Imagining Freedom: Criminalization, Visuality, and the Circulation of Abolitionist Art Messages

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has relied on narratives of criminalization to manage migrant populations, thus leading to the normalization of exclusionary and deadly acts directed against migrant bodies. The consequences of this approach have included expanding racialized and gendered surveillance, detention, and dispossession. These pressures have also generated the urgency for proposing alternatives and feminist aesthetic techniques of imagination to disrupt the current carceral reality, under the term “abolition.” My dissertation, titled Imagining Freedom: Criminalization, Visuality, and the Circulation of Abolitionist Art Messages, focuses on the collective need to abolish the criminalization of migration. Abolition seeks to end criminalization and the use of the prison system as the primary means to address social, political, and economic issues. This dissertation contributes to broadening the abolitionist feminist scholarship and visual theory that champions the abolition of migrant criminalization. Through close-reading together with textual analysis and critical visual analysis I contribute to a contemporary body of research that advocates for abolition feminism in all fields. The archive featured in this dissertation project focuses on the cultural work of contemporary artists and organizers including Melanie Cervantes, #DefendTheCriminalized Collective, Alejandra Pablos (#KeepAleFree Deportation Defense Team), Culture Str/ke's (known now as Center for Cultural Power) Visions from the Inside (2015-2016), and In Plain Sight (2020). My work, Imagining Freedom is guided by the following research questions: What are abolitionist art messages? How are these artistic messages used by artists and organizers in their cultural work? To what degree does social media drive how these artistic messages circulate on and off-line? Which elements of color, space, and text are deployed and to what ends? To explore these questions, this dissertation defines abolitionist art messages as visual and textual practices in artwork/cultural work that use multi-modality to inspire the vision of futures without policing and incarceration. Focusing on a variety of cultural texts—digital posters, screen-prints, photographs, fashion, videos, skytyping, social media posts—my project aims to create an understanding of how these cultural productions effectively circulate across multiple digital platforms as part of their abolitionist messages. I provide academic, historical, legal, and popular context for understanding the role of artist-audience collaboration and why it is so urgent in the re-sharing and re-telling of abolitionist knowledge. Through my exploration of abolitionist art messages, Imagining Freedom argues that art and cultural work make visible futures that do not rely on criminalizing migrants.