Towards Liberation

At the 7 p.m. start time, a line of people still wound around the block, waiting to pack into Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor of earth and environmental science at CUNY, drew a massive crowd with three of her highly erudite colleagues (Nikhil Pal Singh, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Lisa Lowe); they spoke, first individually and then as a panel, about her recent collection of essays entitled Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022). Although the audience was left a little hungry for Gilmore’s more known repertoire of geographic dangers and usual radicalization of capitalist vocabulary, the event still brought out a well-rounded summary of her life’s work on “race and racism as infrastructure”; “prison building as a means of coercive control”; “how to organize abandonment”; the strange paradox that of a “unionized nurse sleeping next to a dirty cop”; a reminder to turn “the green climate crisis red”; and “the conscious faculty of really looking to see all the patterns.”