"Envisioning the future, remembering the past": A Neo-Abolitionist Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks's Fucking A

This article explains how Suzan-Lori Parks's play Fucking A (2000) provides an exemplary model for reading the ways incarceration marks its presence in the everyday lives of people inside and outside of the prison. The play stages a tragedy in which the protagonist Hester struggles to raise enough money to visit her son after his near-lifetime sentence in prison. I categorize Fucking A as an example of neo-abolitionist drama, as it thematically and structurally exposes how the disciplinary logics that make the inside of the prison possible—including various racialized institutions and social practices—also organize the so-called "free" world.