Abolish

Abolitionism starts from the belief that a particular arrangement (social, economic, material, institutional) is broken to the point it can no longer be salvaged. While the recent decades have seen a burst in abolitionist forms of study and practice, giving rise to energetic intellectual movements and street politics, cultural geographers have appeared more hesitant. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it diagnoses the subdisciplinary reluctance to embrace the abolitionist invitation, pointing in particular to the popularisation of a relational metaphysics and of an ethics of world-making. Second, the chapter offers a call for abolitions: of the myth of realism, of the bias towards world-building, of the conflation of emancipation with positive feeling, and of the urge towards concessions. Pursuing such endings, cultural geographers may find tools to critically engage, and if needed to explicitly confront, reformist investments in what ultimately harm us.