Joy James’s New Bones approaches abolition with velocity.

She writes to show that the dismantling the racialised structures that shape bodies, care, violence, and governance is not negotiable. James situates abolition across medical, political, and social terrains — from the clinic to the clinic of the state — insisting that critiques of punishment must attend as rigorously to the violences embedded in health, disability, and epistemic hierarchies. Her prose moves between theory and praxis, pulling biopolitics into the orbit of Black feminist critique without reducing either to jargon or platitude.

This is a politically insistent, structurally incisive text that dialogues with Black studies, disability studies, and abolitionist praxis. It resists easy reconciliation, instead offering a vocabulary for thinking about freedom as constitutive rather than residual — a book as much about what abolition reframes as what it dismantles.