Tip of the Spear - Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.

Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons--not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

List of contents

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction 

PART ONE. THE LONG ATTICA REVOLT 

1. Sharpening the Spear
Strategies and Tactics of Revolutionary Action 

2. Black Solidarity Under Siege
Three Terrains of Protracted Rebellion 

3. Attica Is
Revolutionary Consciousness and Abolitionist Worldmaking 

PART TWO. PRISON PACIFICATION 

4. Gender War
Sexual Revenge and White Masculine Repair 

5. Hidden War
Four Strategies of Reformist Counterinsurgency

6. The War on Black Revolutionary Minds
Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation 

Epilogue 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

About the author

Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University.

Product details

• Authors: Orisanmi Burton
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.10.2023
• EAN: 9780520396326
• ISBN: 978-0-520-39632-6
• No. of pages: 328
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Ethnic Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, Society & culture: general, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global), 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations, HISTORY / African American & Black, Relating to African American / Black American people