| Event Description:
Join us for an engaging book salon in celebration of New Mexico Highlands University Assistant Professor of American literature Jess A. Goldberg’s Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice with M. Aziz (Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington) and LaVelle Ridley (Assistant Professor of Queer/Trans* Studies in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University), moderated by Debarati Biswas (Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at NYC College of Technology, CUNY).
Goldberg’s Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing black studies, queer & feminist theory, carceral studies, and abolitionist activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, they reveal how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics. Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement. Today, Drs. Goldberg, Aziz, and Ridley will invite us to consider how the project of prison abolition necessarily must consider the questions presented by the colonial gender binary and cisheteropatriarchy as an instance of what Goldberg calls “a grammar of law.”
Bios: Speakers:
Jess A. Goldberg (they/she) is a community organizer currently working as Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Gender & Women's Studies Program at New Mexico Highlands University. They are the author of Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, which grounds disciplinary methods of close reading within conceptual frameworks of black studies, queer/trans & feminist studies, carceral studies, and abolitionist praxis. With Marquis Bey, she co-edited Queer Fire: Liberation & Abolition, a special issue of the journal GLQ, and her academic writing is published widely in journals and edited volumes, most recently including Women’s Studies, ASAP/Journal, Public Culture, Teaching Poetry Now, and Teaching Literature and Writing in Prison.
M. Aziz Dr. M. Aziz, PhD, is a writer, community member, researcher, and safety instructor. They are a scholar of movement and movements hailing from the historically Black parts of South Jersey. Aziz is currently an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Washington. A grandchild and student of the Black Power Era, they believe we need a vast toolkit to get free, from gardening to de-escalation skills to therapy. They advocate for this in their free community workshops and their public humanities project, Survival Pending TRANSformation. Aziz’s first manuscript book project asks how martial arts contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, empire, and gender norms. Their future research projects include a choreographic text on Willi Ninja and old school style voguing. In 2022, they received the V.P. Franklin Journal of African American History Award for creative and innovative research for their article, “They Punch Black.”’ Their work was also showcased in the 2017-2018 exhibit, “Black Power!, ” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, for which Aziz was a contributing writer and a curator for the sections on popular culture and blaxploitation film. Because of their groundbreaking courses like “Self-Defense and Auto-Biography” and “Martial Arts and Social Justice,” Aziz became the most junior faculty to win the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Their work has been published or featured in the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and the Smithsonian’s Podcast, Sidedoor.
LaVelle Ridley
LaVelle Ridley is Assistant Professor of Queer/Trans* Studies in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Dr. Ridley’s research and teaching interests meet at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, Black feminisms, and literary and cultural studies of racialized gender and sexuality. Through life writing, film, and media, she observes how trans women of color use imagination critically to transform the world at large. She is currently working on her first book project, tentatively titled Imagining Freedom: Critical Trans* Imagination in Black Trans Life Narratives which articulates how black trans women life writers such as Janet Mock, CeCe McDonald, and Venus Selenite engage in political freedom-making through their life narratives.
Dr. Ridley also engages in interdisciplinary collaboration in academic and community spaces, particularly around prison abolition, oral history, and understanding the cultural philosophies of queer and trans people of color. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Feminist Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the latter for which she serves as Book Reviews Editor. Dr. Ridley is also coediting the forthcoming anthology Paradise on the Margins: Worldmaking by Trans Women of Color.
Dr. Ridley is the recipient of the 2023-2024 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has received additional grants and awards for her scholarship and community-engaged work from the University of Michigan, Rackham Graduate School, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture in Harlem, and the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGI Justice Project Black Trans Cultural Center in San Francisco.
Moderator:
Debarati Biswas is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her book project tentatively titled "The Perpetually Unsettled: Aesthetics of Elsewheres and Queer Politics in Black American Literature and Culture, 1954-2018" explores the affective and embodied dimensions of blackness and queerness in carceral spaces such as the prison, inner city, and single room occupancy hotel. She is the co-editor of Unbearable Being(s), a special issue of WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. Her work also appears in venues such as Social Text, WSQ, Public Books, and Teen Vogue; as well as in the anthology, The Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. Biswas serves on the Editorial Board of WSQ and is the Board Co-Chair of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also the 2025-2026 Faculty Fellow at The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
To learn more about Jess Goldberg, M. Aziz, LaVelle Ridley, and Debarati Biswas see the following links and publications below:
Jess Goldberg:
M. Aziz:
LaVelle Ridley:
Debarati Biswas
- https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53625
- https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10959637
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/941684
- https://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-subvert-the-capitalist-white-supremacist-university/
- https://www.teenvogue.com/story/new-college-of-florida-ron-desantis
- https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/parasitical-logic-in-culture-and-society-9798765138335/
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