Blackness and Time: Race, Anachronism, and Conspiracy

• In Event: Within the Empire: Black Liberation, Community, and Cultural Foundation

Abstract

This paper examines the temporal construction of blackness as a political and social concept. African culture and history have often faced erasure from Eurocentric narratives through the subtle imposition of terminology that effects temporal distance. This paper argues that "blackness" has often been constructed in ways that place African phenomena outside of time, rendering them ineffectual in the course of a Eurocentric social and political history. Building on the history of linguistic interrogation central to Black Studies scholarship, this paper consists in three sections. The first examines the temporal nature of reality as conceived in Western culture. Building on the influential distinction in linguistics pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure between synchronic (coeval) and diachronic (historical) linguistic inquiry, this paper argues for a third category, anachronic, in which phenomena stand outside of either history or the present. The second section offers a brief glimpse of the history of soul as a political concept and organizing principle beginning with the early Pan-Africanists' search for a cultural foundation rooted in the African past on which to build a Pan-African political future. Finally, this paper concludes by arguing that the temporal construction of blackness and the production of anachronism are inadequately theorized by the existing literature on race and racial oppression in the contemporary world. The enduring efficacy of conspiracy as a meaningful descriptor of the forces shaping Black political and social reality bears witness to the shortcomings of social and political theories rooted in Western mythologies of society and the state.

Author

• Bo Chamberlin, Temple University