ASSATA SHAKUR AND THE COUNTERINSURGENCY OF LAW: MARRONAGE AND REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE

Abstract

This article argues that the prosecution and imprisonment of Assata Shakur illuminate how U.S. law operates as a form of counterinsurgency against Black political struggle. Drawing on Shakur’s autobiography, open letters, interviews, and trial record, the article shows how the courtroom, pretrial detention, and evidentiary spectacle functioned not merely as legal procedures but as mechanisms that criminalized dissent and rendered Black survival prosecutable. The article engages legal scholarship by interrogating law’s role in organizing racial domination. Through Shakur’s experiences of surveillance, incarceration, fugitivity, and exile, the article traces forms of political life that emerge beyond the state’s police–court–prison nexus. It situates the plantation, prison, and nation-state as elements of a legal architecture of control and reads Shakur’s practice of marronage—her flight, refuge, and continued political work—as an alternative ordering of safety grounded in relation rather than punishment. Attending to Shakur’s writings, speeches, and political praxis, the article positions her not simply as a subject of legal repression but as a theorist of law, carceral power, and abolition.