Apr 29, 2023
In this episode we welcome Damien Sojoyner to the podcast.
Damien M. Sojoyner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of First Strike: Prison and Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles and Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums.
For this episode we invite Dr. Sojoyner to the podcast to discuss his latest work Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice which offers a distillation of critical, theoretical, and Black organizing and activist work over the past three decades. Working from collections at the Southern California Library the book examines the study and practice of the LA chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Coalition Against Police Abuse, Urban Policy Research Institute, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods.
We ask Sojoyner about how he thinks about carcerality and the archive in relation to domestic warfare, and discuss the collections and documents he examines in the book and what they reveal about the practices of organizations grounded in the struggle for Black Liberation in Los Angeles.
Against the Carceral Archive is a great text to come to grips with the level of rigorous study, analysis and dedication that are required for effective organizing agains t the forces of racial capitalism and the imperialist state.
Thank you to Dr. Sojoyner for this book and for joining us for this conversation. We’ll include links to the Southern California Library which provided collections for Sojoyner’s research here and continues to be an amazing resource for people in struggle in Los Angeles.
And if you appreciate the work that we do, we strongly encourage you to become a patron of the show, you can so for as little as $1 a month & all of your support adds up to make this show - and our own study groups - possible on a weekly basis.
Links:
Pick-up a copy of Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice