Objective: This article argues that a better understanding of the history and reception of W. E. B. Du Bois's abolition democracy helps elucidate contemporary debates by abolitionists about how to engage with the state. Methods: Through a close reading of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction I show how contemporary focus on abolition as abolishing the carceral state and building alternatives elides viewing abolition democracy as an engagement with and challenge to state power. Results: Viewing abolition democracy from this longer history allows scholars today to view debates among abolitionists themselves as a conflict between transforming how the state work and carving out autonomous spaces of freedom away from the state. Conclusion: By recognizing the confliced history between DuBois's use of abolition democracy and its invocation by contemporary activists, I show how abolition itself is a fundamentally contested concept deployed for multiple political discourses and struggles.Abolition politics has become increasingly popular in recent decades as an explicit response to the post-Civil Rights Era growth of mass incarceration. Often explicitly focused on the abolition of prisons, police abolition rarely received much attention within mainstream discourse. However, the 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department and subsequent burning down of a police district building catapulted police abolition into the mainstream like never before. Suddenly news and opinion outlets were debating the merits of defunding police departments, moving money into community development, and even whether defunding itself is a suitably radical goal. Apart from these discussions of the tactics and strategy of police abolition, the goal of police abolition may be encapsulated in one form as an abolition democracy. Used today to name the ideal of a democracy free of police and prisons, W. E. B. Du Bois first coined the term in his monumental Black Reconstruction to analytically describe the incipient social formation in the Reconstruction South of Black freedmen working together with white laborers to establish a truly egalitarian democracy across race and class (Du Bois, 1998) . While abolition democracy is oftenThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

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