“Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation” Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Mon, May 9, 2022
6:00 PM–8:00 PM
The James Gallery
We will gather IN PERSON in the James Gallery.
ALL CUNY FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND STAFF WHO HAVE APPROVED CLEARED4 STATUS ARE WELCOME. NO REGISTRATION NECESSARY.
To attend this reception it is necessary to:
1) Register on Eventbrite here.
2) Obtain a CUNY Access Pass, you will need to register with Cleared4. To register, click on this link: https://www.c4wrk.com/uyRraBwS14jNyP8Z9 and submit proof of your COVID-19 vaccination.
Please read the CUNY Graduate Center’s building entry policy below.
Join Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore for this reception to celebrate her new book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Gathering together Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Organized by the James Gallery, Verso Books, and Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.