Prison abolition is an ongoing process of remaking the world—a necessarily imaginative endeavor. I propose that the Black feminist literary imagination is ripe for this work because it fruitfully engages the contradiction between historical anti-prison and anti-violence organizing. Through a reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), I outline the world-making capacities of what I call the Black feminist abolitionist novel—a genre capable of (1) imagining racial domination and sexual violation in the same story, and (2) resisting incarceration as the logical response to such harms. Decentering the literal prison and centering Black girls, Morrison’s novel expands the sites and subjects for prison abolitionist engagement. The Bluest Eye challenges us to enact a prison abolitionism that cannot write gender violence out of its scope.

Gabriella Isabelle Johnson's research and teaching focuses on African American literature, Black feminist criticisms, and abolitionist theories. Her book project reads canonical twentieth-century novels by African American women as works of confinement literature to elucidate their contributions to the prison abolitionist imagination.