Building Power for Alternative Futures: Mapping an Entertainment Media Path Toward Abolition Democracy

Abstract

In 2020, social justice organization BLD PWR published a “Hollywood 4 Black Lives” letter calling on Hollywood to reckon with its role in state-sanctioned and white supremacist violence. BLD PWR garnered commitments from various studios and agencies to meet their demands; however, five years later, few meaningful changes have been made. We argue that this failure illustrates the need to reimagine how film and television can contribute to the Movement for Black Lives via investing in abolition. Adopting a futurist cultural studies approach, we propose abolitionist democracy storytelling as a framework for creating and evaluating entertainment media narratives that are rooted in realities without policing and prisons and developed via anti-capitalist forms and means of production.