We’re excited to welcome Orisanmi Burton, Damon Locks, and Maryan Kashani to the store for a discussion of Dr. Burton’s new book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.

This event is cohosted with the UIC Department of Anthropology, UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, and the UIC Social Justice Initiative.

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 is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research employs ethnographic and archival methods to examine historical collisions between Black radical organizations and state repression in the United States. Dr. Burton’s work has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, Radical History Review, American Anthropologist, among other outlets and has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and The Margarite Casey Foundation, which selected him as a 2021 Freedom Scholar. Dr. Burton’s first book, entitled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published by the University of California Press on October 31, 2023.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He spent 4 years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He currently teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.

Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking conducted with Muslim communities in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.

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Tags: Chicago, Damon Locks, Lower West Side, Maryan Kashani, Orisanmi Burton, Pilsen Community Books, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt with Orisanmi Burton Damon Locks and Maryan Kashani