar Dylan Rodriguez joins me to talk about the importance of a collective, imaginative, and creative abolitionist praxis. I talked to him about abolition, about a trans and queer politics of abolition, his book White Reconstruction and the anthology Captive Genders. The interview is from June 7, 2021.

Dylan Rodríguez was the 2020-2021 President of the American Studies Association and is a Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. After completing his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2001, Dylan spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies, serving as Chair from 2009-2016. He joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017.

Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist work examine how historical regimes and logics of racial and racial-colonial violence become normalized features of everyday state, cultural, and social formations. He is especially concerned with how liberal and progressive reformist appropriations of radical, abolitionist, anti-colonialist and decolonial, and revolutionary struggles reinstitute racial-colonial power while also reproducing systemic anti-Black, carceral, and colonial violence. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit these oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision–and practice–transformations of power and community?

Dylan’s works mentioned in this episode:

“Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword.” Harvard Law Review, Development in the Law - Prison Abolition, 132 (2019): 1575–1611.

White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

The podcast episode with Dylan I refer to is from the RevLeftRadio.

Follow Dylan on Twitter: @dylanrodriguez