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The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

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A familiar refrain in U.S. history, “leave me alone” has long been the preferred locution with which one affirms one's right to privacy. Insko's essay investigates a conceptual incoherence at the heart of the various, incompatible definitions and applications of the right to privacy in U.S. history by describing a persistent and paradoxical U.S. cultural logic: the logic of left alone. The essay argues that James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel The Pioneers contributes to an inchoate discourse of privacy rights, the contours of which continue to define present-day understandings of the relations between privacy and personhood, as inscribed by the recent Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas and the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy. Rather than tracking the curve along which U.S. notions of privacy transformed during the antebellum period and after, Insko's essay explores the extent to which the often-contradictory coordinates that delineate this curve animate modern philosophical and legal conceptions of privacy in the same ways they animate The Pioneers—a novel that presciently narrates the fraught conditions of the right to privacy in U.S. history.