Lee’s Radical Reading Room – New Bones: Abolition by Joy James

“This book is not for the unbroken.”

That’s the quiet warning and the radical invitation at the heart of New Bones: Abolition by Joy James.

This isn’t your surface-level abolition talk. It’s not a TED Talk. Not a social media carousel on prison facts. New Bones is for those of us who are already deep in the work, or deep in the grief—the ones who’ve lost sleep, lost people, and maybe even lost pieces of ourselves in the fight against police violence and state domination. But in that breaking, in that loss, James argues, something else becomes possible: the growing of new bones—a transformation not just of the self, but of how we fight.

In New Bones, James gives us a searing, unsparing meditation on Black radical resistance through the lens of what she names the Captive Maternal—a figure forged through legacies of colonialism, slavery, and the current carceral state. The Captive Maternal is more than a category of womanhood or a role of mothering. She (or they, or he) is a freedom fighter shaped by care, loss, and betrayal. Someone who starts as caretaker and, through stages of resistance, becomes a war resister—a necessary evolution in a world where the state wages war daily against Black life.

James does not romanticize this path. She traces it through the blood and breath of those who’ve carried it:

• Mamie Till-Mobley, who made the world witness her child’s mutilated body in a final act of defiance.

• The Attica brothers, whose rebellion in 1971 still echoes through the cages.

• Erica Garner, whose heartbreak turned into bold, brilliant political clarity.

• And countless unnamed kin, whose resistance never made the headlines but made the movement possible.

• 
  

What makes New Bones essential reading isn’t just the sharp analysis. It’s the Agape—the radical love that James identifies as the quiet pulse beneath all true resistance. Not love as sentiment, but as strategy. As survival. As something that dares to hold grief and strategy in the same hand. James honors those who organize from that place, who reject the hollow performances of progress and instead build maroon spaces—fugitive, unfinished, but deeply committed to life after cages, after states, after war.

This book is theory sharpened by tears. It’s a challenge to those of us who speak of abolition but have not yet reckoned with what it costs—or what it makes possible. As James writes, the broken don’t disappear. They become something else. They grow new bones.

So if you’re reading this and you feel tired—tired of the same headlines, the same cycles, the same half-hearted reforms—pick up New Bones.

Let it remind you of what we’re capable of, and what we’re called to.

Interested in joining a book group with Lee? Sign up here!

If you enjoy this content and would like to support our work, please consider donating to Project Say Something: https://www.projectsaysomething.org/donation-1