Jess A. Goldberg, "Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
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Beautiful, isn't it? But you can't discover the coolest city in the world just by listening. Check Istanbul.goturkiye.com now and plan your Istanbul trip today. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Deneen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Jess A. Goldberg about their new book, Abolition Time, Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, which just came out from the University of Minnesota Press this past December the 10th.

Jess is an assistant professor of American literature and co-director of gender and women's studies at New Mexico Highlands University, as well as co-editor of Queer Fire, Liberation, and Abolition, a special issue of GLQ. Their book, Abolition Time, is an invitation to think about how literary study might make abolition imaginable in our current world of carceral and anti-Black violence. Welcome, Jess, and thank you so much for being here.

It's so lovely to be here. Thank you so much for this opportunity to chat, Kendall. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Doesn't matter. So to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about how you came to the project or the question of the book? Yeah. So this is in that kind of classic first book way. It's like it's the dissertation turned into a book.

And I came to my dissertation topic as someone who was interested in thinking about social justice and in thinking about the ways that justice and law are different and the ways that African-American literature has historically approached the question of justice in ways that exceed law's capacity to bring it.

Um, along my time in graduate school, that became inflected through my experiences, um, both teaching in prisons and working with grassroots prison abolitionist, um, campaigns. So in graduate school, I both taught in the Cornell Prison Education Program and I was part of a, um, a grassroots group called Decarcerate Tompkins County. We were trying to get, we were basically trying to stop a jail expansion, which we did, um,

But so I was kind of thinking a lot about law and literature and race and all these kinds of things as I was doing this work with the prison – I'm going to say with the prison industrial complex, right? Like when you teach in prisons, we like to think of that as like kind of this –

aggressive, liberatory work, but when you're teaching in a prison through a prison education program, you are reinforcing the logics of carcerality and the links between higher ed and- anyway. So this is all to say that, like, I was thinking a lot about these things while doing work beyond just writing a dissertation, and so I came to abolition as the thing I wanted to write about, and then what finally grounded me in how is this going to be a literary studies project,

was my obsession with the Zong Massacre. So, um, throughout the book, all four chapters of the book, um, return to the, uh, this, this late 18th century, um, uh,

massacre aboard a slave ship called the Zong, which is a story that I'm sure a lot of listeners who are familiar with Black Studies work kind of probably already know. But I first came across M. Narbese Phillips' book Zong, which is a book of poetry that goes to the legal archive, finds this court case where the insurers of a slave ship sued, right? So that way they wouldn't have to pay

pay the money that was the value of the enslaved people who were thrown overboard. And there's this legal battle. And in this legal battle, the question of murder never comes up. The legal question is about property. And so I was kind of intellectually obsessed with this legal archive of murder that can't say murder. And so the Zong Massacre became this

this disturbing and horrific grounding motif of a project, right? So, so I went from having these ideas about law and justice and the carceral system, and it became really grounded in this really vivid historical example. Um, uh,

That first I saw in Ebenezer Phillips' book Zong, but then I was thinking about it with the way that Turner's The Slaveship painting appears in Claudia Rankine's Citizen with this poem Turner by David Dabedin that I talk about in chapter four. And so these legal questions of the contemporary prison abolitionist movement for me became grounded in these literary returns to this

to representations of this late 18th century culture

massacre on board a slave ship. And so that became the dissertation, which then eventually over years gets completely revised into the book, which is both clearly a revision of the dissertation, but also a complete rewrite. So I'll end my answer by saying that for any graduate students listening, yes, the first book is sometimes your dissertation. My book project writes about all of the same literary texts as the dissertation,

but it's completely rewritten. So it's almost like a different thing to me. So anyway, that's, yeah, that's a little bit about how the project evolved. As somebody who just finished drafting their dissertation, I'm like very excited for the idea to get to sort of redo. So thank you. So I think this is important. Can we get your definition, like how you're defining and using the term abolition since it's obviously so central to our conversation today? Yeah, and I appreciate this question because...

So first, to just answer before I say why I appreciate your question, abolition is nothing less than the complete and total undoing of all of the interlocking hierarchical systems that create the possibility for carcerality, for a world that could have prisons, for a world governed by the logic of penal retributive justice.

Right. So abolition to me is always simultaneously an undoing or a raising and a building. Those two things have to happen simultaneously. And I think that there are sometimes different versions of talking about abolition that emphasize one over the other. There are versions of talking about abolition that emphasize the destruction part of it. And there are.

discussions of abolition that emphasize the building part of it. I think for me, it's always very important to say they are both equally meaningful. I don't like the move of only talking about destruction because if you only destroy the prison system and you only destroy capitalism without thinking about what you have to build to sustain, you wind up leaving people to die in the process, right? So this is the example of this would be abolitionist organizations or groups. And this is kind of a caricaturization because

Most abolitionist organizations won't do this, but maybe newcomers to the movement who are only thinking about the urgency of destruction might think about, we need to tear down prisons, and every single suggestion of a reform gets thrown out because it isn't about justice.

destruction when we always have to be thinking about as we destroy the prison system, which literally means closing down prisons, closing down, defunding and disarming and closing down and abolishing the police, right? Like...

It literally means like concrete material work, right? That we also have to be thinking about, well, people are in prison right now and need to have their lives sustained, right? How can we make life livable for people who are in prisons right now before we tear all the prisons down? On the other hand, I also don't like this other –

arm of discussion about abolition where we just, we pretend that the destruction is this thing we don't want to talk about because it's like, it sounds bad and it's mean and it's like, I don't know, it's like negative. So we just talk about like the joy of abolition and like how it feels so good to like be accountable to each other and the hard personal work of like being there with each other. And I love all that, but like also we got to shut down some effing prisons, right? Like we got to actually like, like burning cop cars is as much a part of abolition as community gardens is.

Right. And so for me, abolition is simultaneously the kind of forceful destruction of the carceral world and the loving cultivation of alternative visions of relationality that allow us to sustain life. Right. Ruth Wilson Gilmore always uses the phrase where life is precious. Life is precious. Right. And that takes both of those. So for me, abolition must be both of those things simultaneously with equal emphasis. Right.

And so that's really important, and the reason why I appreciate you forefronting that question is because the central ethos of Abolition Time as a book is its constant self-awareness of what it can't do. And I'm going to return to this throughout our discussion, I think, so I won't get super into it now, but I want to say from the start, Abolition Time unapologetically says the goal of this book cannot be accomplished by this book.

Like, what I want, like, what does Jess Goldberg want in the world? Jess Goldberg wants abolition. But a book written by an academic and published by a university press cannot actually do abolition, right? Like, abolition will not come from the university. Academics will not abolish anything, right? Abolition is an on-the-ground movement that has to exceed abolition.

The colonial space that is the academy and so abolition time is very self conscious throughout it in its text and i'm sure we'll talk about this of saying like these are the limits of what literary criticism can do. Right, like very much i'm about narrowing the focus like all i'm really trying to do an abolition time is offer folks like.

here's how that big, huge project that is abolition, which is a complete undoing and remaking of the entire world as we know it, as it has been constructed by Western colonial capitalism and all of its attendant structures of cis-heteropatriarchy and ableism and white supremacy, right? If it's all of that, all I want to do in Abolition Time is narrow the focus and say, when we're talking about art and literature, there are ways we can look for the unruliness, right?

in not only but sometimes often, quote unquote, minoritized aesthetic traditions that allow us to kind of open our imaginations to thinking about justice in ways that received scripts disallow. And so it's an exercise in thinking toward justice

what would it mean to completely rework our epistemologies and our imaginations, right? Which is only one very narrow part of the abolition project. So Abolition Time's greatest, deepest desire exceeds its ability to achieve it. And so Abolition Time as a book is narrowing that desire to say, what can we do in the realm of thinking and imagining, right? And how can literary criticism or art criticism more generally for those who want to take what I do and

and do it much more brilliantly in other ways than I can with other art objects, do that. So, yeah. Wonderful. Thank you. So I want to talk a little bit about some other really important terms in the book. So if we can discuss...

You know, your introduction, you open with Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, and you're describing what you term the grammars of law and the poetics of justice, which obviously these are in the title, right? So we got to talk about them. We got to define them. So can you talk a little bit about how you're using Beloved to...

to sort of examine these terms for the reader. I would love to do that. And I'm going to do a thing that I know doesn't happen in a lot of New Books Network's interviews. And I'm going to ask you to indulge me. This is the only time I'm going to do this, this whole conversation. I want to read the first sentence of the book in the introduction. As a writer, this is probably my favorite sentence in the book. And I just want to read it aloud and then kind of elaborate on it as why Beloved opens

So the first sentence of Abolition Time in the introduction is, The ghost or the zombie or the reincarnation or the specter or the avatar of the single dead child who crawls up out of the water and walks to 124 Bluestone Road is neither singular subject nor composite figure, neither revived flesh nor dead corpse.

neither recoverable nor dismissible, but in her series of ontological negations, she enacts an ethical force that precedes the social contract and ruptures the grammar of the law with a clear and distinct call for justice. It is abolition time.

um and i open with that because what beloved does for me and my thinking is um like a million things right beloved is this this text that is a key for so many so many ways of thinking right um it's been well written about there's not much new to say it's for some of us right right but um what it does for me is that figure the actual ghost right this beloved book this beloved the ghost

Beloved, the ghost or the specter or the zombie, right, or all these different ways you might call it, unsettles. Like, Beloved, the character, never solidifies and settles into a singularity that you can point to, right? Beloved exists both on the slave ship and in 19th century Ohio, right? Beloved says to Sethe, I am you, right? She is both herself and her mother, right? She's not bound in singularity.

And so Beloved for me is immediately a figure of this unruliness. And so what that has to do with grammars of law, products of justice is this. For me, grammars of law is a phrase that I use to designate the way that received and enforced logics of juridical conceptions of justice, what I would call

An event bound conception of justice, right? The title of the introduction is justice is not an event. And what I mean by that is a kind of legal or juridical conception of justice says there is a moment that you can see where harm happens after that moment is over. Justice is an event that happens in response to that moment in this kind of very linear, periodized, logical way.

And to me, that just screams a kind of ordering force, right? That law puts things in order. And again, I'm indebted to, not indebted, I don't want to use the language of debt. I am thankful and grateful to M. Darbese Philip, whose book Zong tells us that grammar is a colonial force of order, right? It is law, grammar is the ordering force of language.

And so grammars of law refers to the strands of epistemology that are inherited through law, through juridical conception of justice, that put the world in order, right? O-R-D-E-R, right? Sentences begin with capital letters and end with periods, right? There's no other way to use language. What I do in the introduction is I look at Shelby County, um...

the holder, which is the 2013 Supreme Court case about the Voting Rights Act. And I read a Supreme Court case as a kind of inscription of grammars of law that says, we fixed voting discrimination, and so now we have justice, right? This kind of very linear way. That's super quick and surface level, and folks can get the more subtle reading in the actual book, but that's the super quick way. Beloved, though, the character in her unruliness gestures towards what I call poetics of justice.

Poetics of justice are these moments in aesthetic production. And because I'm a literary critic, I'm looking specifically at language and literature.

where aesthetics do things that undo order and ask us to think in disorderly ways, which opens up new conceptions of justice. And the classic example of this in the book Beloved is the one chapter where Beloved, the character, gets to be the narrator. And in the chapter, everyone who's read Beloved knows what I'm talking about. If you haven't, go read Beloved. It's the best novel ever. Um,

In fact, stop listening to this podcast, go read Beloved, then come back. But there's the one and only chapter where Beloved, the character, gets to be a narrator. There's no punctuation, right? There's no punctuation. The spacing on the page is literally irregular. And for me in that moment, it is a kind of very heavy-handed way in which the poetics of the novel exceeds the logics of grammar.

And so throughout the entire book, all I'm doing is I'm trying to set up here are – here's the ordering force of law and how that imposes a certain grammar which says things have to happen in a certain order, and here's how the literary text that I'm reading –

uses some kind of unruly aesthetics to break down order and do things in a disorderly way that just helps us, right? And it always helps us. I'm not saying that these texts definitively give us, like, models of justice, but instead help us think about justice in excess of law. So that's what I hope that those two terms are doing. Yeah. Yeah.

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So let's move into your first chapter. You're talking about Claudia Rankine's Citizen and how this text is interrupting the grammars of law through a kind of polyvocal accumulation. Can you talk a little bit about this? Yeah. So the first poetic of justice that I look at is accumulation. And I look at Claudia Rankine's Citizen because I'm interested in the way that Rankine's

announces on the cover that this is, you know, Citizen, an American lyric. And lyric poetry we often think of as this kind of, excuse me, this kind of expression of a lyric I, right? When I say I, I mean the letter I here for listeners. Right, there is this kind of expression by a singular speaker in lyric poetry. And throughout Citizen, Grand Keane says,

Rankine plays with – or the book plays with – I want to ascribe this to the book more than the author. I'm unsure whether Rankine as a person who wrote Citizen has politics that one might call abolitionist or not. But Citizen, I think, plays with I and you and we, these pronouns that inscribe a speaker and a listener in the way that lyric poetry traditionally has.

But in the way that Citizen does it, it positions the reader as the you to the I of the poem in different ways throughout the text. So a couple – like one example is the section of Citizen that is focused on Serena Williams, right, the greatest tennis player of all time, arguably. People can argue about that. I'm going to say Serena Williams, greatest tennis player of all time. Okay.

And there are these moments early in that section where the narration says something along the lines of, you are watching Serena Williams and you think she's crazy. Where you, the reader, are interpolated in that moment to being in that scene. Like, yeah, you are the one who's thinking Serena Williams is crazy. Then a couple pages later...

You get re-interpolated through another you, but instead, the poetry then actually displaces the you and uses passive voice to say, Serena, you realize the only way that Serena Williams could be read as crazy, right? That could be read as secretes the subject, right? And so in that moment,

You earlier, you, the reader, were meant to see Serena Williams as crazy in this later moment, which repeats and gathers to it those earlier moments, another quote unquote outburst by Williams on the tennis court. That word crazy, which is repeated here.

is not merely meant to mean the same thing, but it accumulates to it this conflict between these different interpolations of the reader so that the different positions you occupy, you, you, the reader, occupies with the different you's pronoun on the page, results in this kind of rupture, this kind of questioning or this disorder of like, wait, what's happening? Who's crazy and why? Right? That's secreted subject, right?

to be read as crazy. The secreted subject in that passive voice construction becomes a question for the reader, like, wait, what are the conditions of possibility for craziness? What makes a black woman crazy, right? And the answer is, of course, misogynoir, right?

which then we can then trace throughout. And I'll finish my answer by saying that this happens throughout the book, over and over and over again, throughout Citizen. The pronoun you constantly interpolates the reader into the position of sometimes a white witness, sometimes a black witness, sometimes a perpetrator of, sometimes a recipient of racism, right? The you is not static. At least the way I read the text, it is not static.

And then there's a moment at the, not at the very end of the book, but there's a poem called In Memory of James Craig Anderson, who is a black man who is murdered by a white man named Daryl Dedman. And again, throughout the book Citizen, for the entire hundred something pages, the you is just the reader being interpolated in these different ways that are very mobile, very unruly. And then you get this sentence eventually in the book, do

Do you, there's the pronoun, recognize yourself Deadman? And in that moment, after hundreds of pages of the reader being interpolated as a you that moves back and forth between different racialized subject positions without a noun, a pronoun without a noun,

The pronoun you is repeated, accumulating all these different positionalities, right? That you accumulates all these different positionalities. And then it rams into, it crashes into like a ship at sea crashing into an iceberg, the proper noun deadman. And in that moment, the reader is asked to take up the position of racist white supremacist murderer.

And that happens through an accumulation of all these different subject positions that results in this rupture, that results in this way that the book eventually – and the argument – I'm going to leave it to the listeners to go read the subtlety of the argument or the depth of the argument – but that that rupture completely undoes the liberal logic of hate crime as well.

justice legislation. It asks us to think more robustly, more in the line of abolitionism about racist murder beyond the kind of hate crime model. And so that's where that chapter goes with accumulation. So I want to move into your second chapter, which is titled Perforation.

in which you are showing how authors might perforate the grammars of law even as they inhabit them. And you have some really rich examples, including incidents in the life of a slave girl. But I was wondering if you could sort of talk us through this using one of those examples that you have in the book. Awesome. And I think here's where I'll talk about Emner Basie Phillips' Zonk.

So Harriet Jacobs' Instance to Life as a Slave Girl opens the chapter, and that actually is where, I should say really quickly, that is where I get the word perforation. It's from Jacobs in the very famous Leupold chapter where she's literally poking holes in the garret that she's hiding in to observe her children. So that's where perforation, the word, comes from. I'll leave it to readers to kind of read through that really rich section of the chapter. And I want to talk, though, about Zom.

Because chapter two is where I really want to make it clear that the two key terms that I talked about earlier that are in the title, grammars of law, poetics of justice, are not a neat binary. Because perforation happens through texts that, as you said, inhabit the grammars of law. So in Zong, M. Nderbece Philip says,

creates poetry, creates poems out of the literal text of Gregson v. Gilbert, which again is an actual, not fictional, is an actual legal case that went into a courthouse and was decided by a judge

about whether insurers had to pay the owners of the ship for the monetary value of enslaved Africans who were literally massacred and thrown overboard a slave ship, right? So the legal archive records the deaths of hundreds of enslaved Africans, right?

So 132, 133, the archive is not clear, right? There's these, which I kind of make a point of using the different numbers throughout the book. Enslaved Africans thrown overboard. And those deaths are recorded in the legal archive as a question of property value.

And Philip goes to this legal text and literally rips it apart, tears it apart, right? She takes the words, cuts them out, paste them in different orders, sometimes separates them out so that way they're not whole words anymore on the page, writes over them in the last section of the book where ink is on top of ink and it becomes hard to discern meaning, shapes them into these different shapes. And so the poetry in Zong, like, completely, like, dissects

tears apart, cuts apart, like undoes the legal archive. There's a way that some folks have read Zong

as this kind of triumphant overturning of the legal archive of massacre. That Zong as a book of poetry either is a kind of literary resurrection or it does a real justice to all of these murdered enslaved Africans. But I think that those triumphant readings of Zong miss...

that Philip insists to us in her essay at the end of the book called Notanda that

in no way does the poetry and Zong ever fully escape the implication, the being implicated in the legal archive from which it is created. Um, and so I am trying to, and Catherine McKittrick actually, um, uh, in her, one of her essays on, on the book Zong really points this out for us in really, really rich ways. I think McKittrick, um, uh,

does this really well of reading what Zong does in terms of undoing the murderous archive without it being a binary kind of like opposite 180 flip and triumph. And I want to continue this and say that the poetics of justice that happen in Zong, which genuinely do offer ways of thinking about Black liberation and

life sustenance beyond the logics of white supremacist murder, beyond the logics of white supremacist capital C civilization to draw on Dylan Rodriguez as he builds on Sylvia Winter in his book, White Reconstruction.

And that even as Zong gets us somewhere else, it gets us there by way of quite literally inhabiting the very logics of murder, the very grammars of law that it wants to undo. And so chapter two is really about helping the reader see that I am not setting up a binary. There is no like pure like

Poetics of justice, thumbs up, yay, good thing. Grammars of law, thumbs down, boo, bad thing, right? Like the book is – chapter two is really using these examples to say a lot – most if not all of the time, poetics of justice because of the way that the English language at least – and I can only speak about the English language because I am embarrassingly monolingual –

but the way that the English language is inescapably a colonial language. So all of these literary texts that are working through the English language cannot escape that violence. And so I just want chapter two to be the moment where I tell readers, like, there are no triumphalist narratives in this book. And I'm sorry for that. That affect does not happen at all in this book. There is no triumphalist narrative. There is no, like, justice to be done. There is only justice with, that is,

within, within, not beyond, not escaping from, but within the struggle of the violence of the law. And so that's what I'm doing in chapter two. And I think M. Derbyshire Phillips' Zong is such a vivid example of that.

Though I want to return to something we were talking about earlier, which is the kind of limitations, right, of literary study to do what this book would like to do. So if you could talk a little bit about the interlude between chapters two and three. And this interlude is highlighting some of those limitations of abolitionist literary studies to produce abolition in reality. So if you can kind of walk us through that, I'd appreciate it. Yeah. So the interlude is...

is a moment where I want to reground readers and myself in what this project can and can't do. And it opens with Eric Garner's final words while he was being choked to death in Staten Island by an NYPD officer, a murder that was very infamously caught on video in full.

where we see on this video an NYPD officer using a chokehold that the NYPD itself prohibits to kill Gardner as he says repeatedly, I can't breathe. And this is, of course, caught on video. And I literally center this, right? In a four-chapter book, this is between chapters two and three as a literal centering

of the stakes of what we're talking about when we're talking about abolitionist literary studies. I then talk about Eric Garner's daughter, Erica, who spends the next, like the aftermath of Eric's death

And I'm only using first names because it's a different issue. I'm talking about both Eric and Erica here, that in the aftermath of Eric's death, Erica is fighting for justice for his death while she's raising her own child. And she also eventually passes away. And what I want to emphasize as an interlude is that there is no amount of writing

Nothing that I write in Abolition Time can actually do just—like, that phrase, doing justice, can't do justice to the Garners' stolen lives, right? There is no doing justice. The deaths can't be undone. Just like Zong can't do justice to—cannot resurrect, cannot make right, finally, the unjust deaths of the Zong massacre. Um—

literary studies can't resurrect, can't do a final full justice to lives that have been stolen. And I emphasize this autobiographically also because Eric Garner's death is the moment that I as an individual gave up on reform. I was someone who you might describe as like a progressive critic of criminal justice, right? Who I believe that the system was racist. I believe that police were anti-black, but I had this moment of hope

that because the murder of Eric Garner was caught on video, we had indisputable evidence. We could literally witness it happening that this murderer, the officer Pantelio, would be found guilty, would go to jail. Justice would be—and of course he wasn't even indicted. And in that moment, I was like, all right, nope. Like, there is no fucking fixing this.

There is no reforming this. Everything must be must be raised. Abolition is the only way towards justice. And it took me as an adult. I was a full grown adult when this happened. Right. So I acknowledge that, like, it took a literal human being's death.

for me to, in my political consciousness, move to the analytical conclusion that abolition is the way forward. And nothing I do for the rest of my life will ever undo the fact that it took my witnessing of someone else's death for me to come to that political conclusion.

And that's not like a, oh, whoa, like hand-wringing guilty thing. I don't think guilt is – guilt is never part of what I'm talking about. It's not about guilt. It's not about feeling the right way or the wrong way or feeling bad. It's not about that. It's just about the very kind of recognition that what we do is always done in that aftermath. And I do – and here's the last thing I'll say about this. I wrote this because there's a strain of –

academic work of that is sometimes focused on like social justice broadly. I think this happens in the legal humanities. I think it happens in the environmental humanities. I think it happens sometimes in, in feminist scholarship that like doing that, that, that the academic writing itself is somehow itself in itself, like doing justice, right?

And I think that there's a way that that kind of irks me, and I want to be an academic who constantly reminds us that when we write journal articles, when we write books published by university presses, the writing itself is not the justice work. The justice work happens in how that writing affects other people, how it is engaged, the work that we do beyond that.

what we get paid to do right um uh i was talking with a graduate student actually a couple weeks ago who is writing a really brilliant paper on chicanx um activism in new mexico and uh they're using the words activism and organizing and we're talking about what are these two things and one of the one of the things that came up in our conversation was like well if you're getting if your employer if you're getting a paycheck from your employer while you're doing something you're

that thing that you're doing is probably not organizing, right? Like, so if you're like, so it's just, it's part of the interlude is also the reminder of like academic work as academic work in and of itself is extremely limited in what it does. And I just want us to be humble about that. And like in that humility, find the motivation to find other ways outside of our, outside of the,

the job descriptions in our contracts to go do the justice work that we're calling for in our writing. So the interluder is doing all of those things. It is ultimately a regrounding in the stakes that abolition is actually, in reality, a concrete material struggle over life and death, not a discursive battle over the right or wrong language.

And that when we remember that, we realize that everything that I'm talking about, literary studies, is just limited. It can't do the material work of closing down prisons, closing down police precincts, releasing people from prison, building up food systems that sustain people, housing systems that house people. It can't do all that work.

So doesn't mean it's not important. Doesn't mean it's not important, right? Literary studies can help us train our minds and our imaginations to figure out where to go from here, right? There is no practice without theory and there is no theory without practice, right? I'm also very much not like a fuck theory. It's all about what's on the ground. Like, no, no, no, we do need thinking. Thinking is necessary. But the interlude is where I kind of try to do all of these things that I'm kind of rambling about now to just remind us like,

be humble about what we do in our academic work. It matters. It truly does matter. But then how can that academic work be grounded in the stakes in such a way that allows us to go out and then figure out what else kind of justice work can be done? Yeah, I appreciate that. I think especially for thinking about my own project, that was really helpful because I think there's sometimes some pressure to act as if

Like the thing you're writing is going to change the world and that's why it's important. So I appreciate it. And so kind of moving on to the third chapter, can you talk a little bit about the poetics of witnessing? Yeah, so building right off of the interludes discussion of the fact that Eric Garber is murdered on video and everyone around the world could watch it happen.

"Politics of witnessing is grappling with this paradox that is old," right? Like, this is an old thing that people have been talking about for a long time in political theory, right? Like, I'm talking about the politics of recognition here, that if we, whoever that we is, can see injustice happening, if we see it, if it registers as something we can witness, then we see it, we know it's happening, it is a fact in the world that we can then fix, right?

And the Eric Garner example, the murder of Eric Garner as an example, just so heavy-handedly and viciously refutes that, right? That chapter three is struggling with this idea of witnessing actually can't bring justice.

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Witnessing itself as it's as as if we just think about witnessing as the moment of seeing and affirming injustice and like saying out loud that is wrong and recognizing it and pointing to it. If that doesn't actually bring justice.

What does it do? And so what I do in chapter three is I try to work out a poetics of witnessing that takes that model of recognizing injustice, of witnessing injustice, of recognizing the humanity of the so-called other and.

as a portal towards ethics, not as ethics itself. So a poetics of witnessing says it's, uh, so, um, one of the novels I talk about is Fred Degars, um, feeding the ghosts. So, uh, I look at scenes of literal witnessing in that novel. So quick example, um, uh,

There's a moment where the protagonist witnesses – the enslaved protagonist, Minta, witnesses a fellow enslaved woman being thrown overboard the ship that they're on. The novel is a retelling of the Zong Massacre. And she says, what is your name? And the woman says, why –

Will it save – basically, why do you want me to tell you my name? Will it save me? And Minta just asks again, what is your name? She says, my name is Ama. And in that moment, what goes unsaid is that knowing Ama's name won't save her, that Minta's witnessing of this injustice can't save her.

But what Minta does is she takes this witnessing and she dedicates her life to justice work moving forward in a way that can never save Ama's life, but can fight against the systemic violence of slavery. Okay.

And so what I'm doing in chapter three is I'm thinking about how do these literary texts model witnessing as a failure in and of itself to bring justice, but in that very failure plants the possibility of an ethos, an ethics, a just ethics beyond the law that can happen through a kind of continuous rigorous work that...

that goes beyond just seeing. And the way that I get there is this moment in Toni Morrison's A Mercy where... And again, this is going to be a very quick description of a really important scene, so you should go read A Mercy. Where...

a character, one character, um, named Jane, uh, helps another character named Florence, um, escape a dangerous situation. And Florence knows that because Florence is black, Jane is white. Um,

A bunch of adults in this situation are focused on Florence, but before Florence showed up, they were focused on Jane and they were harming Jane. And Florence knows that when she leaves, the adults in this community will go back to harming Jane. But Jane still helps Florence escape. And Florence says to another character, she risks all.

to save the slave that you throw out. And so I end chapter three and I get the poetics of witnessing is really getting at this idea of risk. There's an exercise I do with my students when I teach Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. There's a moment in Parable of the Sower where Lauren Olamida, the protagonist says, you know,

You know, she's a writer. She says something along the lines of, I've written so much in my life, but if there's one thing that I've ever written that I know is true, that I know is true, it is that God has changed. So I always ask my students, if you could write one sentence, just one sentence that you know is true, what would it be? And for me, that sentence in Abolition Time comes in Chapter 3. And the sentence is, the condition of possibility for ethics is risk. And so Poetics of Witnessing is about...

How does seeing and recognizing injustice put us in a position to then risk something? And in risking allows us to go from recognition to doing some kind of ethics towards justice. So that's the kind of path of what I'm trying to do in Chapter 3 of The Poetics of Reckoning.

So in chapter three, you also talk about the ethics of reading, right? When you're talking about it through a mercy. So I was wondering, obviously, this is very related. Can you talk us through how you see a mercy, you know, as an exercise in questioning the ethics of reading? Yeah. So I love a mercy is, is my, might be my favorite novel. I have read it probably over 20 times because I teach it all the time and I've published on it and I've read it and, and, and like the,

the first page of the novel, the first page of the novel, right? Immediately starts using the word you to talk to the reader. Eventually you learn who that you is addressing, but as a reader, the first time you encounter it, you don't know who that's addressing. So the kind of assumption is like, oh, it's me, right? Going back to Citizen. And it says right on the first page, one question is who is responsible. Another is, can you read?

right and so like that i am obsessed with the fact that this novel opens by saying who is responsible and can you read and on that first encounter right like everyone who wants to write like we want to write about mercy once you finish reading it you're you're we're all smart and we've read the whole novel and we know who that you is oh it's the blacksmith but like you don't know that on first encounter i'm sorry i'm on a podcast i shouldn't be clapping when i say things i'm like

The listeners don't have video. They can't see that I'm like literally punching my hand. But like, you don't know who that you is on first encounter. And so the novel immediately challenges you, the reader. Can you read?

And throughout the novel, multiple characters are discussed in terms of different forms of literacy, whether it's literal language literacy. Right. Can you read English? Can you read Portuguese? Whether it's can you read signs like if if if if.

The steam out of a kettle makes a shape. Can you read that as if it's a sign? Can you read someone's emotions or intentions in a moment of social interaction? Or if you misread their intentions, how does that affect you? Right? Can you read someone's...

Can you read someone's harmful versus helpful intentions? All of these moments in the text are so centered on whether characters can or can't read something in the world around them, where that is not just text. And for me, what interests me about Immersive is that it puts in our hands, literally in the form of a book, this questioning of reading itself as a problem. Reading becomes the problem to be interrogated by the act of reading.

And so what I work with my students on every year that I teach it and what I'm working through in the book Abolition Time is –

How reading it, how if in this thing we call literary criticism, if what I'm doing is literary criticism, which is reading itself, close reading is like the method that is my method, right? And as far as I have a method, it's close reading, like pretty boring, old school formalist analysis. That's self-deprecation. I think it's very exciting. I think it's a lot of fun. But if that's what we're doing, like, what can we be sure of what we're doing, right?

Can we read is a question that we have to come back to as a way to deconstruct our own sense of mastery over a text, right? Like, every time we think we've arrived at, like, the reading of a text, we ask ourselves, can we read? And so for me...

a mercy in asking that question and making reading a question of ethics gets at what I mean by ethics itself, which is I think when people hear the word ethics, they often think, and I say this because people have throughout my dissertation process, my committee sometimes, other readers, other people would sometimes interpret me as like someone who was reaching towards this list of rules, right? Like ethics is this list of like ways to know what right and wrong is.

And to me, if we talk about ethics just as like a list of like right and wrong or moral good, good and bad, again, thumbs up, thumbs down kind of model of ethics. That's just law with a different foundation. Right. That's what law is. For me, ethics is the perpetual return to question. Right. If I can use grammar. Right. Law is law happens in periods. Ethics happens in question marks.

Um, and so for me, what a mercy does in, in opening up the ethics of reading and, and

demanding that we ask ourselves who is responsible and can we read demands that we constantly re-ask ourselves if we're reading correctly and what would that even mean so that we never arrive at a finality right this is in this way this is where I'm like very much a deconstructionist in my thinking right I'm extremely deridean in my thinking um in a way that like I used to shy away from but now I just embrace like yep I am I'm a deconstructionist maybe I don't write like one all the time but like yeah I am um uh

And so that – what a mercy does, it leaves us in a perpetual non-arrival, which I also think is abolition. Abolition is always about non-arrival. We will never arrive at a perfectly abolitionist society because there will – abolitionists don't have a fantasy that people will just stop harming each other. Harm will happen.

Abolitionists demand that we constantly ask ourselves, what do we do to create a less harmful world? And how do we respond when harm happens? We have to be open to constantly asking that question and unsettling ourselves to not

rest in finality and arrival. And so that's what a mercy does with the ethics of reasoning. It makes us, it makes ethics the non-arrival, justice as non-arrival, which is uncertain, but I think that's where abolitionist thinking urges us to. It's that discomfort of uncertainty that is the space of ethics.

So moving on to your last chapter, I mean, through the text, like there are several points where you're engaging so like richly with Hortense Spillers, right? And her very famous and wonderful essay, Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe. And which I loved because I'm, yeah, I'm using that. And, you know, that's one of the, one of those texts where like you can never read it too many times. Like you'll always just get more, right? So yeah.

It's so brilliant. So I really appreciated reading your engagement with it. And I think this leads me into a question that I had about your last chapter where you're discussing Angelina Weld Grimke's play Rachel, and you're arguing that this play on mother's gender. And I just thought this was so fascinating. So I wanted to just have you talk us through that for the listeners. Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. Mama's Any and Papa's Maybe is this wonderful essay that you can never read too many times. Yeah.

You didn't set me up for this, but I'm just going to say it anyway. It's also an essay that, like, everybody thinks they know what it means, right? Like, it gets... I get a little frustrated with how it gets cited in this shorthand. Like, what Hortense Spillers calls the flesh, and then we just move on. Like, no, no, like, what do you mean by what Hortense Spillers calls the flesh? Like, how do you understand that? Because I'm not sure. I've been reading this essay for a decade. I'm not sure I totally get it yet. Like, what do you get, right? So anyway, Mama's Ape, Papa's Maybe is a lot more complicated than I sometimes think it gets cited as being. I think it's so...

I'm glad that you've kind of noted that I return to it over and over again, and that's not because, like, that's not out of a deference, whereas, like, I'm going to cite Hortense Spillers a lot because she's really important. It's actually because I want to model for my reader that this is an essay that we need to struggle with, that we need to return to, and that we need to not be so certain that we just know what it is because it's this classic essay that everybody's read.

Right. It's actually really dense and difficult and it's doing more complex work than a let down that would allow us to like cite in shorthand like what Hortense Spillers calls the flesh. And which is something I've done before, too. Like we've all done it. Like I get it. But I just want to flag that as like it is an essay, much like a lot of other black feminists like Audre Lorde. They get cited very quickly without necessarily fully sitting with how complex it is. So anyway.

That's not what your question was about, but you set me up for that. So what I'm talking about with Rachel, I am fascinated by this play because of how it has, on the one hand, a really surface-level obvious interpretation. So it's this 1916 play from the Harlem Renaissance, basically, where this titular character, Rachel,

And she opens the play by really melodramatically emphasizing she just wants to be a mother. She wants to raise kids. It's her life dream. And she learns from her mother that her baby brother and her – not her baby brother, sorry. Older brother. Sorry. This is an older half-brother and father were lynched.

And she learns this only late in life as a 16-year-old. She didn't know how they died until her mother finally tells her the being of Rachel. And she realizes that these are two – her brother, who was a child at the time –

did nothing to deserve that. And so Rachel comes to this conclusion that to bring Black children into the world as a Black woman, to be a Black mother, to birth Black children, is to bring a child into a world where at any moment, for any reason, or for no reason at all, their life could be extinguished. And so the play ends with Rachel declaring that she will never be a mother. However,

When I talk about unmothering gender, what I'm interested in in this novel... Oh my god, I just do what my students do. Okay, students, if I call you out for calling a play a novel, I just did it, so there you go. Keep that in. In this play, Rachel does not flee from her gendering as woman, but...

what I work through in my engagement with Spillers as well as other scholars like Sarah Haley, understanding that woman isn't really a gender that coheres for Black subjecthood, right? I also engage with this with Tyrone Palmer in my discussion of Serena Williams. That Rachel's kind of

Queered relationship with womanhood as a gendered position through vis-a-vis blackness, right? She struggles with that and she – in her refusal of motherhood, she un-mothers that –

That kind of unslash gendering that she herself has as a black woman, right, who is always susceptible to the sexual violence that produces the gender of black women. This idea Hartman talks about in Chapter three of Seasons of Subjection, right, where where Hartman points out that, you know,

While it is true that, as Spiller says, gender differentiation ceases to matter in certain ways under slavery, gender differentiation is also a mode through which gender itself is produced through differentiated sexual violence, which, of course, Ali Abderrahim reminds us is not as differentiated in the neat, tidy ways that we might think.

Again, these are complex discussions of Black feminist and queer studies that folks should sit with at length through the texts that I do much more justice to in the text itself of Abolition Time, but just kind of to flag these different aspects of this conversation.

But what happens in Rachel the play, all these different strands of feminist and queer theory coming together in Rachel the character, there's a way that that very complex –

capital B, capital G, black gender that she occupies. And there I'm citing Patrice Douglas, who writes on black gender. Her new book is coming out in just a couple of months, I think. But anyway, yeah.

She stays with that, but unmothers it in her refusal to be a biological mother. But what she doesn't do, what I emphasize at the end of the play is Rachel insists on being a non-mothered mother figure for black children, right?

right the play doesn't actually end with her declaring she'll never be a mother it ends with this cries of this young black boy named jimmy and rachel running off stage to that cry right as i would tell my students when i teach plays never skip the stage directions right it is if if the last if the last text of a play is the stage directions and not dialogue you can't say the play ends with dialogue it ends with the stage directions and so um

yeah, what I'm doing with Rachel is I'm trying to look at the way that this play does something more complicated than just say, like, being a Black mother is this impossible task because Black children are murdered, right? Like, that is a thing that you don't have to read the play Rachel or see Rachel performed to know. So what is Rachel doing that's more complicated than that? And so that's what I'm trying to get at with my reading of Rachel is what does it mean to do what

what Christina Sharpe calls wake work in the form of aspiration to aspire Black being in a way that sustains futurity, which is what Rachel does as a figure for Jimmy and the other children of a apartment complex, but refuses reproductive futurity, right? This kind of Rachel as a figure that both refuses futurity and insists futurity at the same time.

This is that simultaneity of abolition that I opened with talking about. Rachel both refuses futurity and insists futurity at the same time. And I wanted to end the last chapter with that paradox. So you've mentioned your students a few times, and you also talk about your experiences teaching undergrads throughout the book, which I absolutely love because I think teaching and research are inseparable. So yeah, I was wondering if you'd like to talk a little bit more about that. Sure.

Yeah, this book could not have been written without my teaching experience. So, you know, everybody has a different path in this racket we call academia. Mine was finishing grad school, and then I spent two years in a non-renewable contingent position where I had a 4-4 teaching load, teaching anywhere from 80 to 100 students a semester. Very little time to write, right?

But with all that teaching experience meant that I was in the classroom talking with students about the text that I cared about. Excuse me. And excuse me. Sorry. And in doing that, it allowed me to think so much more richly and rigorously in conversation in ways that.

writing and drafting and revising on my own didn't always get to do um so i you know in graduate school i taught but i taught mostly first year writing i didn't really teach literature classes and so to be in again it's like contingency is bad right like fuck contingency fuck eductification right everybody deserves like everybody deserves all the jobs um uh uh

But – so when I tell the story, I don't want to tell it like it was a good thing that I had this contingent position and I was working my butt off in the job market. But there was a way that by having this high teaching job that didn't really give me a lot of time to write actually wound up making the book possible because I could be in the classroom with students talking about incidents in the life of a slave girl. Yeah.

And really kind of spending a couple weeks with students in real time thinking about

Okay, if there's this initial kind of, I mean, I'll use incidents as an example. I've taught that text a bunch at this point in my career. And students often have a kind of uniform interpretation of this text where it's basically like, quote unquote, about intersectionality, where it's like basically a text that is teaching us that like gender and race are both really important and that Harriet Jacobs's experience of slavery is different from Frederick Douglass's.

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True, totally true. And there's a way that a rhetorical analysis of that text draws us to the conclusion that Harriet Jacobs is, you know, positioning herself in relation to her intended white woman readers as saying, I am a woman too, as a try to kind of like plea into womanhood that would place black women within the protective arms of womanhood that white women were in.

And there's this kind of way that that emerges in my classes, kind of my students in a way that like, I guess I could have narrated that before I started teaching. But once you see it happen semester after semester with students and you start to like have conversations and figure out ways to challenge that kind of, because I think that's something I do in my classes. I always notice the moments when

An interpretation of a text starts to go here and feel kind of uniform in the room that a bunch of students start to really start agreeing. And I'm like, if we're all agreeing about something, where can I ask a question to push us in a different direction? And Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl is a text where this would constantly happen, where this would be coalescing around this kind of agreement that this is what the text was about. It was an example of a rhetorical argument.

positioning of trying to like make a trying to like include black women into feminism basically right this kind of old argument of like white feminism excludes black women so this is an example of a text that includes black women in feminism and so eventually kind of getting this idea of like what if there's something happening in instance in the life of a slave girl that that doesn't make that untrue

but exceeds Jacobs's own rhetoric? What if there's a way in which something about how Harriet Jacobs talks about slavery and disconnects nouns and pronouns or pronouns from their antecedents grammatically, because I'm all about gross reading grammar. What if there's a way that we can read the text as actually gesturing towards gender abolition? What if there's a way that Jacobs is actually telling white women, womanhood doesn't protect you either?

Because your husbands are out here doing what white men under slavery did with black women. And by the way, abusing you too. I see how they treat you, white women. And so what if in addition to not negating that interpretation, but what if there's another way to look at the grammars of that text in excess of its author's intentions that opens our thinking towards slavery?

what Marquise Bay in Black Transfeminism might call gender abolition, right? Probably not a concept that actually is in the grammar of Instance to the Life of a Slave Girl itself, but in the actual classroom with actual students and trying to just ask those questions that break through those moments of coalescence helped me to see how can we look at what's on the page and see different possibilities, unruly possibilities, right?

in these texts. And that happens for a bunch of texts in the book that I invite readers to really engage with. Abolition Time is not a pedagogy book that you won't find lesson plans in it, but it is a book that cares deeply about teaching. Even in the moments where I have these moments where I say, like, I don't think I did the right thing in the classroom in this moment, right? But I really, I would love for folks who read the book to engage with its thinking on teaching because it's a book that could not have been written but for

a heavy teaching load and a heavy experience of being in the classroom with undergraduate students and thinking through these texts together and taking undergraduate students seriously as intellectual interlocutors, right? So, yeah. Okay, so it's time for my favorite question whenever I do these interviews. What do you want readers to do with what they learn from abolition time?

I would love for folks to, like I just said, think about teaching, think about classrooms, and think about how we can do the kind of nitty-gritty work of formalist analysis as itself an exercise in opening up our epistemologies and imaginations towards different ways of thinking about justice. I open Abolition Time not only with Beloved, but also with Toni Morrison's essay, Unspeakable Things Unspoken.

And I teach that essay a lot. And one of my favorite moments in that essay for teaching is when Toni Morrison at the end of it basically says, like, to those of you who take African-American literature seriously as art and not as sociology and not as an exercise in tolerance or neighborliness, those are the folks I thank. Those are the folks to whom I owe much. And what I'm saying here is that I think there's a way in which

Folks who come to literary studies with an orientation towards social justice thinking want, and this kind of like desire to change the world, want to kind of almost mine literary texts and aesthetic objects for like the obvious social justice content and almost this quote-unquote sociological content, right? That we read Beloved and we see the injustice, we witness the injustice, right?

of slavery and we say, okay, something must be done for this legacy that we inherit. But what about the irregular spacing? What about the elliptical narration of Sethe in the moments where she answers questions, where she answers Paul these questions precisely by not answering, by talking in circles, right? What I want Abolition Time to be is a model for how

For those of us who come to literary studies with a genuine concern for social justice, that also means paying attention to what Toni Morrison asks us to do in A Speakable Thing Unspoken and attend with seriousness to the aesthetics and the formal composition, the craft of what it is we're studying. And as we stay, in my students' words, annoyingly close to the page,

How does that really highly disciplined and sometimes disciplining methodology of formalist close reading bring us to moments of, I'm going to use this word again, unruliness that undiscipline us even as we're paying disciplined close attention?

And that's the paradox I want people to take in abolition time is like doing that nitty, like, again, you, you, you've seen it in the book. I spend, I'll spend three pages on a paragraph break in a mercy, right? Like this, like, it's not even like a word or the word means it's literally the fact that there's a paragraph break there is really important to me. Right. And like paying that annoying close attention is also an exercise in

in staying with unruliness itself. So that way we are implicated, we are imbricated in the disciplining force of discipline

literary studies as itself a discipline of the academy, even as we think beyond discipline, right? So literary studies basically is a place where we can do abolitionist thinking, even if it is limited in what it can achieve, right? I want to insist on the importance of literary studies, insist on the importance of close reading, even as I say it's limited. And I want folks to take from

from the book that like when you go to your classrooms, when you go to your reading groups, right? And when I say classroom, I don't just mean in universities, right? Go to your reading groups, which could be formal or just informal, you and your friends. When we pay attention to aesthetics, how can our close attention help us think towards a justice that is beyond the very disciplining forces

that we might be employing. This is back to inhabitation. If we're inhabiting discipline, can that get us towards undisciplined? So if I can ask, what are you working on now? And where can listeners find you and your work going forward? Love this last question. So...

I have been, I use the phrase intellectual obsession a lot. So I am currently intellectually obsessed with Lily Long Soldier's book, Whereas. I've taught it the last two years here at New Mexico Highlands University in my indigenous literatures class. And so I'm obsessively working on an essay on poetics of justice in that book and thinking about like decolonial poetics. And I'm thinking about Whereas in relation to, yeah,

not only settler colonialism in North America, but also settler colonial logics in Gaza and Palestine. And so I'm working on some form of writing about decolonial poetics that takes whereas as an occasion to think about, in Stephen Salaita's sense, inter slash national poetics of justice against settler colonialism.

So that's one thing I'm working on very immediately. Hopefully that'll be something I write within the next few months. And then I've started tentatively working on a second book project. So folks will hopefully see me at the American Studies Association or other conferences presenting on this. I've presented on it already a couple of times. Tentatively titled Deputy Citizenship, White Supremacy and the Privatization of State Violence. So what I'm thinking about these days is the way in which

U.S. citizens are deputized by different forms of law to do the work of state violence, even though even and especially those of us who aren't actually police officers. So, um,

Thinking about the historical examples of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms as actually a way of arming settlers to genocide native peoples in order to expand the land and the borders of the United States. Thinking about the Future of Slave Act, which deputized regular people to arrest and report self-emancipated Black people during slavery. And thinking about in the contemporary moment, these state laws or policies that try to get people to basically like

You know, if you're a teacher in school and you have a student, if you have a child whose parents encourage that child to use pronouns that are different from their assigned sex at birth...

Reporting those parents as like abusive, right, as if it is abusive to allow a trans child to be trans. Right. That allows an ex-boyfriend to report that their ex-girlfriend crossed state borders to get an abortion. Right. This way that that law and policy can deputize regular non-police people to report transphobia.

others in order to allow the state to enact its violence. And so I'm thinking a lot about this, what I'm calling deputy citizenship, that to be a citizen is to be an enforcer of state violence. And so, yeah, that's just something that's occupying a lot of my brain lately. And I think it's a second book project. So keep an eye out for that kind of stuff. But yeah, that's what I'm working on these days and we'll see where it goes. It sounds awesome. I'm looking forward to reading more from you.

Thank you so much for this. Yeah, thank you so much for being here. It's been great.