In this talk, scholar Che Gossett focuses on Kiyan Williams’s performance and sculpture especially: Unearthing (2016), Trash and Treasure (2014) Meditations on the Making of America (2019), Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2024). In Williams’s work, anti-black and racial capitalist World is negated and abolished — in its ruination new critical forms crystallize and figurations of the flesh emerge, reverberating and interinanimating each other.

Che Gossett is a Black nonbinary femme writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought, and Black studies. Gossett’s writing appears in publications including the edited collections Death and Other Penalties: Continental Philosophers on Prisons and Capital Punishment (Fordham University Press, 2015), Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), and Trans Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Che is co-editing, with Tavia Nyong’o, a forthcoming special issue of Social Text journal on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant, and are currently associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.