CA Prisons Ban Academic Work on Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, & Attica

Orisanmi Burton, the author of the book _Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt_, recently posted a photo of a letter to Instagram. It was sent to the publishers of his book by a prison bureaucrat, J. Cavagnolo, informing them that the book was banned from circulation in the California prison system.

Here is how Burton describes the book in the introduction:

"_Tip of the Spear_ argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. The book’s major tasks are threefold. One, I analyze what I term the _Long Attica Revolt_, a genealogy of Black radical and revolutionary struggle that emerged among New York’s captive population during the early 1970s. Two, I illuminate what I call _prison pacification_, a campaign of racist and political repression, white supremacist science, and organized violence advanced by a network of state actors variously located within penal hierarchies, police agencies, foreign theaters of war, counterinsurgency think tanks, universities, the FBI, and the CIA. Three, I examine how the protracted _collision_ of these projects gave rise to new formations of consciousness, politics, sociality, gender, and being, as well as new—which is to say _renewed_—technologies of racial-colonial domination, dehumanization, and extraction."

A PDF of the book can be downloaded from https://annas-archive.org/md5/680d4642efe1e4434b01137d1c017e95