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Abstract

This talk draws on the work of Frantz Fanon to ask after the temporal structures of racialized experience—what I call racialized time. In this vein, I analyze the racialized experience of coming “too late” to a world that appears predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility—the limitation of playfulness and imaginative variability—that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, splitting it into a duality of times. While white time is constructed as open and progressive, the times of racialized peoples are read backwards as closed and anachronistic. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I also look to the work of Latin American thinker, Anibal Quijano.

Free and open to all. Reception follows. The Sapientia Lecture Series is funded by The Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.