Methods of Carceral War: A Lecture by Dr. Orisanmi Burton

Join us for an exciting public conversation with author Orisanmi Burton as he discusses his most recent book, “Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt”.

Tip of the Spear (University of California Press, 2023) 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.

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 received his B.A. in interdisciplinary social inquiry from Hampshire College, a master’s in library and information science from Long Island University, and a Ph. D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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.