Burton, Orisanmi

OUR SYNOPSIS: Orisanmi Burton argues “that prisons are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation.” He demonstrates that a “Long Attica Revolt” began in the early 1970s, led to state oppression, and ultimately “gave rise to new formations of consciousness, politics, sociality, gender, and being, as well as new—which is to saw renewed—technologies of racial-colonial domination, dehumanization, and extraction.” (17) Utilizing extensive oral history interviews, he foregrounds “Black radical ways of knowing” in these stories. (26) He repeatedly identifies the message “we are one people” as the vital centerpiece of the Long Attica Revolt. Some of his most compelling analysis regard how state agents, most notably the FBI, ignored abuse of people resisting incarceration while closely surveilling their resistance. This non-documenting of violence against these people while extensively documenting their resistance is “a tactic of archival power, indeed of archival war, this active silencing attempts to weaponize history, to preserve a one-sided narrative through the eyes of the state.” (89) The method Burton employs in this book firmly resists this silencing.