Angela Davis on a New Kind of Universality

Activist scholar Angela Davis’s lifelong commitment to abolitionist struggle against the continuity of the slave system in its modern form, the prison industrial complex, reveals contradictions in liberal democratic notions of equality and reorients the discourse toward what is possible. Moreover, her concept of liberation pursues a very different kind of universality—one that sees no indignity as righteous; instead, it must be global. In the face of notions of the global born from universalist abstractions by white, masculinist, carceral, individualist thought removed from the real terrain of struggle, Davis pursues an embodied, relational politics of difference that aims to achieve symbiosis with the liberatory struggles of all dominated and oppressed beings. The universalism pursued is one that joins arms with carceral, colonial feminised, racialized, poor and working class subjects to form a relational politics of difference.