dismantling the master's clock: on race, space & time w/ Rasheedah Phillips

Notions of time and space are fundamental to orienting one’s place in various experiences. Mapping time/understanding temporality allows us to coordinate ourselves on the map of human geography [shout out to John Henrik Clarke]. But what happens when we understand that time is colonized – a colonial construct – devised as a mechanism of capitalism that maximizes aggressive accumulation and deteriorating processes of human and natural resource extraction? A faint distortion, intentionally designed, to arrest the capacities of a people or peoples to see beyond the moment, limiting the collective capacity to envision a future, not only materially, but non-materially. A process necessary to self-incarcerate our innate ability to map, coordinate, envision, and realize freedom. It is here, Rasheedah Phillips adds more insight by asking, why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature. Phillips dives deeper into understanding and exploring Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations. Rasheedah Phillips unpacks the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. While simultaneously, highlighting how Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. Ultimately, Rasheedah Phillips is interested in the provocation that posits: What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? Thinking deeply about the limited capacity of time as defined and redefined within the historical and material reality of capital, Dismantling the Masters Clock, fits into the long durée of revolutionary praxis, from marronage , self-emancipating Africans who utilized their ancient forms of knowledge of land, warfare, and foodways always with an eye on the undetermined future, freedom, to graffiti artists in Nairobi, merging afro-futuristic concepts with the natural world as way to invoke a radical imagination to redefine their current moment with the multiplicity of future moments. Rasheedah writes, “this book ultimately posits that by decolonizing time – by breaking free from the master's clock that has been instrumental in sustaining systems of oppression – we can forge new pathways for liberation that are attuned to the realities, histories, and futures of Black communities. The act of reclaiming both time and nature of reality itself is a profound step toward manifesting temporalities where Black experiences and knowledges are centered” [23].