“A remarkable account of how prison repression and reform intertwine, one that poses fundamental dilemmas about whether our legal system can ever properly serve movements for social change. It is a book that will unsettle and enrage you. It should also become the account of Attica that every interested person reads.”—Inquest
"With Tip of the Spear, Burton hasn’t just salvaged the imprisoned Black radical tradition from the condescension of liberal posterity, but provided a singular lesson in militant intellectual method, shedding stark illumination on the counterinsurgent genealogy of prison reform (between philanthropy and psyops) while doing justice to an abolitionist horizon oriented toward maximum demands rather than piecemeal adaptations."—Verso Author Pick
"Not only is Tip of the Spear an important addition to the growing volume of literature regarding the role of prisons in the racist capitalist state that is the US, the thesis of the text represents a major evolution in the historical representation of US prisons."—The Morning Star
“This book is essential material for undergraduate and graduate courses not only in anthropology, but in a range of disciplines drawing from Black radical theory, abolition and critical prison studies, archives of war and counter-insurgency, masculinity and gender studies, geography, sociology, and the history of social movements in the United States. This is a deep work, rigorously engaging with archives that have historically been dismissed, overlooked, or repressed. It is also beautifully written, inviting us into the worldmaking of Attica.”—Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"Orisanmi Burton takes narrative and analysis to another level. His scholarship comprehends resistance with a nuance that I have not seen delivered by most academics."—Joy James, author of
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and
New Bones Abolition "
Tip of the Spear transforms our understanding of prison rebellion. In so doing, the book offers a stunning contribution to Black radical thought and abolitionist scholarship and politics. Exquisitely researched and argued, this is a must-read."—Sarah Haley, author of
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity "In this meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Burton presents one of the most dynamic accounts of Black revolutionary struggle against the prison industrial complex to date. Burton centers Black radical action as the hub of knowledge production to explain the function, implementation, and logic of the carceral apparatus over the past fifty years. Powerfully arguing against the ill-conceived notion of Black revolt as spontaneous and state violence as the happenstance of misguided policy, Burton carefully takes the reader through a rigorously developed source map to understand the breadth and depth of prisons within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a brilliant array of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical interventions,
Tip of the Spear is a must-read and is fundamental to the study of prisons and movements against prisons."—Damien Sojoyner, author of
Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums