In this collection on “Spirituality and Survival: Imaginative Freedoms for Abolition Futures,” authors engage key questions of Black survival in this moment: How are Black communities activating our ancestral knowledge to cultivate a future we are willing to fight for and worlds in which we want to survive?
We invited authors to consider the following questions in their writing:
- How are you showing up right now to take care of yourself and to care for others?
- How are you showing up in mindful solidarity with the movements confronting police violence and demanding abolition?
- What contemplative insights, spiritual wisdoms, or dharmic teachings are you finding most relevant for society or for you, personally, in this time?
- How have Black histories of protest, riots, and revolutions related to spirituality?
- How have our ancestors, both familial lineages and intellectual inspirations, responded to past turmoils with insight and vision across the diaspora?
- How can the changes we need, including the abolition of prisons and police, be spiritually guided, mindfully motivated, and creatively conjured now and tomorrow?
- How can these spiritual and wisdom teachings shape our demands for the future?
Their responses, which we will publish successively in the coming weeks, speak to personal experience and social calamity, to profound injustice and the possibility of something else. They speak to survival, abolition, and the desire for freedom through imagination, play, and practice.
Check back here or follow The Arrow on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as we publish new pieces.
Contents
Meant to Survive: Creativity as a Path to Abolition by shah noor hussein
Con*cep*tion by Claudelle R. Glasgow (Dr. g)
We Need More Fugitives by Ra Malika Imhotep
In Solitude and Solidarity by Jarrel Phillips
Queering the Archetypes of Tarot by Mason Dana
Language and Personal Narrative in Revolutionary Poetry: Book Review of I Am Still Your Negro by Valerie Mason-John by shah noor hussein
Spiritual Activism: On the Streets, at the Shrines by Kateria Niambi
There Was Love Included in It: Linking Art and Abolition | Interview with Malik Seneferu and William Rhodes
PRISONS DO NOT HEAL by shah noor hussein
Artwork by Rae Minji Lee, with photography by Carolina Marinati (CC0, nappy.co)
Before you go…
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