ABSTRACT
The pursuit of abolition, from slavery to prisons, has been an intensely visual effort. Abolition movements, historically and now, are inseparable from what critical visual and carceral criminologists name as the role of the countervisual in the dismantling of the carceral state. Countervisual practices attempt to expose and interrupt ideological sutures that sustain police, prisons, and the carceral state: for instance, the racializing of criminality, the prison as economic solution, the police as safety, law as equal, criminal justice as progressive. These tactics seek to interrupt authoritative ways of seeing and ordering the carceral world long enough to envision new worlds and ways of being through a distinctive political imagination that prefigures emancipatory spaces. In this chapter, I highlight the expansive work of reimagining justice that abolitionists are doing in new visual and media environments by analyzing the work those images and imaginings perform.
