Orisanmi Burton on "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression & the Long Attica Revolt"

A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.
Recorded at Red Emma's on 11/9/2023, in conversation with Stuart Schrader
Get the book: bookshop.org/a...
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.
"Orisanmi Burton takes narrative and analysis to another level. His scholarship comprehends resistance with a nuance that I have not seen delivered by most academics."-Joy James, author of In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and New Bones Abolition
"Tip of the Spear transforms our understanding of prison rebellion. In so doing, the book offers a stunning contribution to Black radical thought and abolitionist scholarship and politics. Exquisitely researched and argued, this is a must-read."-Sarah Haley, author of _No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University. As a social anthropologist, he explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with the state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment.
Stuart Schrader is an Associate Research Professor of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.