This book owes its existence to two events that cast the horizon of my study. Those events were two conferences: “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex,” Berkeley, CA, in 1998; and “The Color of Violence: Incite! Women of Color against Violence,” Santa Cruz, CA, in 2000. Such collective forms of thought and movement have animated and sustained this book’s writing. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, and Devon Carbado guided the first iteration of this book as my dissertation committee. Each, in the practice of teaching and mentoring, bestowed the greatest gift a student could receive: the unfettered pursuit of questions as a way of being in this world. Angela Y. Davis, in particular, as my advisor, was and is incomparable in this respect. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, David Marriott, Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, Jennifer Gonzalez, David Hoy, and Herman Gray also gifted me with this freedom. All errors and flaws in this book are my own, but if this book resonates at all, it will be because of what I learned from them while at UCLA School of Law and the Department of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Much of this book’s writing was made possible by a fellowship from Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and Culture, and the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I took to Berkeley Law School’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. I thank Kendall Thomas, Elizabeth Povinelli, Katherine Franke, Gary Okihiro, Robin D. G. Kelley, Leti Volpp, Angela Harris, and Jonathan Simon for their hospitality, encouragement, and support. I am especially grateful to Leti Volpp.