AMST 208
Time and Blackness
Last Offered Spring 2023
Division II
Cross-listed REL 262 / AFR 208
This course is not offered in the current catalog

The concept of time has been one of the most examined, yet least explicitly theorized, concepts in Africana Studies. While the field is saturated with historical studies and literary analyses that take up issues of cultural memory–which involves thinking about time–time itself has rarely the subject of sustained inquiry. This may be due to its abstractness as an idea, and the level of analysis its conceptualization demands, or because time in the Black experience cannot be understood outside of the meaning of race, which itself is not completely tangible. In this tutorial, “Time and Blackness,” we will explore how Black writers across a number of genres–spiritual autobiography, fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and cultural theory–understand time, and create paradigms of time to organize their work. The following questions will structure our investigation: What are the constituent elements of time in Black writings? How does race shape the ways Black writers conceive the experience of time? And, finally, to what can we attribute the recent surge in explicit, theoretical examinations of “time and blackness”?