Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Spectacles
Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s beautiful book helped me see something I had not quite seen before. For some years now I’ve offered a lecture called “Meanwhile: Making Abolition Geographies.” The lecture’s basic principle goes something like this: abolition is life in rehearsal because freedom is a place. Sometimes the lecture stretches out into several talks, and other times it’s a one off. The content changes but the structure is consistent. On most occasions I’ll invoke issues specific to where my hosts are located to help listeners “see” what I’m talking about with some immediacy. So, lectures have referenced the Chicago Teachers’ Strike, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), solidarity with South African self-built communities, Water Protectors at Standing Rock, nurses’ unions building a global movement hospital-by-hospital and country-by-country, and so on.
Although most of the content in “Meanwhile” is about relatively recent occurrences, it is a historical geography of the future. In other words, the purpose isn’t to document that a specific thing happened, but rather to offer thickly analytical, detailed descriptions of many different ways people arrive at arranging themselves into a social force— whether in California, or Portugal, or the Black Atlantic, or North America, or South Asia. The social-spatial fights, connecting past to present, are waged by farmworkers or public sector unions, environmental justice activists or schoolchildren, long distance migrants, care workers, households and communities, transport workers, people in prison, detention, and jail, students, sex workers, formerly and currently incarcerated people and their loved ones, Indigenous peoples fighting for true decolonization, and people who claim space by occupying land in urban and rural areas of the global south (wherever in the world that may be). Any of those places, and more, can figure in the historical geographies of the future, by making abolition geographies as we go.
In short, the purpose of “Making Abolition Geographies” is to say: See? Abolition is presence, and also process. Therefore, by moving our attention from place to place it’s possible to sketch out the shape and vitality of an internationalist movement in process of becoming itself. Each segment, then, consists of patiently explaining the conditions under which people who might have set out to do one thing to improve a situation persisted by also, often unexpectedly, doing something else along the way. Each segment lays out a plot of time and space with narrative detail, in which people become excited by the possibility of change and surprised by where the dramatic incidents of change-in-motion might have sent them. They bend courses, because practice makes different. Any of the stories can therefore become a model for others. We know that people use elements and provocations from many aspects of life—material and symbolic—to make sense of specific challenges, and to assemble impulses into patterns that help, short term or longer, to bend our course through constellations of forces, toward eventually becoming constellations ourselves.
The Rehearsals for Living you hold in your hands helped me better to see what I’ve been trying to do with my lectures. Let me explain. While some of the episodes in “Meanwhile” are big, and even noisy, they tend not to be spectacles of the type that, widespread, gripped so much planetary attention in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Those spectacles matter: we revolt because we cannot breathe, and people take to the streets in the effort to clear up the organized abandonment and organized violence that condense the weight of centuries. All true. And yet, because I’ve been nearsighted my entire life, I also think of spectacles as eyeglasses—lenses that sharpen focus onto small or blurry or distant details. In combination, these two kinds of spectacles support practical remedy, as instruments that help with vision—with the ability to see things we would miss without them. When I read Rehearsals for Living, spectacles in this double sense charted my course as I bent over the expansive meditations gracing every page. And there’s a third spectacle I can see here: a constantly unfolding drama, whose lines and characters and spaces remain thrillingly unfixed, underlying “life in rehearsal.” Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. Nobody has to become them as we become us. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.
Lisbon, November 15, 2021