Black Temporality in Times of Crisis

Contributors to this special issue use crisis as a framework to explore historical and present-day Black temporalities. Considering how moments of emergency shift and redefine one’s relationship to time and temporality—particularly in the material, psychic, and emotional lives of Black people—the authors examine the resulting paradoxical aspects of time. They argue that crisis demands response while revealing no clear course of action and holds its victims in states of suspension and expectation. The authors use 2020 as a point of departure, in which “pandemic time” emerged as an experience of time’s seemingly simultaneous expansion and compression: the slow time of monotony, the racing time of anxiety, and the cyclical time of mourning. The essays cover racial capitalism as it exists through stolen land (dispossession of Native sovereignty), stolen life (African enslavement), and stolen time; the temporal differences between the lived experience of Black flesh and the Black body; and the significance of time to the production of Black ontology and the field of Black studies.

Contributors. Badia Ahad, Margo Natalie Crawford, Eve Dunbar, Julius B. Fleming, Tao Leigh Goffe, Habiba Ibrahim, Shaun Myers, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Sarah Stefana Smith, Frederick C. Staidum Jr.