Alison Rose Reed
Dr. Alison Rose Reed is a writer, editor, educator, and former academic. In 2024, after experiencing whistleblower retaliation for two years, she resigned from her tenured position as Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University in protest of the department's gross mishandling of cases of sexual violence. Given the mistreatment of survivors, she has since named her editing business after the fire rose, a symbol of solidarity against the public shaming and victim blaming endemic to an institutional culture of racialized misogyny.
Reed's scholarly essays on performance, identity, power, and social movements have appeared in GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES; FRONTIERS: A JOURNAL OF WOMEN STUDIES; PRISON PEDAGOGIES: LEARNING AND TEACHING WITH IMPRISONED WRITERS (Syracuse, 2018); ABOLITION: A JOURNAL OF INSURGENT POLITICS; NO TEA, NO SHADE: NEW WRITINGS IN BLACK QUEER STUDIES (Duke, 2016); LATERAL: THE JOURNAL OF THE CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION; TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY; WOMEN & PERFORMANCE, and other academic journals and edited collections. Her poetry has appeared most recently in SCREEN DOOR REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, HOT METAL BRIDGE, CUTBANK, and OCHO: A JOURNAL OF QUEER ARTS.
With Felice Blake and Paula Ioanide, Reed co-edited ANTIRACISM INC.: WHY THE WAY WE TALK ABOUT RACIAL JUSTICE MATTERS (Punctum Books, 2019). Reed is also the author of LOVE AND ABOLITION: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF BLACK QUEER PERFORMANCE (Ohio State University Press, 2022), which offers a brief history of love in the Black Radical Tradition. Since carceral thinking shapes everyday psychic and social life, the book argues for a capacious redefinition of prison literature in an age of mass incarceration. Centering Black creative insurgency, what Reed describes as “abolition literature” resists fetishizing the prison as such and studies how artists and activists seek to reconstitute social practices of addressing harm on their own terms. The book therefore identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle constitutively harmful systems.
In Virginia, Reed co-founded Humanities Behind Bars, an abolitionist network of radical group-based study and mutual aid. She recently returned to California, where she got her start organizing against prison expansion projects while a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara.
Reed's scholarly essays on performance, identity, power, and social movements have appeared in GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES; FRONTIERS: A JOURNAL OF WOMEN STUDIES; PRISON PEDAGOGIES: LEARNING AND TEACHING WITH IMPRISONED WRITERS (Syracuse, 2018); ABOLITION: A JOURNAL OF INSURGENT POLITICS; NO TEA, NO SHADE: NEW WRITINGS IN BLACK QUEER STUDIES (Duke, 2016); LATERAL: THE JOURNAL OF THE CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION; TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY; WOMEN & PERFORMANCE, and other academic journals and edited collections. Her poetry has appeared most recently in SCREEN DOOR REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, HOT METAL BRIDGE, CUTBANK, and OCHO: A JOURNAL OF QUEER ARTS.
With Felice Blake and Paula Ioanide, Reed co-edited ANTIRACISM INC.: WHY THE WAY WE TALK ABOUT RACIAL JUSTICE MATTERS (Punctum Books, 2019). Reed is also the author of LOVE AND ABOLITION: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF BLACK QUEER PERFORMANCE (Ohio State University Press, 2022), which offers a brief history of love in the Black Radical Tradition. Since carceral thinking shapes everyday psychic and social life, the book argues for a capacious redefinition of prison literature in an age of mass incarceration. Centering Black creative insurgency, what Reed describes as “abolition literature” resists fetishizing the prison as such and studies how artists and activists seek to reconstitute social practices of addressing harm on their own terms. The book therefore identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle constitutively harmful systems.
In Virginia, Reed co-founded Humanities Behind Bars, an abolitionist network of radical group-based study and mutual aid. She recently returned to California, where she got her start organizing against prison expansion projects while a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara.
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Books by Alison Rose Reed
While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism.
Antiracism Inc. considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The critical essays, interviews, and poetry collected here focus on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, they focus on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who also work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. Further, these aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as through elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles.
Papers by Alison Rose Reed
Understanding the inextricability of performance capture from surveillance technologies helps unpack the film on which I want to focus here: Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi novel A SCANNER DARKLY. But first I look to the cultural implications of cutting-edge technologies of performance in everything from Quantic Dream’s video game demos to Hollywood blockbusters such as James Cameron’s AVATAR (2009), which are simultaneously obsessed with the alternative and fantastical realities technology enables and thoroughly racialized and gendered preoccupations with the “photoreal.” This article ultimately interrogates the ways in which technologies of performance often assume white mobility and raced immobility. My point is not to make a conservative condemnation of technology but rather to reemphasize the material in a field of inquiry often obsessed with moving beyond the limitations of the body.
Batiste’s meditation moved seamlessly between abstract and literal spaces, including the stage’s minimalistic set, the theater aisles through which the frenetic movement of UCSB student krumpers circulated, and a screen upstage that reflected a spatio-emotional topography of words and images. The projections were at times layered onto her own linen-clad body. Interspersed with slides of obituaries were blurred photographs of LA street signs and corners, which charted the paths traversed by those mourning so many deaths. City intersections conjured the faces featured on funeral programs, transposing the duality of flesh and of spirit across a vulnerable human geography, the (meta)physical crossings of those dead and those living.
Book Reviews by Alison Rose Reed
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s _Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation_, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, demonstrates with astonishing precision the material and ideological terrain on which the prison-industrial complex (PIC) confines possibilities for social life. The PIC, as Gilmore makes clear, is a geographical solution to social, economic, and political problems. Refusing oversimplified sound bites that pulse through each news cycle, her work lays out in no uncertain terms how the PIC is born of “surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity that have accumulated from a series of overlapping and interlocking crises stretched across three decades,” including, significantly, counterrevolution against the radical decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, Gilmore refutes ahistorical narratives of the PIC that distract from the ongoing work of organizers who have been actively challenging the supposed inevitability of human caging for well over half a century—long before the word “abolition” gained mainstream traction... Gilmore, working in the Black Radical Tradition of abolition, seeks to denaturalize the carceral logics that portray the PIC as a permanent fixture of our social landscape. Despite some key distinctions in scope and strategy, the animating spirit of this contemporary movement finds parallels in the abolition of chattel slavery, an institution that, at the time, was considered a given in the natural order of things. Today’s system of policing and punishment is also widely viewed as indelible, but, like slavery, it had to be built, legitimized, and reinforced to maintain its status as such. _Abolition Geography_ challenges the inexorability of cops and cages, just as activists historically worked to uproot presumptions of slavery’s permanence.
While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism.
Antiracism Inc. considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The critical essays, interviews, and poetry collected here focus on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, they focus on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who also work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. Further, these aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as through elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles.
Understanding the inextricability of performance capture from surveillance technologies helps unpack the film on which I want to focus here: Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi novel A SCANNER DARKLY. But first I look to the cultural implications of cutting-edge technologies of performance in everything from Quantic Dream’s video game demos to Hollywood blockbusters such as James Cameron’s AVATAR (2009), which are simultaneously obsessed with the alternative and fantastical realities technology enables and thoroughly racialized and gendered preoccupations with the “photoreal.” This article ultimately interrogates the ways in which technologies of performance often assume white mobility and raced immobility. My point is not to make a conservative condemnation of technology but rather to reemphasize the material in a field of inquiry often obsessed with moving beyond the limitations of the body.
Batiste’s meditation moved seamlessly between abstract and literal spaces, including the stage’s minimalistic set, the theater aisles through which the frenetic movement of UCSB student krumpers circulated, and a screen upstage that reflected a spatio-emotional topography of words and images. The projections were at times layered onto her own linen-clad body. Interspersed with slides of obituaries were blurred photographs of LA street signs and corners, which charted the paths traversed by those mourning so many deaths. City intersections conjured the faces featured on funeral programs, transposing the duality of flesh and of spirit across a vulnerable human geography, the (meta)physical crossings of those dead and those living.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s _Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation_, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, demonstrates with astonishing precision the material and ideological terrain on which the prison-industrial complex (PIC) confines possibilities for social life. The PIC, as Gilmore makes clear, is a geographical solution to social, economic, and political problems. Refusing oversimplified sound bites that pulse through each news cycle, her work lays out in no uncertain terms how the PIC is born of “surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity that have accumulated from a series of overlapping and interlocking crises stretched across three decades,” including, significantly, counterrevolution against the radical decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, Gilmore refutes ahistorical narratives of the PIC that distract from the ongoing work of organizers who have been actively challenging the supposed inevitability of human caging for well over half a century—long before the word “abolition” gained mainstream traction... Gilmore, working in the Black Radical Tradition of abolition, seeks to denaturalize the carceral logics that portray the PIC as a permanent fixture of our social landscape. Despite some key distinctions in scope and strategy, the animating spirit of this contemporary movement finds parallels in the abolition of chattel slavery, an institution that, at the time, was considered a given in the natural order of things. Today’s system of policing and punishment is also widely viewed as indelible, but, like slavery, it had to be built, legitimized, and reinforced to maintain its status as such. _Abolition Geography_ challenges the inexorability of cops and cages, just as activists historically worked to uproot presumptions of slavery’s permanence.