Orisanmi Burton

As a social anthropologist working in the United States, my research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression. Within this broad area of inquiry, my present work explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment. I analyze the productivity of this collision; how it gives rise to new formations of knowledge, subjectivity, intimacy, gender, organization, and statecraft across time and space. I ask: how do Black radical demands generated within and against US prisons presage alternative futures for people and places on both sides of prison walls? In what ways have state-organized responses to these demands - via diverse configurations of repression, reform, and incorporation – been key drivers of US historical development and state formation? Through what bureaucratic, ideological, and material processes is this dynamic political struggle transformed into an administrative problem of “criminal justice”? How can conceptualizing the US prison as a domain of war open new analytical, theoretical, and methodological terrain? My first book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published in October 2023 by The University of California Press.