Week 1 Introduction and Readings
Hello! My name is Jackson Ducksworth (feel free to call me Jackson or Ducksworth, both work) and I’m a first year Language Studies major at Seventh College. My main reason for taking this class is curiosity. The history of Asia as a whole has always fascinated me; as someone who has, and is continuing to learn Mandarin, I feel like it’s incredibly important to have a better formed idea of the more recent history of East Asia. I’m extremely excited to hopefully learn about some of the less talked about ethnic minorities in East Asia. In mainstream media they often get overlooked or lumped in with the ethnic majority, eliminating most of the coverage of their struggles and modern day issues. I’m not apprehensive about too much for this class, but I don’t feel incredibly confident about textual analysis. I don’t think this should be too much of a problem though. On my recent days off I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I’m currently reading a book called “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter. It looks at the concept of whiteness, the concept of a dominant race, and the concept of race in general. It’s definitely worth the read.
Gilmore describes racial capitalism as all forms of capitalism. Referring to it as simply “capitalism” fails to highlight the point that capitalism is built on, and relies on systems of inequality to sustain itself. The abolishment of capitalism and the abolishment of racism are interconnected issues and cannot be solved individually.
My understanding of abolitionist geography is that it is an idea that prisons (of which the US has an incredible amount) should have less of a footprint on our landscape. The sheer amount of prisons we have here in the US has created a system in which the people running these people feel like they need to be filled, so more and more people end up either getting arrested on petty crimes, or having their sentences increased to ensure that the prison can get it’s moneys worth. A world in which the number of prisons no longer inspires a need for more incarcerated individuals is what an abolitionist geography seeks.
