How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love?
This question always leads me to self-reflection. If I can see the ways I am perpetuating systemic oppressions, if I can see where I learned the behavior and how hard it is to unlearn it, I start to have more humility as I see the messiness of the communities I am a part of, the world I live in.
—adrienne maree brown1
(a) identiteas(er)
Situating oneself at the forefront of an academic offering can sometimes serve to simply check a box; a basic requirement for "good, balanced" scholarship. Perhaps at its best, situating oneself evinces humility and reflective acknowledgment of identities and lived experiences, which critically inform the scholar's goals, methods, subjects, and sensitivities in their work. So who am I? aaron moore ellis. I take the lead from trailblazers who refuse capitalization. Who am I to do so? A wyte, nonbinary, ashkenazi jewish, irish, AMAB, m@sc-presenting person born into relative privilege, a sett!er on stolen land. … Who am I *not* to do so? What's at stake? What's at promise? And as to spelling: why write "wyte" instead of spelling out the color? Some may be familiar with the practice of intentionally respelling words associated with pain, trauma, and oppression, so that the experiences of those impacted by those words' referent is acknowledged and their reading experience softened. For those with privilege enough not to feel the resonant impact of these words, I invite you to consider my respelling as a reminder that privilege comes with built-in blinders to others' experiences, others for whom words matter in specific ways and whose lived experiences are deeply impacted by violence and oppression; that those people with those experiences matter; and that we—all of us—can seek ways to make life more breathable, more livable, more joyful. Who am I *not* to respell these words? What's at stake in respelling, or not?
These are recurring questions—questions that don't stop me in my tracks or silence me, but rather stay on the move with me. I keep these questions with me as an invitation to others to see consonance—or dissonance—between how they witness me identify, what they hear me proclaim, and what they see me embody. That is to say, these questions invite myself into accountability—to my decisions, actions, identities, privileges, responsibilities, and abilities to respond to those most impacted by structural and interpersonal oppression, close by and across the world.
As I write and edit this reflection between unceded Timucua, Anais, Seminole, and Miccosukee lands, and Lenapehoking, I am reminded that confessional scholarship and accountability may begin at the written word, but must follow and grow into action and intention, relational community connection, reflection and revision. It is no small task, and I am by no means holding myself as exemplary—I am simply acknowledging who and where I am and inviting accountability from within and without in pursuit of alternatives to the everyday into which I was born and into which I was acculturated.
I am a latecomer to the world of theatre. I came to theatre as an activist-organizer and theory-head, seeking tools for existential and sociopolitical transformation. I found the infinite possibilities of the stage compelling. I imagined the theatre to be a site for experimenting and for co-creating transformative practices. Then, I met the theatre world.
Until I saw the call for abolitionist scholars and practitioners to convene a session at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference in 2021, I had not heard of an abolitionist theatre collective or organization in an academic institution.2 Leading up to the ATHE 2021 session, and since then, we have engaged with one another. We now publish a Zine as a starting point and a provocation for ongoing praxis—action, reflection, and revision—toward liberationist, decarceral practice.3 Upon receiving word of this special issue of Theatre Journal on "Abolition and Performance," I found myself opening up to an opportunity to uplift aspects of our efforts that resonate with me. And I am moved to do so by turning to authors whom I find to be critical for—though arguably outside of—theatre studies proper. The fact that this literature is so pertinent and outside of the field is instructive. It may be that we must leave the field to get vantage on the field; and it may be that the only way to substantively change the field, to inaugurate shifts that actually tend to the deep-seated carceralities in our field, is to use tools not given to us by gatekeepers of the field, and use them to go farther than my instructors would ever encourage—or allow—me to go.
(x) c0p in the head: canon
In my view, our Zine functions to raise awareness around how carcerality is not limited to the people, places, or logics of the pri$on industrial complex, but rather is present as close to home as in our very own field. Furthermore, our Zine articulates an abolitionist framework and starting point for decarceral work in theatre studies and practice. This is a starting point—a lily-pad jumping-off point for theoretical and practical possibilities and therefore an invitation for all of us: to leap, to dive, and to breathe. To breathe into decarceral futures as theatre pedagogues, scholars, and practitioners who find something deeply troubling in the structures, systems, and practices in our theatre world, who find that beneath the veneer of progressivism, humanism, and artistry, we must confront and contend with the punitive, elitist, 3urocentric, capitalist, carceral realities and practices in our institutions, in our programs, and, yes, in our canon.
In our Zine, we name one of our disciplinary "c0ps in the head" as our reliance—insistence—on maintaining the we$tern theatre canon despite its relationship to centuries of silencing, language injustice, and chr!stocentric and 3urocentric purveyors of imp3rialism and sett!er col0nialism. Wyte theatre has served as ideological, aesthetic, and practical reinforcement—even as evening entertainment—for those purveyors, by and large following right along with their hierarchies of social orders and hegemonic, interlocking systems of oppression4 that extract cultural and material resources from the 2/3 world, disseminating their cultural hierarchies as absolute and evolutionarily desirable for the rest of the world to emulate. I am (and you are too, perhaps?) among those who benefit from our institutional and canonical embeddedness in we$tern canon and we$tern power. And I am (maybe you, too?) among those paid wages to teach and inculcate the canon in our next generations.
In my own development as a practitioner/scholar, I began to internalize our canon as a map toward some sort of X marks the spot: disciplinarity, professionalization, qualification, hireability, livelihood. I observe this all around me as well. I experience the field, the institutions and the people who populate it, as generally accepting, either in theory or in practice, a highly problematic apotheosis of canon: the classical age of the Greeks and then the Romans; the Siglo de Oro of the Spanish; the Elizabethan drama of the English; the golden age of US playwrights of the mid-twentieth century; and the "gold standard" in belly of the beast of we$tern theatre today—Broadway and its trickle-down theory of "cultural value," overrunning professional, community, and school-based theatre with reverential replication and reiteration.
While much blood, sweat, and tears have been poured into breaking the canon's hold on our classrooms, our pages, and our stages, many of us—and our departments, classes, journals, and seasons—still traffic in the apotheosized canon, whether as true believers or simply as workers in its factories. Yet these traditions all ground themselves in systems of violence, in empire, militarism, nationalism, capital, and cultural elitism.
I do not exempt myself from this situated conundrum—or the imperative I proclaim. With softness and love and understanding, I call upon myself to fire the c0p that lives in my head; to cease, to desist, and to find other ways of speaking to theatre and performance, rather than kicking the canon down the road, adding a bit of diversity here and tacking an underrepresented voice to the canon there. Cups of water and the best intentions cannot put out the wildfire that is 3uropean col0nialism and cultural elitism.
The critique I offer here of what I see as the uses and abuses of theatre and performance as canon is not a final judgment on the validity or quality of work produced by c!s-h3t, wyte, m@le authors in 3urope, nor a callout judgment of anyone who loves that work, does that work, or has been inspired by that work. It doesn't mean, for example, that $hakespeare's body of work isn't of good quality, or that teachers and artists who engage, adapt, and are inspired by his work are somehow misguided, or that people can't find meaning or beauty or purpose in that art.
Yes, and our canonical focus on $hakespeare centers aesthetic hierarchies and pedagogical frameworks rife with elitist aesthetic hierarchies, 3urocentrism, @nglocentrism, c!sh3terop@triarchy, and wyte supremacy, all deeply embedded in English imp3rialism and subsequent sett!er-col0nialism. This centering, benign or even benevolent as it might seem to some, reifies metanarratives and hegemonic power structures in theatre, culture, and statecraft writ large, not to mention our academic institutions. This status quo is not natural or inherent; it is contingent and contrived. Whom does it serve? Whose history does it serve? Whose language does it serve? Whose freedom does it serve?
Rather than a callout, this is a calling-in—an invitation for critical reappraisal of the fundamental framework of whom we teach our next generations to love; whom we teach them is necessary to read, to stage, to pass on—and why. This writing is an exercise in swimming against the current and in making strong moves from a place of love, and with softness, while also recognizing my own lagging behind, my own shortcomings, my own not-yet-where-I-want-to-be. I advocate a shift that I myself—and I'll venture to say that we, collectively—do not know how to fully accomplish. I advocate a principled embrace of the unknown and see our shared conundrum as an invitation into community, to be co-conspirators in flipping the script on what knowledge, theatre, performance, histories, and theories we teach, stage, and value as canon.
When I try to put my finger on our field's apotheosized canon, I have three fingers pointing right back at me. The canon and its attendant forces are deep within me: my very own c0p-in-the-head. Even though I am committed to another way forward, I find myself pulled back in, as if stuck walking the path of the we$tern theatre canon.
Yes, the c0p-in-my-head is my own and nobody else's, and I must take personal responsibility for the hold this internal force has on me—even if it grips me without my willing it to keep hold of me. Yes, and any personal accusation risks solipsism, self-aggrandizement, and/or requires a bigger-picture analysis. When I think of the canon c0p-in-my-head, I wrestle with what possibilities there might be not only for dispelling this c0p-in-my-head, but also for dismantling the canon-po!ice headquarters outside my head: in our field, in our departments, in our classrooms, and on our stages. A stunning feature of this canon-po!ice headquarters, and the canon c0p-in-my-head, is that it is overwhelmingly wyte. Taught to me by mostly wyte (mostly c!sgendered, h3terosexual, cla$$-privileged, and/or 3uropean-descended) individuals. What does radical, decarceral imagination offer the oversaturation of wyteness in our field? Especially concerning the intersectional implications of the interlocking systems of oppression that wyteness brings with it?
What follows is a proposal: that we break with what is sacrosanct in theatre studies, history, practice, curricula, and institutions—wyteness, the foundation of the we$tern theatre canon as we inherit it and are expected to replicate.
(y) centering periphery: decentering wyteness
What would it look like to stop teaching and staging canonical wyte playwrights?
I propose we stop teaching and staging canonical wyte playwrights. At all. Perhaps this will help us stop predicating financial solvency (and professional ascendancy) in our field on wyteness.
I immediately hear groans of protest from the c0p-in-my-head.
And—perhaps more frantically and at a higher pitch—from that c0p's headquarters:
Well, we have added "competencies" onto our 3urocentric canon. Yes, we may be saturated with wyteness, BUT! we have room for adding others on. We already have entire classes devoted to POC theatre and performance history! What about the "diversity play" we added to our season (and struggle to responsibly produce)?!
The apparent "unthinkability" of removing wyte playwrights from our curricula and our stages invites me further into the possibility.5 I posit that it is (well past) time to flip the script entirely.
Imagine: what if instead of tacking POC playwrights onto our canon, we could reserve wyte theatre for electives? You know, once students have established a firm foundation outside of wyteness.
Who am I, as a wyte, 3uropean-descended sett!er, to teach, center, uplift, recirculate, inculcate, wyte, 3urocentric theatre? Who are we, wyte, 3ropean-descended peoples, to teach, center, uplift, recirculate, and inculcate wyteness?
At stake is the maintenance and perpetuation of carceral traditions, housed in ethically compromised institutions. We can be quite good at connecting the dots in tales of complicity, treachery, and barbarity. What happens when we flip the script on the canon c0p-in-our-heads? What opportunities does it offer me? What opportunities does it offer you?
What do we—what do our students—have to lose?
What do we—what do our students—have to gain?
(z) decentering the center: pri$on
The insistence on remembering and reiterating the canon comes at the expense of alternate languages, cultural sensibilities, stories, and people being seen and heard on their own terms as well as in relation to their entanglement with one another and with what has been centered. Canon is remembered as central and all else is forgotten.
Carcerality, too, flourishes in the invisibilization of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls "forgotten places," where dehumanizing treatment, neglect, and heightened precarity are "out of sight, out of mind."6 A corrective to this invisibilization is not to simply center forgotten places and forgotten people, by platforming, historicizing, telling and staging what we might call "forgotten stories"; it is to do so in ways that take up "precious opportunit[ies] to think in cross-cutting ways and to find both promising continuities and productive breaks in the mix of people, histories, political and economic forces, and landscapes that make up forgotten places."7 This is not a mere exercise in semiotics, opposing "remembered" and "forgotten" as "center" and "periphery"; "forgotten stories" here does not mean "not remembered by anyone"—rather, it indicates positionality within cultural hierarchies, values, and care, and the intimate intertwinement of what is elevated and what is dismissed, what we prize and what we keep out of sight, out of mind. Analysis of their material connection serves as a call to responsibility.
Forgotten places, and forgotten people, are not outside of history; they are on the same boat as everyone else, albeit in different predicaments. They are inextricably situated and relationally intertwined with places, people, and practices, at the so-called center of history. The c0p-in-my-head and the canon po!ice are not mere metaphors. Rather, the pri$on industrial complex is materially and ideologically intertwined with institutions we call our own—even the theatre in higher education—and thus, with us.
Many of us in the field invoke the highest of values in our descriptions and justifications of liberal arts and theatre studies and practice: artistic expression, diversity of ideas and representation, theatre as an art for social change. These utterances, despite our best aspirations to make them manifest, can mask embedded conservatisms, carceralities, hierarchies, and wyteness—not only in our theatre world, but also in academia and higher education. They mask our ties to the pri$on industrial complex, including the increased militarization and brutality of campus pol!ce forces;8 contracts with pri$on profiteers like Aramark;9 and pri$on-based furniture manufacturing that literally furnishes many of our classrooms.10 Then we get into foundations and endowments.11 Then we get into our institutions' origins in slavery,12 the Indigenous lands on which [End Page E-24] they sit,13 appropriation of dead bodies for experimentation and demonstration, and other abuses.14 Make no mistake: the periphery is not far away. Forgotten people and places are at the center of our institutions and thus at the center of the theatre world of higher education. What does our material situatedness and complicity in carcerality, its closeness to us, our arts, our classrooms, our livelihoods, mean for us? Who will hold us accountable if not us ourselves?
And yet to actually enter these forgotten places and connect with forgotten communities is rarely encouraged by our institutions—and sometimes actively discouraged. Counterexamples prove the general rule; I can speak to this truism from my own experience teaching "Performance Poetry" in a rural North Florida pri$on. Perhaps unsurprising to some, I caught ire from academic supervisors for even the idea that I would go do such a thing. That teaching in the pri$on might take away from my studies. Might be a distraction. That I might do this thing irresponsibly. As if staying in my lane—teaching the canon in our ethically compromised institution—is "responsible." Accepting my responsibility, as articulated from within my academic institution, would have kept forgotten people and places in the periphery, and would have missed an opportunity for coming to terms with our institutional interconnectedness with their plight, hopes, dreams, and poetry. Thank goddess I didn't let my schooling interfere with my education.
As a wyte, 3uropean-descended person, I have long resisted writing for publication about my experiences engaging with forgotten people in a forgotten place, especially since it concerns work with and about people who are intersectionally impacted by structural and interpersonal oppression. My reasonings are related to the limited circulation of academic publications and the way publications serve to generate cultural capital for (already privileged) scholars without per se benefiting the communities featured in the writing. This is a feature of forgotten places and people—that the subjugation and relegation of people and places to the status of "forgotten" can be categorized as "organized abandonment," an outcome of a system working according to its design as a result of the movement of larger social forces, labor and capital.15
With trepidation and no small sense of eating my own words—even if I do so in hopes of nourishing new and more responsible actions—I will now recount in brief my experience of teaching "Performance Poetry" at Gadsden Women's Correctional Facility while a doctoral student in theatre, including the reaction I received when I told my department faculty in a year-end review that I had been volunteer-teaching at a women's pri$on and planned to continue doing so. I share these experiences as a way to put into practice what Gilmore calls "syncretic practicality,"16 or creating space for activist agitation and change by opening up connections that cross disciplinary boundaries and institutional logics of carcerality. This application of theory can help us recognize our own intertwinement with carcerality and is a necessary step toward accountability both to those on the margins, with whom we are intertwined, and to our highest values as believers in the power of theatre to transform ourselves and our world.
I think about my experience at Gadsden Women's Correctional Facility often. If not daily, then every few days—in personal and professional contexts (intervening in that binary), in daydreams, in moments of joy, as well as in moments of difficulty. Those two years working, creating, laughing, crying, breaking bread, and creating performance poetry with people who were—and (those who are alive) who probably still are—incarcerated were transformative for me and for my pedagogy. People in that pri$on taught me more about pedagogy than I had learned in ten years of graduate school and two graduate degrees across humanities disciplines. They showed me that actually what's at stake in curricular decisions, in the embrace or the refusal of canon, is our students: their existential journeys, their senses of self-worth, their being encouraged to read, speak, and perform in their own vernacular, honoring their own identities and lineages and all the baggage they bring with them.
Going there, and learning from a forgotten people in a forgotten place, opened up the possibility for transformative encounter. We all find our way to decarceral strategy on our own time and in our own context. For me, that connection with and learning from forgotten people in forgotten places and acknowledging our intertwinement at fundamental levels became a practicable framework for undermining carcerality in our field.
While this is not the place to share all of my pri$on poetry performance story, suffice it to say that I was invited into a rural women's pri$on to clear space for elevating people's stories in a place that operated on carceral principles of silencing and of carceral practices that did not take as primary concerns the health, education, rehabilitation, or flourishing—much less the stories—of the people subjected to those rules. I realized at the start that my role was not to teach people how to write poetry or how to perform per se. Rather, my role was to support their articulation of their own intersectional identities, histories, hopes, and dreams, as women and gender nonconforming LGBTQ+ people, as people from poor and working-cla$$ backgrounds, as people from families and communities impacted by mass incarceration, as people with disabilities, as people living with severe traumas, as people currently incarcerated and living in an environment that rendered them susceptible to depravation, dehumanization, and silencing as well as verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Through centering these concerns as primary, learning objectives related to support writing and performance emerged as means to support participants. Thus, my volunteer efforts functioned to clear space for "broadly contested sensibilities—indeed feelings"17—in this case, the thoughts, feelings, stories, despair and dreams of people kept under lock and key. This constitutes what Gilmore calls "the basis for political struggle" in the sense that participants' "social identities" were freed, if only for precious moments, from overarching rules and regulations that reduced them to the category "pri$oners," and thus forgotten.18 Centering those forgotten people in this forgotten place—and academic resistance to my doing so—paints a bright line underscoring the interconnectedness of center and periphery, thus troubling the loaded binary opposition and our field's propensity to maintain it.
Centering my students in this way while still maintaining my responsibility to provide some curriculum, exercises, and scaffolding from which participants could depart, and find new strategies for articulating their voices, led me to ask: what poets, and what poetry, can model poetic narratives, strategies, and devices with which these participants could identify? The answer was simple: poets and poems that reflected, spoke to, and resonated with participants' life experiences. BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women's poetry served as entry points through which participants could feel more secure in their own ways of speaking, their own ways of writing, their own bodies, their own stories, all of which are deemed marginal and without value in institutional settings like pri$on and like the academy. We acquiesce to this binarized hierarchy when we fail to grasp the mutual constitution and close connection between them.
Would we be okay if we didn't include $hakespeare? Or Robert Frost? I wondered what was at stake in the choice to use exclusively nonnormative, nonhegemonic voices in the curriculum. And instead of finding drawbacks to my choice, assets started to emerge. Instead of "what's at stake," I began to ask, "what's at promise?" What possibilities emerge by refusing canonical hierarchies of form, language, and authority? How, and to what impact, would or could this shift be applied to teaching in the academy?
(8 to abolition to ∞)
What comes after Z? Rather than a linear progression, a complete set, or a list of check-box assurances, where X marks the spot, our Zine's "8 to Abolition" section is an invitation to beginnings, a starting point toward indeterminacy, toward infinity, inviting surprising shifts into our pathways: backward, forward, ancestral, lateral, spiral, cosmic, deeply personal, and deeply decarceral possibilities. Refusing the "responsibility" narrowly imagined by my academic institution, escaping the c0p-in-my-head, as well as its local headquarters, showed me how, beneath a veneer of separation and relative sophistication, academia is interrupted by—as much as its business-as-usual is built upon—the histories of carceral logics and practices. Yet this status quo is called into question by current realities and imagined futures, and by those who refuse and overflow the confinement of its canon, its institutional parameters and exclusivities. Refusing and operating outside of what I see as a carceral framing of responsibility showed me what I soon came to understand as my—indeed, our—liberationist and relational responsibilities to those rendered forgotten, yet who remain at the center of our classrooms, our journals' pages, our stages, and to those most impacted by cultural, political, economic, and epistemological hierarchies.
We all find our own pathways as we approach infinity, reappraising and reconstituting our practices toward a decarceral ethic of relationality. In doing this work, I find Gilmore's theoretical categories of Stretch, Resonance, and Resilience helpful. I share them because they may be helpful to you, too.
"Stretch enables a question to reach further than the immediate object, without bypassing its particularity."19 Rather than asking how we can develop the canon or expand it to incorporate some underrepresented or historically marginalized authors, I asked: What is canon? How does it function, and why is it sacrosanct? Whose needs does it serve? Who benefits? What are we missing? What alternatives are available to us? Whom might alternatives better serve? In reaching beyond the canon, I could not ignore the specificity of canon qua canon; I thus found a foundation from which to build an alternate approach. Stretching outside the canon really came to me by stretching myself out of my own institutional circumscription. What might stretch look like for you? Where might it take you?
Resonance "enables a question to support and model nonhierarchical collective action through producing a hum that, by inviting strong attention, elicits responses that do not necessarily adhere to already-existing architectures of sense-making."20 The hum of the process invited participants in my classes into a mutually constitutive process, whereby I was not a teacher-as-we-know-it, nor were they expected to be a good-student-as-we-know-it. It refused the banking model of education criticized by Paulo Freire,21 and it offered in its place an opportunity for writing and staging, authorship and performance on participants' own terms, in their own language, and to see themselves reflected and affirmed in readings, writing prompts, and community. Participants' stories were not treated as objects, but rather valued for their capacity to lift up lived experiences and support playful imagination. This hum is not the sound of a one-off approach to pri$on pedagogy. Instead, it invites us into a liberationist pedagogy writ large and offers a challenge to structures of curriculum development, assignments, evaluation, and feedback, as well as the value and purpose of the educational project, where it takes place, and for whom. With canon out of the way, this emptied center invites (actually requires) us to figure out: What ought we center? With these participants? In this context? In this place? What humming resonance might emerge for you? What sound does it make?
"Resilience enables a question to be flexible rather than brittle, such that changing circumstances and surprising discoveries keep a project connected with its purpose rather than defeated by the unexpected."22 In our performance poetry class, participant hesitance to engage in an activity, even proposals to do something entirely different, did not deflect or undermine curriculum. Rather, the students' desires for what we would do each class period, whom we would read, what assignments participants would do, and more were integrated into a collective class process, part of not separate from curricular decisions. This inspired me to bring consensus process facilitation practice from my activist-organizing training into my pedagogical practice moving forward. Resilience meant engaging in the particulars of each class, each person, to see if and how curricular choices could support their needs and their journeys instead of relying on the one-size-fits-all approach endemic to we$tern academic pedagogy (and we$tern theatre canon). It meant resisting the standard of cementing a syllabus without engaging those most directly impacted by it. The adaptability of participant-centered curricular design begs all sorts of questions about how and in what way to center student needs and journeys—but this is not an obstacle to the work. It is the work. What does flexibility and resilient questioning look like in your practice? What might a current conundrum open up for you?
Gilmore sets her analysis within an autobiographical reflection on how she came to this study, asking, "Why prisons and prisoners?"23 Like Gilmore, I did not turn to pri$ons or people who are incarcerated out of academic, or research interest. "Rather," Gilmore writes, "the issue hailed me."24 I felt the call, and I took a leap. I started facilitating and making space for performance poetry work in a rural North Florida pri$on and did so while staying the course of my PhD and professionalization in theatre studies.
Remembering what is forgotten, and finding it at the center of the apotheosized we$tern theatre canon, shines a light on me—on all of us—asking, what are we doing here? What is your call? What leaps have you taken? Where did you land? What future leap(s) might become possible for you?
In this remembering, I grow. I stretch, seek resonance, and tune in resiliently. I continue to cultivate these approaches. Even when it seems too much, cacophonous, or doomed. For me, it is the work. What is the work for you?
We can cultivate practices for finding each other in a shifting world. We can each create an intentional approach to what we take in and put out. What are the intergenerational and evolutionary ways that we become what we practice? How can we navigate oppressive environments with core practices that build community, resistance, and more loving ways of living?
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs25
Footnotes
1. adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2020).
2. This does not mean they didn't exist, but rather speaks to lack of representation and platforms in the field and in my institutional affiliations. In 2019, two years prior to our Decarcerate the University gathering, I first encountered the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed organization (PTO), and I have since become coeditor of their annual peer-reviewed, open-source journal. This organization is an abolitionist and liberationist assemblage of theatre practitioners and scholars, decidedly on the outside of academic institutions in ideology and in orientation of praxis, even though many of us find employment in academia and even host PTO conferences on college campuses. After six years of doctoral work in theatre studies, and being quite active in the field, I had never heard about this organization, or its journal—nor had I ever been invited to engage in either Pedagogy or Theatre of the Oppressed work within a theatre studies setting.
3. Deep gratitude to Leticia Ridley, Donatella Galella, and Lindsay Livingston, who initiated this theatre studies/practice abolitionist initiative under the title "Decarcerate the University"; thanks to those who have joined and/or do this work in their own ways; and thanks to those who laid the groundwork for us to think, dream, write, speak, and act against carcerality.
4. Combahee River Collective, "The Combahee River Collective Statement," in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 15.
5. brown, We Will Not Cancel Us, 33.
6. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning," in Abolition Geographies: Essays Towards Liberation, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2023), 417.
7. Ibid., 411.
8. Alex S. Vitale, "Campus Police Are among the Armed Heavies Cracking Down on Students," The Nation, May 9, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/campus-police-arresting-studentprotesters; "The Equipment 117 Colleges Have Acquired from the Dept. of Defense," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-equipment-117-colleges-haveacquired-from-the-dept-of-defense.
9. Faith Matson, "Dilemma in the Dining Hall: Aramark as FSU's Controversial New Dining Services Provider," FSU News, January 17, 2021, https://www.fsunews.com/story/news/2021/01/17/dining-hall-dilemma-fsus-controversial-new-food-service-provider/4196067001; Justin Bey, "Mississippi Prisons End Contract with Controversial Food Provider," CBS News, April 27, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-prisons-aramark-end-contract-team-roc; David Eggert, "Michigan Ends Prison Food Contract Year after Company Fined," Associated Press, July 13, 2015, https://apnews.com/michigan-ends-prison-food-contract-year-after-company-fined-9174f9282ea14bf1b550faf6ba77fbc1.
10. Lilah Burke, "Public Universities, Prison Labor," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/14/public-universities-several-states-are-requiredbuy-prison-industries.
11. Douglas Ankney, "Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign Files Suit Seeking to Sever University's Financial Ties with Prison Industrial Complex," Prison Legal News, August 1, 2020, https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2020/aug/1/harvard-prison-divestment-campaign-files-suit-seeking-severuniversitys-financial-ties-prison-industrial-complex; Kaitlyn Pohly et al., "Yale Refuses to Divest from Military Weapons Manufacturers amid Student Protests," Yale Daily News, April 17, 2024, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/04/17/yale-refuses-to-divest-from-military-weaponry-amid-student-protests.
12. Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University," in Slavery and Justice Report, with Commentary on Context and Impact, 2021, https://slaveryandjusticereport.brown.edu/sections/slavery-the-slave-trade-and-brown; "Case Study: Slavery and American Universities," U-M LSA Center for Social Solutions, July 23, 2020, https://lsa.umich.edu/social-solutions/news-events/news/inside-the-center/insights-and-solutions/case-studies/case-study--slavery-at-american-universities.html.
13. Kalen Goodluck et al., "The Land-Grant Universities Still Profiting off Indigenous Homelands," High Country News, August 18, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-the-land-grantuniversities-still-profiting-off-indigenous-homelands; Stephanie Sy and Lena I. Jackson, "Investigation Reveals How Universities Profit off Land Taken from Indigenous People," PBS News, June 18, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/investigation-reveals-how-universities-profit-off-land-takenfrom-indigenous-people.
14. Stephen Kenny, "How Black Slaves Were Routinely Sold as 'Specimens' to Ambitious White Doctors," The Conversation, June 11, 2015, https://theconversation.com/how-black-slaves-were-routinelysold-as-specimens-to-ambitious-white-doctors-43074.
15. Gilmore, "Forgotten Places," 411.
16. Ibid., 420.
17. Ibid., 412.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 421, 423.
20. Ibid., 421, 431.
21. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1968; London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 72-80.
22. Gilmore, "Forgotten Places," 421, 440.
23. Ibid., 411.
24. Ibid.
25. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2020), 43.