ANGELA DAVIS
Women and Gender Studies – Angela Davis
As Professor Emerita at the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, Dr. Angela Davis' appointment to the UC Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies places her as one of the foremost experts in this field. Davis' theory advocating the abolition of American prisons arises from her decades, stance as a member of the American Communist Party aligned with women, racial, and prisoners' rights. As a feminist thinker, according to Mendieta, Davis' views provide "some of the most transformative and enduring texts of the last quarter of a century." At the same time, during the last four decades, Davis' standing as one of America's "most original philosophers" incorporates "Marxist inspired historical materialism" through the facilitation "of Marcusian critical theory." Davis' standing these past four decades as a political-intellectual underpin the substance of her published writings expanding both political theory and social thought with much drawn from her first hand experiences as an African American growing up in the Jim Crow South and a vanguard of the social movement of the 1960s and 1970s across the nation. Themes framing her political and social theories for change in America draw on contextualized social conditions she experienced and understands as "bound by repression and resistance, reflecting the collective desire and demand for freedom" as marginalized by race and gender. Her joining the American Communist Party reflects her rejection of the Black nationalist-centered movement as already a failure. It is her ongoing advocacy today, for the abolition of the American prison because of the racial based criminal justice system she views as fundamental. Her founding member status of the national organization called Critical Resistance continues reveals her ongoing dedication to demolishing the prison industrial complex.
References
Davis, Angela. Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz. Angela Davis, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz.http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=aydavis 2012
Davis, Angela and Joy James. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/7073/Introduction%20to%20the%20Angela%20Y.%20Davis%20Reader.pdf?sequence=5 1998 21
Eduardo Mendieta, "Prisons, Torture, Race: On Angela Y. Davis's Abolitionism," Philosophy Today 50 (2006), 176
