Author Meets Critics: A Conversation on Abolition Time

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The 2025 American Studies Association conference asks us to consider the dynamics of time, justice, and abolition in the unfolding present and past. This panel takes up Jess A. Goldberg’s Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice as a central text for engaging these themes. The book challenges readers to reimagine the temporality of abolition as not simply a horizon but a grammar—one that underpins how we live, think, and act in the shadow of law and structures of domination. By weaving together legal theory, critical race studies, and poetic inquiry, Goldberg offers a sweeping and incisive meditation on abolition’s radical possibilities.

Each participant will be given 7-10min to respond to the book from their unique disciplinary and intellectual vantage points: some have chosen to discuss how it relates to their own work, others will discuss how they or others might use it in the classroom, and still others meditate on its implications for politics or scholarship. After each presentation, the author will provide a 10-minute response to the ideas raised, after which the entire panel will have a larger discussion amongst one another, before briefly opening things up to the audience.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Marquis Bey

Panelists

• Sasha Ann Panaram, Fordham University

• Christopher Paul Harris, University of California-Irvine

• Almas B Khan, University of Mississippi

• Brigitte N Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Comment

• Jess A Goldberg, New Mexico Highlands University

Biographical Information

Jess A. Goldberg is an Assistant Professor of English, Undergraduate Studies Coordinator for English, Co-Director of Gender & Women’s Studies at New Mexico Highlands University. They teach and research American literature, abolitionist thought, Black studies, carceral studies (prisons, policing, and criminalization), gender studies (especially queer and feminist theory), critical race theory and ethnic studies (with a focus on white supremacy), legal humanities, environmental humanities, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Goldberg is the author of Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, published in 2024 with University of Minnesota Press.

Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Critical Theory at Northwestern University. Their work concerns trans and nonbinary studies, black feminist theory, abolition, and critical theory. They think primarily about the violence and coloniality of categorization and the possibilities in departing from such categories—all through the scope of blackness, transness, and nonbinariness. They are the author of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published with Duke University Press in 2024.

Almas Khan is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. She specializes in race and the law, constitutional history, and law and literature, with a focus on African American experiences after the Civil War. Almas holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia with a concentration in American literature and a J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School. She is currently working on her first book, An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship. Almas has published widely in journals and edited collections, including essays on civil rights lawyer Albion Tourgée’s literary writings, Black Lives Matter poetry, and critical legal history in graphic narratives. Almas also serves on the Board of Governors for the Society of American Law Teachers and is part of her university’s Coalition for the Study of Race and Racism.

Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the
author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and co-author (with Jonathan Senchyne) of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). She is currently writing a book on Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry for Oxford University Press's Children's Classics, Critically series and another on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century.

Christopher Paul Harris is an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His first book, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care, was published by Princeton University Press in September 2023.

Sasha Ann Panaram is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University, where she specializes in African American and Caribbean literature, with a particular interest in slavery studies and women’s and gender studies. From 2023 – 2025, she held the Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American & African Diasporic Literary Studies and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rutgers University. Her current book project tentatively titled The Aesthetic Afterlives of the Middle Passage: Black Movement, Catastrophe, and Choreographies for Living examines how anglophone Caribbean writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries represent movement in the Middle Passage not only as forced migration or ongoing displacement but as vital modes of relation that outlive the transatlantic slave trade and animate Black life today. Her research has been published in The Black Scholar, Small Axe, Southern Cultures, and The Journal of West Indian Literature.