Fugitive time imagines a new form of being to sustain Black sociality---time is not linear, but a flowing system of memories that reinforce each other through performances. Our method of fugitivity builds upon these memories to bring people together and create alliances against neoliberalism.

Fugitive Time charts this utopian impulse as a theory of the experience of time: memories and anticipations, woundings and desires, culturally and historically marked. Through the lens of time as it manifests in the imagination—time as it passes from moment to moment—this study traces the embodied sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany one’s anticipated passage from subjection to freedom. It’s in the phenomenal outward vision and the subtle desire for transcendence animating Shikeith’s The Moment You Doubt Whether You Can Fly. It’s in the blink of an eye that separates the one figure’s dream of flight and the other’s seeming enactment of that dream. What I call “fugitive time” names the phenomenon in which one imagines what it might feel like to be free of the violence that has consumed blackness throughout the world for centuries. The anticipation of the outside of subjection is paramount, but the recurring haunting of violence as it bleeds into present consciousness remains fundamental, constituting the moment from which one flees. To be clear, this is not a theory of futurity or linear progress. Fugitive time’s utopia lies in the anticipated moment when pain has at last vanished from the body, whenever and wherever that may come, bringing with it a new form of being and being-in-the-world. As in all utopias, however, that moment of absolute release is elusive. If one does seem to touch on it, it quickly recedes. Instead, fugitive time is about sustaining the idea of the chase as a social gathering, the shared ecstasy of perpetually imagining in advance that moment of unburdening. As in Shikeith’s image, keeping an eye and a hand on the black balloon that just might lead, in that next moment, to new life.

In this book, aesthetics is how we see and witness fugitive time, as this introduction’s priming “scenes”—each revealing different valences and formations—demonstrate. The book attends to descriptive anticipation and desire in aesthetic works, how fugitive time manifests at the level of deliberately articulated ideas. But I’m also fundamentally concerned with the myriad ways fugitive consciousness is registered in narrative structure, in metaphor, in cinematic editing, in sonic texture, in physical objects and materials. To use the term Caroline Levine borrows from design theory, aesthetic form takes on “affordances”: “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs.” “Glass affords transparency and brittleness,” she suggests. “Enclosures afford containment and security,” whereas “the sonnet, brief and condensed, best affords a single idea or experience.”

Affordance broadens the idea of form so that we might ask “what potentialities lie latent—though not always obvious—in aesthetic and social arrangements” and how such arrangements “organize experience.”6 Rather than just describe time consciousness, the aesthetic works in this book afford time consciousness. By this I mean that their materials, designs, and structures provide additional ways of perceiving the subtle movements of memory and anticipation. Fugitive time’s indexing in montage editing, in tense and mood, in one musical instrument’s sound set against that of another, surrounds and complements those deliberate ideas of anticipated embodied escape expressed in a song or a film, together evincing layers of kinetic movements, sedimentations of fugitive dreaming. Cultural expression archives and maps these simultaneous temporal vectors, providing a multidimensional lens into black cultures and experiences from around the world. Through the confluence of form and description, aesthetic works make fugitive time consciousness perceivable.

These layers are in the simultaneously singular and double figure in Shikeith’s image, the way—at the touching of hands—the one form rises and becomes the next, black starkly set against white, as if the young man is picturing his body lifting through an ethereal passageway toward another world. It’s also in this wall stencil’s placement in the larger installation—in the affordances of the soil scattered on the floor, the sculpture of a prostrate man, the sound of a female voice singing “Over the Rainbow.” “I found a symbolic significance,” Shikeith said in one interview, “in working with what I refer to as these mutable, underground, and fugitive substances and forms such as dirt, spills, and blue light.”7 This idea of fugitive form and substance is central to Shikeith’s larger excavation of the interior lives and spaces of black queer masculinity, and central to the way I attend to fugitive time in this book.

The other fundamental feature of Fugitive Time is its geographic scope. This is a resoundingly global black project, not one limited to North America or even the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps the most evident connection among the circum-Atlantic geographies of this book—from Africa to the Caribbean to North America to Europe—is their common structural subjection that extends back centuries to the first Portuguese sea expeditions to the West African coast. What Frank Wilderson calls “blackened life” is a global historical structure that continues to organize the world today.8 It’s a constellation of interconnected, systemic subjections that has mutated across time and space: from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African captivity, to the slave castles of Elmina and Gorée, to the plantations across the Americas, to the European partition and colonization of the African continent, to the restructured violence of Jim Crow, to economic structural adjustment and postcolonial autocracy, to the transcontinental migrations of West Indians and Africans to the global North, to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, to the ongoing quotidian antiblack and xenophobic violence on the streets of Brussels, Johannesburg, and Rochester. These subjugations are varied, to be sure. But they all extend from that “natal alienation.”9 They all pivot back, however indirectly, to that originary designation as an object in the world.

As evident as these interrelations of subjection may be, however, the principal connection among this book’s geographies has more to do with the cultural responses to that violence—that which gets generated through the desire to be free. “The bridge between the people of Gwolu and me,” Saidiya Hartman proposes in Lose Your Mother (2006), “wasn’t what we had suffered or what we had endured but the aspirations that fueled flight and the yearning for freedom.”10 Likewise for Achille Mbembe, the African diaspora, inclusive of the African continent, is organized around the recognition of “a life that must at all costs be pulled out of the dungeon and . . . healed.”11 The idea of diaspora that organizes this project centers on the global circulation of cultures, languages, and discourses produced from these aspirations to be free and healed—understanding this circulation as structured by a network of “practices,” as Brent Hayes Edwards puts it, which produce not only “new and unforeseen alliances on a global stage” but also “unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings, persistent blindnesses and solipsisms . . . a failure to translate even a basic grammar of blackness.”12 The diaspora of this project, in other words, is always contingent, in search of intimacies and alliances among people of African descent, but always marked by difference.

Fugitive Time is allied with inspiring work that frames black life and diaspora as globally differentiated, where the African continent is not just a historical source but a diverse, vital, and coeval contributor to diasporic circulations and belongings. I’m thinking of Tsitsi Jaji’s notion of “stereomodernism,” a method of reading and listening to cultural production from across the global diaspora that accounts for difference but operates within a relational logic of pan-African solidarity.13 I also have in mind Keguro Macharia’s practice of reading “across geohistories, across difference, toward freedom.” Macharia conceives of the black diaspora as constituted by a “multiplicity of sense-apprehensions” that he names “frottage,” which includes notions of “recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion,” altogether composing a desire to “create new ways to imagine and be with one another.

Examining works from Martinique, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Britain, and the United States—ranging from fiction and poetry to music, film, and multimedia installation—Fugitive Time builds on and forges new lines of inquiry in this field, showing how this distinct experience of time remains, since the late eighteenth-century slave narrative, a dominant and recurring form of utopian time consciousness in global black cultural production.

The novel ends in midair. With Verlia “weightless,” her body having “fallen away,” “just a line, an electric current.” Leaping from the cliff, toward the sea, “she’s in some other place already, less tortuous, less fleshy.” Set between Toronto and an unnamed Caribbean island, shuttling between the mid- and late twentieth century, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996) features a figure who’s ahead of herself in her flight, occupying in advance that elsewhere in her mind. Feeling the weight fall from her body, electricity surging through her, as if she’s already there and then. Taking flight from the history that haunts blackness, from the heteronormative world that demonizes queer desire, from the suffocations of capital. Most of all, from memory, from the body. She’s leaping to her death, but also to her ecstasy, to her release. And this isn’t just a final moment. Brand’s nonlinear plotting constantly cycles around Verlia’s leap and the pain she flees, like a vortex that climbs and accumulates until it bursts out over the cliff. Meditations on insomnia, on loneliness, on “lifting a load but you don’t know what that load is” accrue. Persistent mentions of “riding out to sea” in her mind, dreams that she “multiplied into pieces and flew away,” prefigure her leap beyond this world.

The concept of fugitive time emerges from the intersection of the study of time consciousness in European continental thought and theories of fugitivity in black studies. These latter theories broadly postulate the ways people of African descent have historically responded to their subjugation by evading the very societal structures that have rendered black life unlivable. In my framing, fugitivity is a refusal to acknowledge the interpellation that negates black being. It enacts “a duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from the performance of the labor of the negative, to avoid the economy of objectification and standing against, to run away from the snares of recognition.”16 It means, in essence, fleeing the iconic scene in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks a split second before the child can utter the words “Look, a Negro!” Thinking alongside Fred Moten, it means escaping that encounter altogether, leaving the child breathless and the fugitive figure vanished, off to a world all their own. Fugitivity is a movement that runs in and out of the confines, fleeing the forces of surveillance and control as an ecstatic social gathering, collectively refusing what’s been refused to it.

Importantly, in the poems, music, images, and films I’ve collected in this book, fugitivity’s active planning and movement are not the form of agency that has become overwrought in studies in the humanities of subaltern groups countering a hegemonic force.17 As the Senegalese multidisciplinary artist Issa Samb insists of his own politics and practice, “To contest is not to refuse, it’s a form of acceptance,” a way of assenting to another’s terms. Samb, whose sprawling work I examine in chapter 4, instead opts to “detach,” refusing “all forms of existing society.”18 In the various artworks studied in this book, however, I want to be clear that fugitivity—this refusal to engage—is not in itself freedom. It is, more precisely, not yet freedom. But it’s an insistent imminence. Perhaps something more akin to what Rinaldo Walcott calls “proto-freedom,” an almost liberation that evinces a rhythm “difficult to capture, often glimpsed,” yet is too often “violently interdicted.”19 There’s something in this world that blocks black freedom, that tethers it to unfreedom despite that glimpse. Fugitivity’s stealth leans toward freedom, but, as Darieck Scott cautions on the question of agency, with indeterminacy and contingency, where power is always “provisional and to some degree slippery and suggestive.”20 Slipperiness and suggestiveness, we might say, facilitate the operations of eyeing for an opening.

With this contingency in mind, fugitivity names a movement of the physical body, but it also suggests a form of consciousness that corresponds to the myriad desires that signal an as yet unrealized freedom. Fugitive consciousness is integral to the way that Jared Sexton, for instance, characterizes black captivity as “open to an outside about which it will not know anything and about which it cannot stop thinking, a nervous system always in pursuit of the fugitive movement it cannot afford to lose and cannot live without.”21 Hartman likewise describes this frame of mind as a collective “dream of an elsewhere,” a ceaseless set of imaginative operations.22 Ultimately, the broad idea of fugitivity that animates this book aligns with Neal Roberts’s notion of marronage as the “liminal and transitional social space” that separates unfreedom and freedom.23 But in this project, that transitional space is not just social. It’s temporal, affective, ontological. It’s saturated with desire for the outside of unfreedom. The elusive other side of fugitivity promises transcendence for black life, even if it always remains just that: a promise.

Fugitive Time builds on the work of Hartman, Moten, Roberts, and others by theorizing fugitivity not just as a structure of consciousness, but of time consciousness. This book proposes a way of conceiving of time within this strain of black studies thought by drawing on what’s often referred to as “phenomenological time,” the study of the human perception of time as a constantly ebbing and flowing system of memories and anticipations. Dating to St. Augustine’s eleventh-century Confessions, it’s an approach that attends to the ways the mind registers the passing of time from moment to moment, and how this expansive system of anticipations and memories contributes to one’s sense of being and being-in-the-world. This phenomenological analytic is central to Martin Heidegger’s construction of Dasein in Being and Time (1927), as well as Paul Ricoeur’s influential work on narrative and fiction in the three volumes of Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988). But it was Edmund Husserl’s conception of the “ever expanding now,” notably in his turn-of-the-century lectures assembled in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), that renewed interest in this philosophical method. The example Husserl returns to again and again is the human perception of a musical melody: one’s recognition not just of the moment of a tone’s articulation (the now point) but also of the simultaneous perception of that tone’s continual recession into the past (memory) and the coming of a new articulation (anticipation).24 But Fugitive Time escapes this work, as it were, on this question of the human—what Sylvia Wynter would call Husserl and Heidegger’s formulation of the colonial “ethnoclass mode of being human, Man,” and its overrepresentation as that of the human species tout court. 25 Where these thinkers sought to uncover a universal humanness through phenomenology, Fugitive Time zooms in on the memories and anticipations stitched into aesthetic works to uncover a culturally and historical distinct conception of time. The project presents not a monolithic temporality, but one of multitudes, examining how disparate African diasporic cultures produce their own versions of this phenomenological fugitive time.

One of the foundational ideas to emerge from these studies in phenomenology—another, no doubt, in need of amendment—is Ernst Bloch’s notion of “anticipatory consciousness.” In the first volume of The Principle of Hope (1954), he describes the temporal “poles” of time consciousness as the “darkness” of the lived moment and one’s openness to the “outside.” The immediacy of “the now,” he suggests, is a moment of enclosure. The now is the point from which the human least comprehends experience: it “burrows in itself and cannot feel itself.” But in the phenomenal flow of time—specifically the moments just after and just before the now moment—the prior or coming “now” becomes legible as experience: “Only what is just coming up or what has just passed has the distance which the beam of growing consciousness needs to illuminate it.” Intuition nevertheless rises from the blindness of the now and the points of illumination phenomenologically surrounding it. “What is driving in the Now at the same time continually surges forward,” he maintains. The surge is a kind of outward searching, an “urging, wishing, doing.”