Book Reviews  541

with the titular nefarious machine and how their self-awareness helps them in their career, 
ultimately recognizing that they matter. The book wraps up with “A Critical Conversation 
about LIS Interrupted with Miranda Dube and Carrie Wade,” which presents an informal 
discussion regarding the creation of this book and their own experiences. 

Most of the chapters included a content warning at the beginning and a bibliography. The 
book as a whole includes a useful index. The authors mention that there are multiple ways the 
book may be read. For the sake of this review, I read it cover to cover. I don’t typically reread 
many books, but this one is something I will keep on my personal reference shelf. The authors 
indicate that the audience for LIS Interrupted is “library workers, educators, and students in a 
variety of environments as a text, resource, guide, and place of refuge.” This book is needed 
in the field, and libraries should consider this for their collections. 

On a personal note, it took me quite some time to finish reading LIS Interrupted, simply 
because I reread chapters discussing conditions I live with. I discovered that I am not alone. 
Neither are you.—Lizzy Walker, Wichita State University Libraries

Mariame Kaba. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. 
Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press, 2021. 240p. Paper, $16.95 (ISBN: 164259525X). 

“Prisons haven’t always existed. They came into being…”
“I don’t believe in self-care: I believe in collective care…”
“…hope is a discipline and…we have to practice it every single day.”

These three sentiments continuously repeat in my mind, over and 
over again, since reading Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us: 
Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Filled to the brim with 
thoughtful, liberating, and radical essays and interviews on the prison 
industrial complex, prison abolition, and all that lies in between, Kaba 
manages to create an accessible tome for collective abolition activism 

while never becoming reductive.
Calls to defund the police and for the abolition of the many layered carceral systems 

prevalent in the United States reached mainstream ears during the protests of the summer of 
2020. Amid national mourning over the unending disregard for black life, Kaba’s book came 
at a time, one could argue, when we need it most. Every instance of police brutality, unjust 
incarceration, and the myriad traumas that come from the White Supremacy–laden institu-
tion of policing and the justice system contributes to the messages we hear repeating on a 
loop: countless calls for “reforms” that only further bolster the prison industrial complex’s 
pockets with our money. We are told by our politicians that their “thoughts and prayers” are 
with us and that these issues are but consequences of a “few bad apples.” It becomes easy, as 
someone who wishes for change, to fall into a cycle of petition signing, social media posting, 
and, eventually, sitting in a sense of demoralization as the powers that be once again show 
us that they are wholly uninterested in the material change we deeply need.

We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a break in this cycle of demoralization. Kaba gracefully 
distills the complexity of our justice system to the most clearcut issue: harm. So much of 
how we view crime and punishment is through the lens of harming the harmer as a form of 
restitution. However, as Kaba states in her essay “Transforming Punishment: What Is Ac-



542  College & Research Libraries May 2022

countability without Punishment?” “the power dynamics that create the conditions that fuel 
sexual violence go unaddressed and are even maintained by criminal legal proceedings.” More 
than once, she reminds us that accountability cannot be forced upon those who cause harm 
to others and that our cycle of submitting people to the “physical, social, and civic death” of 
imprisonment only feeds our overcrowded prisons. 

Kaba continuously reminds us that we can look beyond our “failure of imagination” 
where it is either “prison or nothing” when speaking to folks about abolition. However, none 
of this work can be done alone. This idea is at the heart of her abolitionist message, at the heart 
of redressing harm, at the heart of caring for victims, and at the heart of activism as a whole. 
And what makes these notions of community-centered activism so powerful is Kaba’s abil-
ity to move easily between high-level histories to hands-on, feet-on-the-ground organizing, 
to personal reflections on her own role in the activist community and what she learns from 
being embedded in activist communities. 

In Kaba’s interview with Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger, she offers a beautiful 
moment of self-reflection. Kaba addresses her natural instinct to “always remind everybody 
of everything else and everybody else” and the moment of accountability it took for her to 
begin placing her name on the things she was creating. Collective action is the only way 
to change the structures of our society, and a part of collective work is acknowledging the 
work of others and the work you yourself have created. And not only to receive and share 
praise but—more importantly—to create transparent dialogue between organizers. These 
introspective moments Kaba brings to these essays and interviews ultimately make Kaba’s 
book a deeply accessible and usable reference for years to come as we collectively imagine a 
transformed and more caring world.

The timeliness and timelessness of Kaba’s subject fits the needs of librarians and other LIS 
practitioners and the positions we find ourselves in as stewards of information today. As library 
workers, we should absorb books like We Do This ’Til We Free Us not only because Mariame 
Kaba herself is pursuing a degree in Library and Information Science. The students, faculty, 
and multitude of patrons we serve are paying attention to these issues. These issues affect our 
patrons personally and materially; and, if there is anything we can learn from Kaba, it is that 
what affects one in a community touches us all. Collective community care work should be 
at the center of what LIS professionals do. As Kaba says in her writing, there is no single way 
to perform activist work. The role of those of us in the LIS profession has historically been in 
flux, but in principle, our work and our impact extend beyond the walls of our institutions. 
How we work toward freedom in our libraries follows our patrons as they embark into the 
world we share.—Shawne West, University of California, Los Angeles

Sara Ahmed. Complaint! Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 376p. $29.95 (ISBN 978-
1-4780-1771-4).

Living, as we are, in this confluence of catastrophes including climate collapse, the global 
drug poisoning crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, experience tells us that the trouble is not 
with evidence. The trouble is with power. As we hear more and more testimony and analyze 
increasing amounts of data about the impacts of racial capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, 
and connected ideologies, I find the most urgent writing of our time to be the scholarship of 
power: how it operates, where it accumulates, and why it persists. In Complaint! Sara Ahmed 
offers what she calls a “phenomenology of the institution” (19) by interrogating complaint