Black Relativity: On Law, Music, and Spirit in (Anti-)Black Time

by

James Stevenson Ramsey

Advisors: Dr. Todne Thomas and Ethan Goodnight

A Senior Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Master of Divinity

Harvard Divinity School

Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 5, 2021

For Mama, Dad, and Uncle John

In the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the nameless, Black protagonist begins his account by reflecting on the anti-Blackness that shrouds his true nature: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”1 This “invisible” position, which is to say the position of the Black, offers him a unique perspective of the world around him, including the nature of time others may take for granted:

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.2

For him, time is relative, and his Blackness estranges him from society’s default or given experiences and understandings of time; Black folk are “never quite on the beat,” whatever the governing “beat” is or is assumed to be, even as the song goes on and on. He goes on to illustrate this relativity through an anecdote:

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior…. The yokel had simply stepped inside his opponent’s sense of time.3 (emphasis mine)

This memory serves as an allegory for the protagonist’s theory of time. The two boxers embodied different rhythms, different senses of time, and the dissonance between them led to the prizefighter’s defeat, even with all of his speed and sophistication. This is a scene where time is not some single flow that surrounds history, but multivalent, both (and differently) internal to

1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 3. 2 Ellison, 8. 3 Ellison, 8.

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each fighter and observable from the outside (the protagonist, for example, tells us that he watched the passage of these events, and he detected as a third party the times each boxer resided in). Here, time can be disrupted, this disruption is violent and shocking, and the Black experience of time is this disruption and dissonance in perpetuity, “never quite on the beat.” (emphasis mine)

This scene and the protagonist’s reflections on time comprise, in other words, a story about time, its (de)naturalization, its violences, and their repetitions and effects on Black life. I want to think alongside this story in its illustration of different embodiments of time, bodies beyond “time” as such, and the trappings and traumas thereof. In particular, I am interested in how imposed categories and renderings of what we understand as “time” are informed by power, anti-Blackness in particular; how these renderings of time bolster anti-Black power; and how

Black folk resist and/or turn time into sacred occasion to honor and sustain Black life. In this paper, I argue that manipulated time’s function as a constitutive element of the governing, anti-

Black, sociopolitical order is evident in various aspects of (United States) law. And, against and within this order, I argue that Black capacity to resist and refigure time is evident in Black music, which this paper explores through “readings” of two compositions—“Come Sunday” and

“Ostinato (Suite for Angela)”—and their respective performances.

My point of departure is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

There, through literature, art, and social analysis, Sharpe explicates Black life as caught in the wake of transatlantic chattel slavery and, importantly, advocates intentionally thinking and acting from this standpoint. In her words, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care… and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.”4

4 Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 5.

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Her project is one that thus foregrounds “the wake” as its operative metaphor for Black life and imagines ways Black folk might survive and resist it both as a practice and a way of thinking, what she refers to as “wake work.”5

Sharpe’s work is important and instructive for my project as I, too, attempt to think across disciplines to articulate some of the perils and possibilities of Black life under what are evidently intractable, even spiritual circumstances of oppression. Indeed, her and other scholars’ understanding that slavery persists in various afterlives that give contemporary Black life shape is an illustration of the kind of time-making and -altering violence I am concerned with here—in

Sharpe’s words, the violence of “that past not yet past.”6 By juxtaposing Black study, legal studies, music, and religion in the multidisciplinary fashion In the Wake is written, this project seeks to interrogate some of the multifaceted mechanisms by which something even as seemingly transcendent as time structures and is structured by anti-Blackness and, along with these, how Black folk yet live otherwise under these conditions. In this way, I demonstrate that the violences of and resistances to anti-Blackness transcend genre, implicating the variegated lifeworlds and the very souls of Black folk.7

On the “Hold”

One of the metaphors Christina Sharpe employs in In the Wake to signify these wake experiences is the “hold” of the slave ship, not only as the place where slaves were physically transported, but also as the images, ideas, and technologies that continue to characterize and make up the various violences of containment suffered by Black people. Despite this concept’s

5 Sharpe, 18. 6 Sharpe, 13. 7 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903).

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rootedness in the particularity of transatlantic slavery, Sharpe is not only concerned with the

Black descendants of those who were formally chattel; as she emphasizes throughout In the

Wake, the wake of slavery and the hold encapsulate life for Black diaspora in its international, geographic variety. More broadly, she is grappling with worldwide “violence at the level of a structure that required, indeed invented, the Black as the constitutive outside for those who would construct themselves as the Human.”8 (emphasis in original) For Sharpe, slavery and the

Middle Passage that help(ed) constitute it are indispensable parts of this structure that continues to produce Blackness “whether we [i.e., any Black person] made that passage or not.”9 (emphasis in original) As such, the hold in its modern manifestations “appears in Calais, Toronto, New

York City, Haiti, Lampedusa, Tripoli, Sierra Leone, Bayreuth, and so on.”10 My paper is an extension of and riff off this metaphor that has global implications, arguing that time is a part of the hold’s construction, in the United States and wherever else it might be.

Conversely, in Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle

Wright calls us to move beyond the hold, critiquing what she calls “Middle Passage epistemology,” which she defines as a way of making sense of Black collective history that espouses what she argues is a “linear progress narrative” from Africa, through the slave trade, to plantations, up from slavery after formal emancipation, and onward into Black liberation movements and ostensibly more free forms of modern Black life.11 For her, reducing all diasporic Black experience to narratives stemming from slavery obscures the complexities and multiplicities of Black life, and it limits the representative and liberative capacities of Blackness

8 Sharpe, 141. 9 Sharpe, 32. 10 Sharpe, 83. 11 Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 43-47.

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as a signifier. Wright therefore argues that an understanding of Blackness through the primacy of the Middle Passage (i.e., through a narrative from Africa to slavery and beyond) should be qualified, abandoned, and/or supplemented by other, perhaps less neatly linear narratives, including what she calls “Epiphenomenal time,” an emphasis on a conception of the “now” woven into notions of “past” and “future.”12

But Wright’s critique of focusing on slavery and its Middle Passage as a basis and, per

Sharpe, a problem for (Black) thought slips past the nuanced conceptions of Blackness set forth in In the Wake. First, Sharpe (and this project) understands Black people as those who have been interpellated as particularly enslavable, fungible, etc. such that Black people everywhere inherit the legacies of subjection reserved for Black slaves. There is not a neat ontological difference between, say, captives taken from the shores of modern-day Benin and their family members who remained behind, nor between the establishment of plantations in the Caribbean and the carving up of Africa through and beyond the turn of the 20th century by European powers, in that all of these phenomena are tied to and justified by (anti-)Blackness as articulated in Western conquest, of which slavery was an inextricable part. Indeed, as scholars such as Cedric Robinson have argued, the underpinnings of the modern nation-state and global capital(ism) are themselves founded upon the slave trade of so-called “Negroes.”13 Second, and as such, neither slavery nor its Middle Passage were/are merely a discrete historical event or set of events bounded by space and time. Instead, they were/are an irruption of a paradigm that transforms the (possibilities of) discourse that precedes and follows it, along with the attendant material conditions thereof and how they are understood. As Fred Moten argues in his critique of Wright in Stolen Life:

12 Wright, 41. 13 See, e.g., Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 66-68.

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The time of the middle passage is not fixed; it is the brutal ekstasis of a global condition, as Henry and Dionne Brand, Gayl Jones and Julie Dash, M. Jacqui Alexander and Grace Nichols, M. NourbeSe Philip and Lorna Goodison, among a host of others, both in and out of the hemispheric configuration of the African American, constantly assert. The middle passage is and opens onto an alternative warp, enacting its own singular rupture of the space-time continuum, of a transcendental aesthetic that lays down the terms and conditions of possibility for the modern subject of knowledge and power.”14

In other words, and grounding this paper, transatlantic chattel slavery is a constitutive part of the shape of Blackness in its diasporic multiplicity. Therefore, as a history, paradigm, and ongoing force to be contended with, the Middle Passage is inescapable for the Black, and the hold as conceptualized by Sharpe, which was and is the vehicle for the Middle Passage and its afterlives, remains in contemporary, varied iterations as something for the global Black diaspora to apprehend and a place from which (they ought) to think. Alongside Sharpe, then, my aim here is to offer a way of thinking through how the hold’s “time,” unfixed and ubiquitous as it is, is in a co-constitutive relationship with anti-Blackness, and I also seek to articulate some of the ways in which Black folk subversively shape and move within that “time,” even as they are held in the wake of the slavery that continues to makes the world.

Anti-Black Time

If the hold of the slave ship, as Sharpe argues, can be understood as a way of conceptualizing the constraining, “containerizing” violences which continue to characterize

Black life, then, extending this metaphor, I argue that time is an important part of its construction and that this manifests in a variety of ways. Put differently, the ongoing logics of the slave ship that Sharpe is concerned with give rise to and are subtended by various operations of and through time and its manipulation. One such operation is forcing the Black out of time, rendering them

14 Fred Moten, Stolen Life, Consent Not to Be a Single Being, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 208-09.

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without it—(as) timeless. In Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American

Diaspora, Stephanie Smallwood describes how slaves in the hold were sealed into a kind of temporal void where any prior ways of understanding or organizing time were obliterated. In that place, they were often unable to determine how much time had passed since they left the shores of Africa, the changing of seasons, the speed of their travel, and, as a result, where they were at any given point:

“Their travel as captives thus made it enormously difficult for Africans to clearly distinguish the phases of their journey, or to anticipate the end of one phase or the beginning of another…. Always in motion but seeming to never reach any destination, the ship plowed forward in time without ever getting anywhere, always seeming to be in the same place as the day before. It was as if time were standing still.”15

Slaves, unable to orient themselves to the world, were made to be lost, both geographically and temporally; indeed, their containment in the hold was coextensive with their containment in this kind of temporal no-place, a no-time. The hold was, in the words of Smallwood, “temporal and spatial entrapment.”16 In “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness,” Calvin

Warren argues that this disorientation and displacement is key to the very making of the slave, which is to say the Black:

“Temporal domination is essential to slavery; its purpose is to disorient, objectify, and terrify. Not knowing where you are, how long you’ve been there, how long this torment will continue, or if there is an end in sight is part of the domination that separates the white ship captain from the black cargo in the dark hold….Blackness is the product of such temporal domination….”17

Understood this way, this kind of temporal domination is a permutation of what Orlando

Patterson observes as one of the constitutive elements of slavery (and social death): natal

15 Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 135. 16 Smallwood, 125. 17 Calvin Warren, "Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness," in The Psychic Hold of Slavery Legacies in American Expressive Culture, ed. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Aida Levy-Hussen, and Robert J. Patterson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 60.

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alienation, whereby the slave is disconnected (or attempts are made to disconnect them) from their origins, rights, traditions, and heritages.18 Natal alienation is, as he argues, a crucial part of the experience and making of the slave, and we might extend the theory to our observations of the hold’s temporal functions; in the hold, the slave is cut off from their own ways of marking time (including their histories, cultures, and geographies) and from time in general as conceived of, instituted, and inhabited by their captors—this is temporal alienation. In Warren’s words,

“[t]he captive lives outside of metaphysical time, without a future, without an accessible past

(natal alienation), and in a present overwhelmed with the immediacy of bodily pain, psychic torment, and routine humiliation. Time is terror.”19 (emphasis in original)

How is it that the slave is able to be continuously changed in this way, even after their kidnapping? What process or quality allows them to be conditioned to be, paradoxically, both exiled from “time” and trapped within it? In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-

Black World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson refers to this imputed alterability as plasticity, whereby the humanity, essence, and bodies of Black people are rendered endlessly and ontologically transformable through and for the purposes of slavery and its afterlives.20 For example, Jackson observes that through this plasticization, Blackness is often and historically, but not only, interpellated as the abject, bestialized, detestable aspects of “humanity” as hegemonically defined by the master class.21 But more fundamentally, Jackson argues that the destructive force and potential of this mode of anti-Black violence via slavery (and vice-versa) lies in the plasticization itself: “Arguably, plasticization is the fundamental violation of enslavement: not

18 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5. 19 Warren, 60. 20 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Sexual Cultures, (New York: New York University Press, 2020). 21 Jackson, 46-47.

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any one particular form of violence—animalization or objectification, for instance—but rather coerced formlessness as a mode of domination and the Unheimlich existence that is its result.”22

This process of coercing formlessness is a fundamental and ongoing reshaping of who and what a (Blackened) person is, as well as their relationship to the master class and, I argue, to time—a continuous orientation, reorientation, and disorientation of personhood (and, per Patterson, heritage and tradition) that legitimates anti-Black governance: “Black beings are disoriented within… time…. This disorientation provides the necessary existential ground to discipline, punish, and destroy black bodies.”23 With respect to time, the plasticization of the Black manifests in their temporal entrapments (which is to say their being made into one who is temporally trappable) in no-time and the resultant physical and existential horror.

If, as Sharpe and Smallwood argue, the hold, its logics, and its traumas reproduce themselves in various forms throughout and beyond the formal institution of chattel slavery, a second temporal operation that grounds and issues forth from the hold is the reconfiguration of the slave’s time according to the will of others. This is related to the placing of the slave in a timeless void as mentioned before; once the slave is unmoored from their own temporal schema and set outside of the temporality of their masters, time for them is then able to be bent according to the discretion of the master class. As Walter Johnson observes in “Possible Pasts: Some

Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” plantations, for example, were settings in which this complete authority over slaves’ time was made manifest.

There, slaveowners decided which days would be workdays and when they began and ended.

Slaveowners punished tardiness and premature quitting. Slaveowners were the ultimate authority of the broad shape of their slaves’ lifespans, determining when they began (both in terms of

22 Jackson, 71. 23 Warren, 61.

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owning the birth documents and in their breeding of slaves); deciding what kind of work was appropriate for each age and what corresponding monetary value attached to that age; and controlling the time and/or the circumstances of their slaves’ deaths, whether killing them slowly or quickly.24 Additionally, Smallwood notes that even slaves who were already on the plantations were still “trapped, inside the one-way route of… slavery and also within a colonial regime of time-space imposed from without, whose contours they could not know and which they could not navigate on their own terms.”25 Here, the one-way route Smallwood refers to is the constant rhythm and flow of slave ships to their shores which constantly brought new slaves and, with them, the specific traumas of the Middle Passage.26 Through violence, then, slaves were subject to temporal fetters fashioned by the master class, enchained to both their whims and a continual rehashing of the trauma brought about by their initial abduction. This epitomizes what Warren refers to as “black time,” which is “time” at any and all points configured to inflict suffering upon and extract profit and meaning from Black people.27 In Johnson’s words,

“[Masters] infused their slaves with their own time—through the daily process of slave discipline, the foreign, the young, and the resistant were forcibly inculcated with the nested temporal rhythms of their enslavement.”28 Put differently, to return to Jackson, if “Black” personhood is plastic, forced to be formless and limitlessly displaceable and transformable “with no regard for the potential irreparable effects of ontological slippage,”29 so, too, is Black time.

24 Walter Johnson, "Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery," Amerikastudien/American Studies 45, no. 4 (2000): 491-92. 25 Smallwood, 185. 26 Smallwood, 183. 27 Smallwood, 61. 28 Johnson, 491-92. 29 Jackson, 71.

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Related to both temporal alienation and plasticized time, a third temporal violence visited upon Black people by and for the hold is their establishment as timeless, not only in the sense of being without and/or outside of time as explored before, but also in its natural, lexical sense of being excluded from time’s effects—from change. Here, I am thinking with Frank Wilderson when he argues that Black people, unlike non-Black people, have no narrative arc available to them:

The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic slave who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line… that “moves” from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated. To put it differently, the violence which both elaborates and saturates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inaccessible to Blacks.30 (emphasis in original)

This flat line might be understood as an outgrowth of Smallwood’s “temporal entrapment” whereby Black people are contained in an externally imposed (non)temporal scheme.

Wilderson’s theorization of the Black as one who is restricted to a certain structural position that does not fundamentally change is, in other words, an illustration of what Hortense Spillers raises in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” when she claims that the slave is “the essence of stillness,… or of an undynamic human state.”31 And, as Wilderson argues, if the Black is stillness incarnate and barred from narrative movement, which is to say from time’s change, they are also barred from the concept of “redemption” in Western thought—“Historicity and redemption are inextricably bound.”32

But, more importantly, the function of this timelessness—this stillness, or frozenness in time or at the base of (a) narrative—is that it serves as the cornerstone upon which all other

30 Frank B. Wilderson, III, "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption," (2016), https://humanitiesfu- tures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/. 31 Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 224. 32 Wilderson.

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narratives (or, per Wilderson, all other historicities) as determined by the governing order are built:

Both [historicity and redemption] are inherently anti-Black in that without the psychic and/or physical presence of a sentient being that is barred, ab initio, from narrative and, by extension, barred from redemption, the arc of redemption would lack any touchstones of cohesion. One would not be able to know what a world devoid of redemption looks like.33

In other words, reading Wilderson alongside Warren and Smallwood illuminates Blackness, its interpellation through temporal violence, and the temporal violence levied at Blackened peoples as the materials that provide coherence to the temporal schemata of the so-called (white) Human.

The “longue durée”34 of the wake of slavery in which the Black is both placed in no-time, subject to the temporal proclivities of the master class, and kept there—plasticized humanity, temporal alienation, and its plasticized, stilled time —makes Humanity’s time legible, serving as the “touchstone” for any of its grand timelines, even those of so-called liberalism and/or liberal multiculturalism.

Further, in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Willie Jennings describes how this conception of an overarching timeline initially comprised and legitimized the colonial, slave-making enterprise and, I add, its modern-day afterlives, anthropologically and theologically. This particular understanding of time allowed early European explorers to distance themselves temporally from the peoples they encountered in the broad, Western scheme of history they articulated; specifically, they understood the peoples they would conquer as underdeveloped adherents to so-called “primitive,” “old,” or otherwise “prior” ways of being.35

This, as Johannes Fabian explains in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object,

33 Wilderson. 34 Sharpe, 22. 35 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 45-47.

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constituted an understanding of the colonizer as being in a time different from and superior to that of the colonized, or on a farther-along point in some divinely (as they understood the

Divine) established chronology of human development.36 In short, to Europeans, the non-white were always ripe for conquer and conversion on account of their inferiority, conceptually held in waiting to grow or be grown into something whiter.

And, while their destiny was supposedly whiteness, these colonized peoples were also the foil against which the white defined not only themselves, but also their (Christian) faith. As

Jennings’s work illuminates, the imperialist conception of the viability of a people’s salvation and redemption was intimately related to this racialized hierarchy and timeline of cultural- phenotypic development, with Black people being the furthest away from the idealized

“Christian man” and whiteness, on the other hand, representing the“ high[est] salvific probability” among creation.37 Here, time functioned as a linear scheme by which white conquerors distinguished themselves from others evolutionarily and mapped all peoples onto different stages of Christian formation. This was the formulation and imposition of a durable, multinational, racial-theological structure of time, with Blackness signifying the darkest, most wretched, reprobate, and prior condition to reference and/or be saved and redeemed from.38 The subjugation of indigenous and Black peoples, which established the essence and legacy of whiteness, was therefore tied to white ways of making sense of the world, which is to say white theologies and their embedded assumptions about culture, personhood, and time:

[European Christians] saw themselves as those ordained to enact a [divinely] providential transition. In so doing they positioned themselves as those first conditioning their world rather than being conditioned by it. They performed a deeply theological act that mirrored the identity and action of God in creating…. What is decisive here is that a creative

36 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25-27. 37 Jennings, 35-37. 38 Jennings, 37.

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authority, a creative regime, gets channeled through white presence…. All peoples touched by the machinations of colonialist operations get caught up in that creative regime.39

Within this theological formulation, “time” is both a production and foundational feature of what

Jennings refers to here as Europeans’ colonial, “creative regime[s].” And, along this regime’s continuum of human and theological development, this linear arrangement of peoples into relative times, Blackened peoples were frozen forever at the earliest and/or most evil position, and subsequent stages of development leading all the way up to whiteness and holiness were defined over and against Blackness.40 All of this was, of course, existentially and financially profitable for the colonial enterprise and its subjects, providing theological and anthropological grounds for the continuous extraction of bodies and resources, enslavement, and the ideological elevation of whiteness over all else.41 And importantly, as Fabian notes, this theological conception of time (and, I argue, (anti-)Blackness within time) persists in the modern, more secularized afterlives of the colonial empire;42 it is within this framework, for example, that a young, injured, Black Michael Brown might appear as “like a demon” to an armed agent of the

United States in 2014.43

However, the hegemonic time described by Jennings and Fabian is not limited to the kind of linear conception of time and human development they observe in slavers and colonists. For example, as mentioned before, Walter Johnson illustrates in his account of the temporal lives of the enslaved how (anti-)Black time is variously warped into lines, cycles, cages, chaos, order,

39 Jennings, 60. 40 Jennings, 35-37. 41 See Robinson, Black Marxism, 67. 42 Fabian, 25-27. 43 Transcript of Grand Jury Volume V, Missouri v. Darren Wilson (Sept. 16, 2014), 225, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1370658-grand-jury-volume-5.html.

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time taken, and time given, all enforced by physical and psychic violence.44 Anti-Black theologies of time were—and, per Sharpe, are—therefore not only encapsulated by a straight line from damned to saved; more fundamentally, Black time along with Black people were/are rendered as another providential gift, another aspect of Edenic, untamed nature to creatively define and subdue as one sees fit. The aforementioned, earth-shattering line from “past peoples” to “saved/redeemed/future peoples" is but one conceptual outgrowth of this appropriated, theological, and still-contemporary temporal dominance.

Time in the wake of conquest and slavery, then, which is to say time in the hold, is at its root (anti-)Black time as controlled and determined by another, where Black self-determination is severely wounded by design, with spiritual force and, historically, religious sanction. And it is through different, anti-Black, temporal maneuvers and violences such as those synthesized here—temporal alienation, temporal plasticization, and temporal freezing—that the hold as conceived of by Sharpe is imbued with an awesome power that persists and multiplies Black

(social) death across generations; “time” constructs the hold, and the hold constructs (anti-)Black time.

Anti-Black Time as Law

As bases for the formation of the West and its subsidiaries, these anti-Black operations of time saturate the world-making processes through which polities like what is now known as the

United States can come to exist. Instrumental to the ongoing nature of their governance and the attendant institutions thereof is the law and certain conceptions of “time" it takes as given.

Numerous thinkers in critical race and legal studies have explicated the law’s orientation against

44 Johnson, 491-492.

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Black people more thoroughly than what can be outlined in this paper. However, of particular interest here are the ways in which the anti-Black orientations and outcomes of the law manifest in and are constituted by the kinds of temporal techniques described before—namely, the rendering of Black people out of time and into a temporal void, manipulating or attempting to manipulate Black time (i.e., its plasticization), and freezing Black people in a certain, profitable temporal space. Understood in this context, the law—defined here as the government’s collection of statutes, codes, legal institutions, and legality more broadly—exemplifies and is mobilized by these violent, anti-Black regimes of time that help constitute its apposite sociopolitical order.

While neither the law nor its sociopolitical order are monolithic or unchanging, I argue that they, whatever their shifts and changing sensibilities throughout history, continue to rest on legacies and dispositions of anti-Blackness and its temporal violences, even as their particular manifestations may change. The United States is one locale within this order and the primary subject of this inquiry, but, as Sharpe emphasizes in her work, the hold—and, I argue, its time— is a paradigm through which the myriad violences facing the global Black diaspora might be understood. Here, then, I turn to United States law and the anti-Black temporal schemes it implies as one part of a more expansive, transnational tapestry which may manifest similar entanglements elsewhere.

In a sense, time is one of the primary ingredients in law’s conception and enforcement.

For example, much of law is, at its core, an attempt to account for and/or regulate the future behavior of the governed in some way, while other aspects of the law attempt to remedy and/or acknowledge past behavior. Additionally, along with looking backward and forward, the law and its application may also be concerned with mediating among present interests of various stakeholders: Where is the plaintiff now? If some wrong has been committed, what are the

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claimants’ current injuries? Does this person convicted of a crime presently appear remorseful?

And, in these regulations of time, the law prescribes or, at least, illumines pathways for the balancing and prioritization of some temporalities over others. A certain statute of limitations, for example, might extinguish what may have otherwise been a legal remedy because, essentially, the alleged violation was too long ago. Or, the supposed severity of a certain alleged past crime might override any consideration of the alleged perpetrator’s present disposition or future possibilities, as in those crimes which the state argues warrants capital punishment or a sentence of life without parole. In these ways, the law governs various temporal locations (e.g., past, present, and future) while also constructing them; for instance, by naming an action or idea as inherently already or not yet done, the law categorically places it outside of the bounds of the present, and vice-versa.

Put differently, the mutual co-constitution of the law and civil society, which is to say the governing sociopolitical order, is a structuring in and of time. Patrice Douglass addresses this relationship between law, society, and time in “On (Being) Fear: Utah v. Strieff and the Ontology of Affect,” where she also explores some of the latent, anti-Black assumptions and implementations of the law as expressed in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s ostensibly progressive dissent in Utah v. Strieff.45 There, the majority opinion held that, although police officer Douglas

Fackrell illegally stopped Edward Strieff, Fackrell’s discovery of an outstanding warrant for

Strieff in the course of that illegal stop validated his resultant arrest.46 In her dissent, Douglass argues, Sotomayor invokes fear as a node through which various registers of time are negotiated and interpreted in the law. For example, Sotomayor implicitly concedes that if Officer Fackrell

45 Patrice D. Douglass, “On (Being) Fear: Utah v. Strieff and the Ontology of Affect.” Journal of Visual Culture 17, no. 3 (2018), 332-42. 46 Utah v. Strieff, 576 U.S. ___ (2016), 1.

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had a valid reason to fear Strieff, the illegal stop and following search might have been justified:

“Remember, the officer stopped Strieff without suspecting him of committing any crime. By his own account, the officer did not fear Strieff.”47 Douglass interprets this to mean that “fear is a logical [and, paradoxically, legal] reason for an officer to step outside of the bounds of the law.”48 Fear, however, is itself inundated with anti-Black subtext and, as Douglass is careful to highlight, “has been deputized against Black bodies and employed as justification for their violation,”49 as in the murders of Michael Brown, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Breonna

Taylor, and many others.

The mobilization of fear as an excuse for officer (mis)conduct, an excuse already given in and as the law, is deepened in Sotomayor’s dissent, and it affirms the law’s linkages to time. For

Douglass, the law-fear-time relationship as expressed in the dissent operates on multiple levels.

In one register, she analyzes how fear is invoked in legal space as mentioned above— particularly, as a kind of legal carte blanche for the violences of policing. And, here, policing is inherently anti-Black insofar as to be Black is, by definition, to be a criminal, the paradigmatic specter from which the police must always protect the citizen: “Acknowledging that Black people are the targets of policing does nothing more than solicit agreement with a fact that is already well known, that policing is for the Black. Which is to say, Black people animate the scope of cognition with respect to criminality.”50 This kind of fear is of a threat that imbricates the past, present and future; in enacting such violence through what Wilderson might call a

“Negrophobogenesis,”51 the police—along with the law they enforce—are responding in the

47 Strieff, 6 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). 48 Douglass, 335. 49 Douglass, 335. 50 Douglass, 337. 51 See, e.g., Frank B. Wilderson III, "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal." Social Justice (San Francisco, Calif.) 30, no. 2 (92) (2003): 18-27.

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present to a supposed, potential threat from the future based on anti-Black structures of thought, feeling, and societal organization formed in the past, before the materialization of the threat

(even as the production of such structures is an ongoing process). Sotomayor’s failure to account for this relationship between (anti-)Blackness and fear (i.e., as both relate to policing) therefore

“misappropriates the law as separate from, and not parcel to, the violence of its enforcement.”52

But, in another way, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is meant to warn against a different kind of threat in time—namely, the consequences of the court’s decision:

“Do not be soothed by the [majority] opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you [i.e., the reader, though the assumed race of the reader is not clear] on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant.”53

Along with this warning, Sotomayor describes elsewhere related violations to privacy and dignity (e.g., the bodily violations of stop-and-frisk practices, the total control of the police officer over the stopped person in that situation, etc.) that the majority opinion potentially exacerbates, all of which Douglass considers to be instantiations of the afterlives—what Sharpe might call the “wake”—of slavery that already particularly affect Black people: “Given the captive violence that binds together slavery and its afterlife, it’s clear that this arrangement is not new. From the barracoon to the slave ship, to the plantation, to the prison, Black bodies have been stripped, penetrated, and inspected without the prior consideration of consent.”54

Sotomayor’s framing, then, betrays a certain anxiety about a devolution or reversion to a supposedly prior state of subjecthood (or, per Saidiya Hartman, subjection55), where there are no

52 Douglass, 334. 53 Strieff, 1 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). 54 Douglass, 336. 55 See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Race and American Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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reliable rights or protections against the abuses of overseers/officers.56 Absent from her opinion is the explicit recognition that this kind of subjection already constitutes the lived, contemporary reality of Black people—the law has already brought about that which she fears. Nevertheless, this anxiety leads her to invoke the language of the Movement for Black Lives and the Black radical tradition more broadly, as in, “[Victims of police violence] are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere”; “Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but”; and her citations of thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin.57 However, as Douglass observes, despite her usage of this rhetoric and these thinkers, Sotomayor dilutes her focus on the then (and always) current violences referenced by the Movement for Black Lives and, instead, is more concerned about the imminent infiltration of the kinds of injustices of a so-called prior age due to the court’s holding: “Rather than attending to [the movement’s immediate demands for an end to police violence against Black people], I argue, the dissent displaces that concern with a focus on past and future violence rather than a direct focus on the current state of antiblack policing.”58

This displacement and dilution of Black experience are not accidental, even if they were not consciously contemplated by Justice Sotomayor; they are features of the default terms of engagement within legal discourse, which most often functions to, as Sotomayor attempts to do in her dissent, legitimize the law and the sociopolitical order it helps structure.

Accordingly, while it might be argued that Sotomayor does, in fact, at least partly attend to the demands of Black organizers by using their rhetoric at all, of special interest here are the ways in which she dodges the substance of abolitionist critique by implying that the law is

56 For more on the lexical and historical overseer-officer connection, see KRS-One, "Sound of da Police," in Return of the Boom Bap (New York: JIVE, 1993), compact disc. 57 Strieff, 12 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). 58 Douglass, 337.

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supposed to stave off future threats and past violences and how, in the absence of the court’s erroneous holding, the law would do just that. As Douglass notes, this framing assumes that those threats are not yet here and/or that these indignities are merely things of the past. These assumptions transpose the current realities of Black folk—here, the various, constraining violences of the United States as a police state—to “back then” or the possible and/or likely future (i.e., not here, not now). In other words, Sotomayor’s dissent and its imbedded assumptions signify a complex knot of temporalities that insidiously perpetuates violence against

Black flesh in congruence with more overt Western tradition(s). For her, laws are to protect against the future activity of so-called criminals (and we have already been taught what criminality is, anti-Black as that pedagogy was/is), and the state legislates and enforces that legislation thusly. And these laws, the logic goes, protect us against savage, illiberal tendencies of what is purportedly a past time, and, absent the law’s protection, those tendencies might rush forward and/or back onto us in the here-and-now as, in Douglass’s words, “a threat from the future but anchored by the past that augments the trajectory of the present.”59 Through conceptual maneuvers and assumptions like these, the law effectively exiles dissonant Black experiences into the mythical before and/or the hypothetical after; the timeframe of Black suffering is placed elsewhere, apposite contemporaneity, hidden by and for the law’s coherence.

Sotomayor’s dissent—comprised of faith in the law, fear, and the presuppositions that ground them and the governing order—thus illustrates how the law is grounded both in fear, sutured to fear’s juridical and temporally twisted ties to Black suffering, and in the displacement

Black suffering from the present. Of course, the extent to which this dissent can be said to be

“law” or metonymic for it is debatable. However, the point here is that Sotomayor’s words

59 Douglass, 336.

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illustrate how the law operates (at least in principle) in and outside of time; how, in its “onto- theological machination,”60 it engages belief and shapes observation and perception, how it uses and shapes time, and that the law and these temporalities it assumes and produces are interwoven with (anti-)Blackness.

Anti-Black Time in Captivity

In this way, the law serves as a kind of vector through which the hold’s temporal violences, what I have loosely referred to as anti-Black regimes of time, come to be. Perhaps the most salient manifestation of this, particularly the taking of a person out of time, is the prison. In the United States, the prison is at the heart of the (carceral) state, the paradigm and first principle of the threat of punishment that animates legality. The seizure and/or displacement of persons

(including execution as a kind of ultimate seizure-displacement) is the basis of the law’s coercive power and the place from which the state monopolizes and/or distributes violence throughout and beyond its borders. To be sure, there are other ways of establishing rules in a society that do not necessarily involve state-sponsored prison or prison-adjacent consequences—this is the future that prison abolitionists, for example, work toward. However, in this country, the laws imposed on the populace are backed up by force, and that force takes the shape of arrests, detention centers, jails, prisons, fines and fees (which, for the poor, often amount to prison later on), and probation (a prison-in-place). Prison, most often through the police, is where the state sends and, ultimately, defines its problems; introduction into this punishment apparatus, even absent an actual prison sentence, usually carries with it some formal marker of “criminality,”

60 Douglass, 339.

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(e.g., a criminal record) itself already defined and animated with respect to Blackness, as discussed before.

In exploring the connections between incarceration, its power to define, and internationalized afterlives of formal chattel slavery (e.g., the chaining together of incarcerated persons, the ways in which they are “stored” in dark cages, etc.), Sharpe writes: “US incarceration rates and carceral logics directly emerging from slavery and into the present continue to be the signs that make Black bodies…. The prison repeats the logics, architectural and otherwise, of the slave ship (in and across the global Black Diaspora).”61 To return to the hold and its temporal violences, then, the prison (by which I mean the prison and its related technologies), much like the Middle Passage ship, is a place(ment) outside of time. Like water around some fixture in a stream, time flows around it, even putting pressure on it, but, somehow, it doesn’t always or necessarily move with time. The prison, like the ship and the Black people it contains/ed, is a zone of transport whereby people are plucked from their times and/or ways of making sense of time—their own “streams”—and placed into a kind of holding pattern with its own kind of time, not moving forward, not moving backward, no inherent metrics by which to even measure their stillness—temporal ambiguity and chaos. In Marking Time: Art in the Age of

Mass Incarceration, Nicole A. Fleetwood highlights the work of incarcerated artists expressing their experience of this void in prison, such as Raymond Towler’s painting entitled Passing

Time, which features what Fleetwood refers to as “[u]seless clocks.”62 In this acrylic and oil painting, these clocks appear to be decomposing in the desert sun, their hands and irregular frames melting into the desolate ground. Time, in other words, is denied internal coherence in

61 Sharpe, 75. 62 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 41.

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prison, and former ways of marking time are rendered “useless.” This decomposition of former ways of marking time is accomplished by the law’s prisons as a reiteration of the slavery that initially gave rise to the “Black,” and these prisons structure and are filled by the law.

Having taken the captive out of time in these and other ways, the law then places them in alternative temporal arrangements that are variously and violently molded around them, what I have referred to here as plasticized time. This particular legal tradition of bending time around those dispossessed (out) of time manifests most soundly in the experiences of those under formal chattel slavery, as explored before. Again, as Johnson notes, “[Masters] infused their slaves with their own time… and the resistant were forcibly inculcated with the nested temporal rhythms of their enslavement.”63 While the master class’s discretional manipulation of slaves’ time was authorized by the law which gave them state-sanctioned power over slaves, the law itself also gave shape to the temporalities that textured Black life. For example, in a literal sense, some antebellum statutes determined when and under what (temporal) conditions slaves were to work

(e.g., no working on Sundays).64

However, more existentially, the law determined slave status through ancestry, which was not merely an evaluation of time, but itself a temporal operation. Partus sequitur ventrem, literally “that which is brought forth follows the womb,” was a legal doctrine codified throughout British colonies that decreed that a child inherited the free or slave status of their mother.65 Carried out in good faith, this law functioned by looking at a person and then looking backward at that person’s mother (and, if necessary, that person’s mother and so on), dragging

63 Johnson, 491-92. 64 See, e.g., Harmon Kingsbury, The Sabbath: A Brief History of Laws, Petitions, Remonstrances and Re- ports, with Facts, and Arguments, Relating to the Christian Sabbath (New York: Robert Carter, 1840). 65 Jennifer L. Morgan, "Partus Sequitur Ventrem." Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (2018): 1- 17.

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that woman’s status to the present, onto the body of the person in question, and, if that person is a woman, into the future, onto all of her direct descendants and the descendants of those of them who are women, again and again, forever. This is misogynoiristic time travel, slavery produced through a sentence on the bodies of Black women: “The birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness, then, is another kind of domestic Middle Passage; the birth canal, that passageway from the womb through which a fetus passes during birth. The belly of the ship births blackness; the birth canal remains in, and as, the hold.”66 (emphasis in original) Put differently, anti-Blackness, the hold, and time in and around the hold are also always formations which attend to gender. And, in concert with other law like the Dred Scott decision, which concretized slaves’ fungible chattel status,67 and various fugitive slave acts by which any Black person anywhere in the United States was susceptible to (re)capture, Blackness continued to be produced as “coterminous with slaveness.”68 This was accomplished through the legal interpellation of Blackness, which was given expression in legal, plasticized time’s implications for Black flesh, which is to say its imbedded sentence of (hereditary) servitude and abjection through Black motherhood—past, present, and forevermore.

Taking seriously Douglass’s observations about the (historical and contemporary) rendering of Blackness as criminal(ity), we might return again to the prison and the methods

(i.e., laws) by which its cages are filled as contemporary echoes of the hold, its institutionalized plantation forms, and its plasticized time. Consider sentencing laws, whose harsh, disproportionate impact on Black people as a matter of judicial and prosecutorial discretion is

66 Sharpe, 74. 67 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 693 (1857). 68 Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), 100.

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well-documented.69 These are temporal decrees, sharp pronouncements in and of time against

Black (as) misconduct. Like the Black Codes before it, they inaugurate anti-Black time shaped in layers: legal systems and actors as vectors of the state set the temporal terms of confinement in prison, in which time is shaped according to its imposed rhythms (or lack thereof), and all of this reaches its most severe manifestations around Black flesh; on average, Black people receive the longest prison sentences,70 are sentenced to death or life in prison most often,71 et cetera and on and on in endless repetition of the constitutive anti-Blackness of the state. In other words, in the process of imprisonment, time is stretched and/or shrunk to effectuate Black suffering, and incarceration, too, thus structures temporal regimes according to the principles of anti-Black governance, here again through the law and its arms.

Along with the law’s plasticizing of time, repetition, insofar as it represents a lack of fundamental change, is a way in which we might also discern stillness, or the law’s freezing of time. In his work, legal scholar Anthony Farley argues that purported changes in the law have not changed its anti-Black character:

The movement, then, from slavery to segregation to neosegregation, from the so-called past to the so-called present, from then to now, is movement from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black, and that is not movement. That is the motionlessness of death. The so-called Civil Rights Movement has taken us from white- over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black. White-over-black, whatever its juridical designation, is slavery.72 (emphasis in original)

69 See, e.g., Elizabeth Hinton, LeShae Henderson, and Cindy Reed, An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System, (Vera Institute of Justice, 2018), https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/for-the-record-unjust-burden-racial-disparities.pdf. 70 Hinton, Henderson, and Reed. 71 American Civil Liberties Union, “Written Submission of the American Civil Liberties Union on Racial Disparities in Sentencing,” Hearing on Reports of Racism in the Justice System of the United States; Sub- mitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 153rd Session, (October 27, 2014), https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr_racial_disparities_aclu_submission_0.pdf. 72 Anthony Paul Farley, "Perfecting Slavery," Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 36, no. 1 (2004): 235.

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And elsewhere: “There is no past, no moment before the pain, no end to slavery’s timeline.

Slavery destroyed that past, that moment, that timeline. The master is the accumulation of the slave’s time. Law is that which keeps the slave unconscious of this reality.”73 (emphasis in original) As mentioned before and will be explored more fully later, this is not the only way to conceptualize (anti-)Black time or Black experiences of time, even in (the wake of) slavery; I have argued here that the fundamental violence is temporal dominance, and this can take a variety of forms and compel a variety of responses. But if Farley has diagnosed at least one aspect of our situation correctly, that is, if one anti-Black temporal mode is freezing the Black in time (i.e., freezing the Black’s time), and if the law helps accomplish this, what shape might this relationship between stillness, anti-Blackness, and the law take?

One shape appears, again, in the shadow of the prison’s and the prison sentence’s aftermaths. For formerly incarcerated people, the violences of incarceration inflicted by the law extend past the physical walls and time of the prison into the world on the outside. Leaving aside the lingering physical and mental trauma, there are numerous other collateral consequences to incarceration that are either mandated or enabled by the law throughout the United States. This commonly includes not only voting disenfranchisement, but also a curtailing of “other forms of civic life,” including “employment or occupational licensing and … tangible benefits, such as education, housing, public benefits and property rights.”74 These consequences, like other aspects of the carceral state, particularly and most harshly affect Black people:

“Black Americans are banned from voting at four times the rate of all other racial groups combined.” (emphasis in original)

73 Anthony Paul Farley, "Law as Trauma & Repetition," New York University Review of Law and Social Change 31, no. 3 (2007): 620. 74 Sarah B. Berson, "Beyond the Sentence - Understanding Collateral Consequences," National Institute of Justice Journal, no. 272 (2013): 26-27.

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“A study conducted in D.C. by the Equal Rights Center found that white applicants with criminal backgrounds received preferential treatment 47% of the time over Black applicants with similar records, and that property agents imposed stricter criminal record screening criteria, and sometimes greater fees, on Black applicants than on white applicants”

“An audit study published in 2009 found that “the magnitude of the criminal record penalty suffered by black applicants (60%) is roughly double the size of the penalty for whites with a record (30%).”75

In this way, the law and its allowances freeze formerly incarcerated people in the time of their incarceration. And given their particularized effects on Black people, these examples illustrate some of the ways in which the law, both actively and through its gaps and exploitation, continuously reproduces, to return to Jackson and Douglass, the Black as criminal and the criminal as Black, even outside of a prison cell. This freezing is a method by which Black families and communities are boxed out into the shadow of “civic life,” or, as Wilderson might argue, an affirmation of the Black already being civically (i.e., socially) dead vis a vis slavery. In his words, this is an anti-Black freezing in and of time that is, in effect, a “barr[ing] from redemption,”76 and its function is to make coherent and legitimate the sociopolitical and, as mentioned before, theological order as it orbits “the ‘black criminal,’ the figure used to justify lynching, chain gangs, exploitative labor, segregation, and the overall maintenance of white supremacy.”77

In sum, the criminal, the prison, the statute, and the judicial opinion are apparatuses of the law which structures and is structured by anti-Black time. And through this legal machinery, time is stolen from Black people, malformed and weaponized for white and anti-Black ends

75 "Race and Collateral Consequences," National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 2021, https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Race-and-Collateral-Consequences. 76 Wilderson, "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption." 77 Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10.

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more generally, and this bolsters the nation, its citizens, and “nationhood” and “citizenship” as such—all accessories to the anti-Black, temporal regimes that shape them. But, as in any regime, there remains the possibility of insurgency.

Time Refigured

As discussed before, the temporal violences facing Black people, including those expressed in and through the law, inflict a kind of temporal alienation, a containment in a place designated as no-time—the hold. But from within this place, Black people have brought about and insisted on their temporal self-placement, even if its ground is shifting, even against any latent constraining qualities of that placement, perhaps in some dialectic with “constraint” itself.

In other words, this hold, with all of its horrors and violences, is also a place of possibility and continual (re)generation. Per Moten, the hold holds Black people in a zone of refusal by and/or separation from the polity while also functioning as a zone of Black refusal of the polity and, I argue, the anti-Blackness that undergirds it.78 This zone does appear and function as a void whereby Black people are rendered out of and without a claim to time, able to be put into alternative times and temporal schemes, moved and hindered at (white) will. However, this place which is meant to serve as a timeless, empty abyss is, in actuality (or, perhaps, paradoxically alongside or within its emptiness), replete with the time(s) that Black people make and remake, where and by which what might be called a certain counterhegemonic politics against anti-

Blackness is enacted. Here, I am thinking with Evelynn Hammonds, and, again, Zakiyyah

Jackson in their theorizing about the relationship between black holes, (Black women’s) sexualities, and how each is represented in dominant forms of discourse:

78 Moten, 191.

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As Hammonds instructs, one detects the presence of a black hole by its effects on the region of space where it is located, as in the case of observing a binary system in which a visible star circles an invisible companion. The existence of a black hole is not seen optically but rather is inferred from its ability to distort the orbiting star. The forces observed within the system could not be produced solely by the visible star, but instead gesture toward that which withdraws from direct empirical observation. As Hammonds further clarifies: “The observer outside of the [black] hole sees it as a void, an empty place in space. However, it is not empty; it is a dense and full place in space” (137). With Hammonds I ask, how might this “perceived void,” which is actually a “dense and full place in space,” confound the very representationalist terms of “empirical” evidence and its perception? In the case of black(ened) female sex/ualities, Hammonds’s metaphor implies the need to further develop reading and critical practices that allow us to approach that which resists and exceeds representation: the constitutive trace effects that black(ened) female sex/uality produces in relation to the generic terms of gender and sexuality’s legibility.79

Of particular interest here are the ways in which Black people exist and make alternative meanings within the hold—that temporal void and zone of their temporal alienation—and, per

Jackson, how this place “confound[s]” what Hortense Spillers refers to as the “semantic and iconic [and, I add, temporal] folds… that come to surround and signify the captive.”80 How might time be employed or (re)shaped to effectuate this confounding of (anti-)Black time and anti-Black governance more generally? What ways of being under and against empire and anti-

Blackness might Black maneuvers of and within time demonstrate or engender?

Put differently, if time has been made malleable and weaponized in ways that constrict and extinguish Black life as discussed before, this paper argues that it is and might yet be continuously remade by Black people in ways that can open up more sustaining forms of life. In this way, as it relates to time, Jackson’s notion of the confounding and paradoxically dense void might be read alongside Sharpe’s explication of what she calls “wake work”:

If . . . we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake

79 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, "Theorizing in a Void: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics," The South Atlantic quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 632-33. 80 Spillers, 210.

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work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.81 (emphasis in original)

In explaining wake work, Sharpe raises as an example the practice(s) of what she calls aspiration. This concept, which itself may take several different shapes, arises for Sharpe from

Black insistence on breathing in a suffocating, anti-Black climate:

“What is the word for keeping and putting breath back in the body? … What are the words and forms for the ways we must continue to think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake? The word I arrived at for such imagining and for keeping and putting breath back in the Black body in hostile weather is aspiration (and aspiration is violent and life-saving).”82 (emphasis in original)

What would it mean for Black manipulations of time to be a form of wake work, this way of being in which Black people might live in and against the hold? More specifically, how might

Black (re)use of time itself serve as a form of aspiration, “think[ing] and imagin[ing] laterally, across a series of relations in the hold,” through which Black people might breathe a little easier, a little longer? How might Black breaking and reassembly of time create new narratives and epistemes? How might it encourage solidarity in the hold and across diaspora? Or lead to the

“rupturing” of the hold itself, its governing logics, and, per Sharpe, the world’s anti-Black climate more generally?

Returning to Smallwood, consider the account she includes in Saltwater Slavery of

‘Sibell, an “Old African Female Slave,” who speaks of her capture and being trafficked from the shores of West Africa to Barbados. This transcription is conspicuously hard to follow, with no clear narrative arc, no linear portrayal of events, and no satisfying conclusion, strongly contrasting how one might expect stories to ordinarily be told. Smallwood reproduces and analyzes ‘Sibell’s narrative more thoroughly in her book, but, to summarize, she writes,

81 Sharpe, 17-18. 82 Sharpe, 113.

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“‘Sibell’s account reflects the nonlinear temporality of a nonwestern subject and the familiar rhythms of oral, as distinct from written, narrative expression.”83 Smallwood argues that

“‘Sibell’s remembered experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories” which traditionally shape Western accounts of the Middle Passage and slavery more generally and that, within the relaying of ‘Sibell’s experience, “[t]he temporal and spatial categories of her remembered middle passage overlap, as past, present, and future comfortably commingle.”84 In other words, whereas one might perceive chaos or something like unreliability in the way the account is told, Smallwood argues that the fractured narrative as told by ‘Sibell, with her drifting, nonlinear, and abrupt storytelling, is (also) a demonstration of alternative temporalities and alternative ways of speaking and storytelling within those temporalities. ‘Sibell’s storytelling does not shy away from chaos, nor does she force her narrative into forms of storytelling that might be more legible to Western subjects. To borrow from Jackson, her storytelling, in all of its temporal ambiguity, “confound[s] the very representationalist terms of ‘empirical' evidence and its perception”—including the dominating, anti-Black, Western terms of “coherence,”

“objectivity,” “proof,” and, importantly, “time”—that flow from and make something like chattel slavery and its afterlives possible. Essentially, the temporal schemes portrayed in ‘Sibell’s story and her telling of it—their rhythms, perhaps—clash with those of the master class and their ways of making sense of time and the events thereof; they dance to different beats.

Of course, time is not reducible to rhythm, nor rhythm to time. Time might be thought of as fodder for rhythm, or the dark matter between the elements of whatever is deemed to be

(ir)rhythmic—notes, speech, embodied movement, or something else. Or, rhythm, the (ir)regular pattern or passage of events, might be understood as that which makes time comprehensible; we

83 Smallwood, 205. 84 Smallwood, 206-07.

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measure our days, for example, by a certain repetition of moments, whether what we call

“seconds” or the sun’s rising and falling. But, in the relationship and/or conceptual space, whatever it is, between rhythm and time, we can discern certain Black, revolutionary politics in and against given or imposed temporality. Smallwood notes that ‘Sibell’s storytelling, for instance, contravenes conventional, Western formats, incongruent with the “trajector[ies]” and

“tropes of early modern travel literature.”85 ‘Sibell was, in other words, not beholden to the rhythms of narrative expression that ruled the day. She moves variously between past, present, and future throughout her story, even denying her listeners closure; as recorded by her transcriber, “here she burst into tears and could say no more.” ‘Sibell’s piecemeal, irregular storytelling, its blending of different points in time, and its sudden conclusion reflect the fracturing, disorienting traumas of the hold. Indeed, her account of endurance is perforated and shaped by the violences of betrayal, erasure, and the subjection of her body and soul to the whims of the master class, which reach backward and forward in (‘Sibell’s) story/time. However, the peculiar rhythmic patterns of her life and story are not only inflicted on ‘Sibell; here, they are expressed by ‘Sibell herself, products of her choices. She, for example, laments her separation from her homeland and her people, but, in order to mourn them, she must recall them, inscribing them into the archive even as the archive and its masters seek to extinguish and/or corrupt their memory. From this perspective, the story she tells might be understood as simultaneously a testament to the anti-Blackness she experienced and a challenging of it and its norms, toward a different way of being. Along these lines, we might reread the conclusion of her story’s transcription; what if, instead of her (white) transcriber’s assumption that “she could say no more,” we read “she would say no more,” a refusal?

85 Smallwood, 205.

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Whether a matter of refusal or capacity, this abrupt ending is a cut, a sharp break, a breaking in and of a story, its internal rhythms, and the rhythms an audience might expect from it, which is to say their (rhythmic) worlds. This break and the unconventional forms of ‘Sibell’s story more generally demonstrate a mode of, in Sharpe’s words, “inhabiting and rupturing this episteme,” and they constitute an alternative imagination by which ‘Sibell attempts to “think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake”: “Me no know nobody in de [slave] House, but ven me go in de Ship me find my Country woman Mimbo, my Country man Dublin…, My Country woman Sally, and some more, but dey sell dem all about and me no savvy where now.—here she burst into tears and could [read: would] say no more.”86 This concluding sentence’s insistence on relation despite separation; its collapse of past, present, and future; and its hard stop instantiate what

Moten might refer to as the “radical temporal politics of the broken groove,”87 an orientation in and toward the hold (along with its contrived coherence, its time, and its temporal violences) that can foster Black life. This is an orientation that feels and reflects the violent time(s) inflicted upon the Black while also making space for Black response to and reconfiguration of these times.

Thinking in terms of time, rhythm, groove, and their breaking, we might turn to music, then, as a site of Black refusal of, in, and through time. Ashon Crawley refers to the sounds of

Black music (for him, Blackpentecostal noise and performance in particular) “as dissent, … a critique of the very conditions under which work-time as enslavement emerges.”88 That music

86 Smallwood, 204. 87 Fred Moten, Black and Blur, Consent Not to Be a Single Being, (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2017), 117. 88 Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Commonalities, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 172.

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serves as a “choreosonic” force which is itself a critique of anti-Black impositions of time—of which slavery’s work-time is an example, with a long wake—exemplifies what Crawley refers to as “the inexhaustible resource of resistance found in black performance.”89 In this way, in its capacity to demonstrate and enact alternative temporalities and, per Crawley, (a)theologies,90 musical performance serves as a form of wake work, which is to say as a resource by which

Black folk might sustain themselves and the relations among them, lay claim to the twisted forms of time levied against them, and resist and disrupt the very conditions that make such temporal violences possible, toward the subversion of the regime itself along with its law. To demonstrate this, I now turn to two musical compositions and their performances: “Come Sunday” and

“Ostinato (Suite for Angela).”

Refigured Time as Music: “Come Sunday”91

Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” was composed in 1942 as a part of his Black, Brown, and Beige suite, which, in his words, was written “as a parallel to the history of the American

Negro.”92 After its first full performance at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Ellington would only perform parts of the three-part suite, and he reworked it into a shorter, 1958 album of the same name, cutting material and dividing the suite into six shorter sections. However, he kept “Come

Sunday,” and, whereas the original version was purely instrumental, this version features gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who sings the melody, to which Ellington added lyrics in 1958.

Although it shares many similarities with the original 1942 recording, the 1958 version of

89 Crawley, 175. 90 Crawley, 4. 91 Duke Ellington and Mahaliah Jackson, “Part IV (a.k.a. Come Sunday),” in Black, Brown and Beige (New York: Columbia Records, 1958), vinyl LP. 92 Duke Ellington, introducing Black, Brown and Beige, Carnegie Hall, New York, January 23, 1943.

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“Come Sunday” is of particular interest here due to its lyrical content, the group performance, and how they and the piece as a whole demonstrate relationships between worship, fluid time, and Black liberation.

Rhythm is often understood to be a defining feature of jazz and Black music more generally; swing, the blues, bossa nova, hip hop, and more, for example, are characterized by, among other things, their various, distinctive rhythmic patterns, which are given life through percussion instruments, drums or drum machines in particular. But there are no drums in “Come

Sunday,” no easily discernible underlying rhythmic framework. The tune is a free, suspended ballad, almost arhythmic, but it is guided through the form and in its pacing by Jackson. Her singing has a kind of gravity in the plentiful empty space of the song, drawing Ellington on the piano and the other musicians into her sense of time, contracting or expanding the spaces between her phrases as the spirit moves. To be sure, “Come Sunday” does have a structure; there is a short instrumental introduction, the main melody repeats twice (the “A” section), then a bridge (the “B” section), then the “A" section again to a couple of alternations with the “B” section, and another AABA cycle during which Jackson hums the melody to conclude the tune.

Indeed, AABA is a common song format in jazz and other genres of Western music, and “Come

Sunday” is a far cry from the structure-phobic “free jazz” movement that would arise over the following decades. But, still, while it isn’t formless or even unconventional in its format, its form is soft, growing and shrinking in tempo and instrumentation like a lung, following Jackson’s lead.

In other words, rhythmically, “Come Sunday” might be characterized as both nebulous and strict, a tune full of contradictions. Its melody and its time emerge from an empty stillness that never quite leaves, almost ex nihilo, but, even as it feels unmoored, its structure (pliable as it

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may be) and its musicians coalesce around Jackson’s voice, like moths around a flame. There is no (steady) pulse in the tune, no drums or walking bass to push it forward, guard against awkward silences, or queue starts, stops, entrances, or exits. The pulse, that sign of life, if it exists in “Come Sunday,” is weak, a potentially dangerous arrhythmia. But the song lives on in defiance, animated by Jackson and her deep, embodied sense of knowing; she understands the form, the lyrics (and their context), and the melody of the song, and, led by her training, experience, and intuition, she executes these.

While the instrumentalists respond to her with their loose scripts, some improvising over chord progressions and others following written-out sheet music, Jackson is no conductor;

“Come Sunday” is, typical of small ensemble jazz, more properly understood as a group conversation, and Jackson and the other musicians move with one another, even as she provides the prompts. The tune thus comprises a set of overlapping dialects—those of Jackson, Ellington, and the other musicians—and dialectics between emptiness and fullness, motion and suspension, individuality and community, democracy and authoritarianism—all colliding and collapsing into one another to generate the Black, abundant lushness—or the lush, abundant Blackness—of the music. This art is what we might call a kind of communion, what J. Kameron Carter would call study,93 or, in honor of (the God of) Sunday, worship, perhaps akin to what Abraham Joshua

Heschel might call a Sabbatical “climax of living.”94

Accompanying these various musical formations, the lyrics themselves offer their own

Black, theological commentary. And, complimenting the music, the words sung by Jackson come from a particular void—here, the abyss of formalized slavery. “Come Sunday” was in the

93 J. Kameron Carter et al., “Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman at Duke University | The Black Outdoors,” (Duke Franklin Humanities Institute, October 5, 2016). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc. 94 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 14.

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original suite’s first movement, Black, which Ellington wrote to symbolize what he considered to be the first landmark in the history of Blackness in what would become the United States—the, to return to Sharpe, “singularity” of formal chattel slavery.95 These are the depths from which the

1958 lyrics come, and the lines between history, storytelling, and prayer—which is to say past, present and future—are thus blurred in Black performance.

Jackson sings (and repeats):

Lord, dear Lord of love, God almighty, God above, Please look down and see my people through.

This is an appeal to a God and a love that spans space and time; the God the group appeals to is both separate (i.e., “above”) and proximate (i.e.; “of love”), and this love is felt or known now, at the time of the writing and performance of it. But, in order to sing of this love, the songwriter would have to had to also experience and/or learn of it at some prior time. This love, then, and the God which attends to it, is both past and present, and “Come Sunday” holds these as grounds for a future Divine intervention. And, importantly, this is a prayer on behalf of a people—Black people—to help them survive, or perhaps guide them “through,” toward something like freedom or escape from the governing sociopolitical order.

Jackson then sings the first bridge:

I believe the sun and moon Will shine up in the sky; When the day is grey, I know it’s clouds passing by.

The kind of Divine intervention asked for in the “A” section is now expressed as a certainty; she know[s] that the clouds are passing by, even (and especially) now. But, tacitly, this likens her people’s hard times to weather, and in this metaphor we might hear resonances in Sharpe’s work:

95 Sharpe, 106.

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“In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.”96 Read alongside Sharpe, there is therefore a more threatening side to the momentary nature of strife “Come Sunday” takes comfort in: those clouds can (and do) come back. Put differently, even seasonal, temporary weather patterns can be destructive. But in this ominous, violent climate which contextualizes the song and Black life more generally, “Come

Sunday” argues that God is in the midst and authoritative; “clouds passing by” must be held alongside God “see[ing] my people through.” This poses a classic, theodical difficulty not quite addressed by the song—namely, the question of God’s sovereignty over these cycles of anti-

Black violence. However, the song is more concerned with survival in violence as a given part of the fabric of the world around Black folk to be withstood, shaped, and challenged, perhaps reflecting an understanding of a God who did not create the cosmos from nothing, but from disorder: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”97

The third “A” section follows the bridge:

He’ll give peace and comfort To every troubled mind, Come Sunday, oh come Sunday— That’s the day

In most Christian traditions, Sunday is a day of rest and/or worship, and, in the context of slavery

(which, again, is the context of “Come Sunday”), it is the day when Black people were often allowed some measure of reprieve from much of their work (e.g., the antebellum laws governing slave labor discussed earlier), another instantiation of the temporal domination under which they suffered. But here, Sunday is not (only) a temporal, legislated technology of anti-Blackness and

96 Sharpe, 104. 97 Gen. 1:2, ESV.

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white supremacy, but a deadline for God’s deliverance from them (“see my people through”). It might reasonably be read as symbolic; anti-Blackness has not been eradicated by any Sunday that has come and gone thus far. But more precisely, this Sunday and the deliverance it promises is like Jesus’s own Sunday resurrection—eschatological, which is to say having happened, taking place now, and promised in the future. In other words, there is, paradoxically, a presence (e.g., a present “peace,” “clouds passing by” even now, etc.) and promise of life in the midst of (social) death. Here, the Sunday imposed on Black folk has been refigured by them into a Divine guarantee of the destruction of white supremacy and the interim possibility of Black movement toward liberation, which is to say resistance.

Another bridge, followed by another “A” section:

Often we’ll feel weary, But he knows our every care; Go to him in secret— He will hear your every prayer.

Lillies of the valley, They neither toil nor spin, And flowers bloom, and springtime, Birds sing.

The songwriter borrows from scripture in these two stanzas, with both references (“Go to [God] in secret” and “Lilies of the valley/They neither toil nor spin”) taken from the sixth chapter of the

Gospel of Matthew (verses 6 and 28, respectively). In this musical exegesis, these references effectively shrink the (temporal) distance between the Jesus of the Bible and Black folk, allowing Jesus to speak to Black folk directly about their oppression and what God means to do about it (e.g., “He will hear your every prayer”). Additionally, as in the prior “A” section, the lyrics might be read to reflect a collapsing of the past, present, and future. Here, God’s future deliverance is, again, already manifest in and attested to by God’s present activity, specifically in

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God’s current heeding Black prayers and sustaining flora and fauna. This is confirmed lexically, where the future tense—“He will hear your every prayer”—is bound up with the present tense

(e.g., “He knows our every care,” “They neither toil nor spin,” etc.).

After another bridge (same lyrics as above), the lyrics end with an “A” section:

Up from dawn ’til sunset Man work hard all day; Come Sunday, oh come Sunday— That’s the day.

“Work” in “Come Sunday” is a euphemism for the forced labor of slavery, and, in this paper, we might understand this as inclusive of slavery’s attendant institutions and the more generalized anti-Blackness which engenders them and their various afterlives. And this final stanza, even in the kind of cyclical work-time ensnaring Black people, again signifies the end to all of these on that coming, and yet already here, eschatological Sunday. This Sunday, as explored before, does not merely signify some far-off promise or temporary reprieve from oppression; the insistence on the importance of past, present, and future throughout all of the song’s lyrics comprise a claim on and about God’s deliverance—specifically, liberation from anti-Black domination and violence—as a process happening now.

“Come Sunday,” then, with and without words, is a meditation on and invitation to Black worship, demonstrating how to reorient oneself to oneself, one another, the Divine, and I argue, time. It is a tribute and call to, like Ralph Ellison’s protagonist, “never quite being on the beat,” to flexibility, and to responsiveness to one’s own internal intuitions and those of other people, even while allowing for structure. It affirms the importance of multiple voices in conversations on freedom. It invites, prays for, and demonstrates uncanny, unlikely life and movement in what seems like motionlessness and/or death. And, in its quietly subversive way, it manipulates given times and rhythms of anti-Blackness into something else, something that can help sustain the

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dispossessed, signal possibilities for different ways of being, and/or prophesy the end of anti-

Blackness itself.

Refigured Time as Music: “Ostinato (Suite for Angela)”98

If “Come Sunday” is about rhythmic freedom and flexible time, how might we understand constraint and rigidity? How might we rework established, hardened boundaries in such a way that still makes something like freedom or the pursuit of it legible? Is some “pure” escape from the constraints of (anti-Black) time possible, or, in the words of Moten, is “purity impossible and undesirable”?99 These questions and some ways of approaching them through and in time are illustrated in the sounds and context of “Ostinato (Suite for Angela),” the first track from Herbie Hancock’s 1971 album Mwandishi.

Like much jazz produced by Black musicians at the time, Mwandishi was influenced by the political climate in the United States, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in particular. It and many other albums in the 1960s and 1970s were pan-African and/or Afrocentric in orientation (as is evident in the Swahili title of the album, which translates to “composer” and was also Hancock’s nickname), and, at times, they took up overtly political themes. “Ostinato

(Suite for Angela)” is but one example of this. Sonically, and representing different segments of the Black diaspora, the tune is a fusion of rock, funk, and Latin grooves, which will be returned to later. But, alongside its sonic elements, “Ostinato” is dedicated to Angela Davis, who, around the time of the album’s recording, had fled and been captured by the FBI and declared herself

98 Herbie Hancock, "Ostinato (Suite for Angela)," in Mwandishi (n.p.: Warner Bros. Records, 1971), vinyl LP. 99 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “FUC 012 | Fred Moten & Stefano Harney — the university: last words,” (FUC, July 9, 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqWMejD_XU8.

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innocent of the charges brought against her.100 The Mwandishi band internalized her example along with the Black freedom struggle more generally, and they came to understand the tune’s ostinato (a repetitive musical figure, often used in many genres of Latin American and sub-

Saharan African music) as a symbol for her continual insistence against oppression.101

We might therefore understand resistance—and, given the tune’s context, fugitivity more specifically—as the topical heart of “Ostinato”; this work is designed to honor insurgent Black life in its diasporic variety and one Black woman in particular who chose to attempt escape. I am particularly interested in how the piece invites flight as a mode of being and the relationship between this invitation and the rhythms of “Ostinato” as orientations to and within time.

“Ostinato” is, I argue, a musical enactment of life in contravention of conventional constraints of anti-Blackness and the temporal schemes thereof, or, in Sharpe’s words about wake work, a method of “inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.”102

From its beginning, the instrumentation and stylings of “Ostinato,” the drifting improvisations of Hancock on the Fender Rhodes keyboard meshed with those of Bennie

Maulpin on the bass clarinet, gives it a wandering, unsettled feeling. After the introduction, this mood is figured into the piece’s famous ostinato, which is first played by Maulpin and constantly picked up by other musicians throughout the piece. This ostinato grounds the piece both harmonically—Hancock composed the line to both provide a melodic basis for the tune’s spontaneous framework and open up different improvisational possibilities for the members of

100 Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1974), 291- 92. 101 Robert Gluck, e-mail message to author, October 3, 2020. 102 Sharpe, 18.

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the band103—and rhythmically. From this line, the tune takes on a life of its own, maintaining this foundation while branching out into different chord progressions, themes, combinations of musicians, and energy levels. The piece’s ostinato serves as a kind of North Star, providing a capacious structure and a direction throughout the tune while also serving as a collective vamp to signal and connect the different solos.

However, despite providing some semblance of stability, the ostinato itself is conspicuously and intentionally unstable. Western music tends to group beats in factors and multiples of four—twos (e.g., a 2/4 time signature), fours (e.g., a 4/4 time signature), eights,

(e.g., an 8/8 time signature), etc. The typical Western ear knows and comes to expect this pattern.

But “Ostinato” has a 15/8 time signature, which, in this tune, means that each rhythmic block is a group of eight beats followed by a group of seven beats, a challenging aberration from most popular forms of Western music. Additionally, there is instability within each block; the ear might intuitively expect the group of eight beats to be followed by another group of eight, but there is a kind of imbalance introduced by the baked-in heterogeneity of each rhythmic block. In other words, against stability, Hancock has stolen a beat from the listener, or the beat has stolen away to another place:

“…I started with a repeated syncopated bass line in 4/4 [essentially equivalent to an 8/8 time signature], a regular thing…. But then I thought ‘Why should I keep that all the way through?’ so I changed it slightly and shortened every second phrase by half a beat [or a full beat in 8/8 notation].… Having 15 beats in a bar automatically sets up a little tension, because just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it eludes you.”104 (emphasis mine)

Alongside this peculiar rhythmic framework is the overall groove, which is established not only by the time signature in its mathematical way, but also by how each musician orients

103 Robert Gluck, You'll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 93. 104 Gluck, 93.

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themselves to this rhythmic pattern. Hancock describes the rhythmic feel as a “rock beat,”105 but the various stylings of the accompanying members of the band—particularly, Buster Williams on the bass, Billy Hart and Leon Chancler on drums and percussion, and José Areas on congas and timbales—also imply funk and Latin influences, while the solos of Hancock, Maupin, and Eddie

Henderson on trumpet call forth avant-garde and swing sensibilities. In other words, the groove of “Ostinato” is expressed through (Black) diaspora, people and music that have been scattered in time and space, yet reassembled here. “Ostinato” is a family reunion; a conversation with and among the exiled (dis)possessed and their ancestors; spontaneous, semi-scripted group creation in Black. The rhythm and the groove are their lingua franca; despite its complexity, its various influences, its diverse instrumentation (along with the aforementioned musicians, there was also

Julian Priester on trombone and Ronnie Montrose on guitar), and lack of a single, governing chord structure, the piece coheres around the ostinato, that irregular, uneasy rhythm in fifteen.

Put differently, the groove’s tension is the resolution of “Ostinato”; the instability of the uneven, two-part rhythm stabilizes the tune, and the musicians rest in elusion. “Ostinato” is an homage to fugitivity, and it also a way of, perhaps paradoxically, being in fugitivity as a residence place. The expected structure, the sixteenth beat, never arrives, and the musicians don’t look for it. Instead, they respect its escape, working around it and mimicking its absence in other parts of the form; there’s a natural resonance, for example, between this fugitive beat and the elusive, open-ended nature of the tune. In their solos, Hancock, Maupin, and Henderson—like

Angela Davis in her own flight from the government—are both governed by the overarching, loose structure of the ostinato and a fugitive of it, often sliding into loosely related chords and

105 Gluck, 93.

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melodic choices, tampering with its already unconventional rhythm, and allowing their phrases to stretch across these fifteen-beat increments.

The freedom-loving impulses of the Mwandishi musicians and the tune as a whole, then, are in a troubled relationship with constraint and structure, like fugitivity itself. There is, in a broad sense, some predictable regularity of time (the piece has a beginning and an end, the pace of “Ostinato” is more-or-less steady after the introduction, etc.), but this regularity is subtended by profound, necessary, and disorienting irregularity. There is a reference point (i.e., the iconic ostinato line), but the soloists both contravene it and are trapped by it. The time of the piece,

15/8, is decidedly outside of conventional Western rhythms, but its building blocks—Western instruments, Western musical notation, Western recording studios, United States copyright law, etc.—are largely rooted in the very (white) ways of thinking and making music the musicians attempt to escape. Likewise, Angela Davis, the Mwandishi band’s muse, was both a fugitive of the United States and a fugitive within the United States, a refraction of Black being throughout history. When slaves in the United States fled their plantations, for example, they fled to another plantation, or to another place within the settler colony they built, or to another settler colony, or to another place touched by Western conquest. When slaves stole away together for a little while to their ring shouts, when they sang their spirituals in the fields, or when they congregated in secret or in code, they were trapped in bondage while also shattering its fetters—fugitives still chained, chained folk still in flight. This is Black music; this is Black religion: “Black music is also theological. That is, it tells us about the divine Spirit that moves the people into unity and self-determination.”106

106 James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 6.

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This is the musical, theopolitical heritage conjured by and enacted in “Ostinato”: fugitivity in place, fugitivity as place, sacred and profane, self-contradictory and perhaps doomed to fail when measured against something like true “freedom,” and yet there is something worthwhile and life-giving in the fleeing. In Moten’s words:

Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument. This is to say that it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.107

If this is what fugitivity is, a reflexive transgression of delimitations, and if this fugitivity is the heritage and, paradoxically, the destiny or destination of Blackness, then “Ostinato” is nothing less than a rehearsal of and invitation into this tradition. It is a constant quest for and tribute to escape, even an escape from those structures and the caging brought about, even if unwittingly, by our own designs (“it moves… outside [the creator’s] own adherence to the law and to propriety”)—the hold and holding impulses within oneself. We might call this sanctification, whereby a people’s (divine, religious) inheritance and self-reflection work together to continuously usher them into life and integrity, even from within a killing and reality-splitting world. The tune enacts this as Black, sanctifying feeling with and in time, including its own rhythmic framework, the various diasporic rhythmic traditions it is influenced by, and the rhythms of the Black radical tradition in which it participates—against and from inside Western

(i.e., anti-Black) conventions, histories, temporalities, and other technologies of domination.

———————

In short, anti-Blackness is so vast and expansive and deadly that it has disfigured time itself. However, amid this “total climate,”108 Black folk harness its disfigured time and shape it

107 Moten, Stolen Life, 66. 108 Sharpe, 104.

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into something else according to our own purposes, including, as has been explored here, a setting within which to cherish Black life, to (re)imagine the Divine and freedom, and to work out the feeling of escape. That is, time, even as it is structured and weaponized to contain and siphon life and labor from Black folk, becomes the raw material with which Black folk construct alternative socialities and ways of making meaning, ultimately to anti-Blackness’s undoing, even in small spaces and moments. These warped time regimes, as expressed in and as law, that press

Blackened flesh into a fungible, killable resource are a legacy of slavery, as Crawley observes:

“…one enslaved will not have had the ability to “own” one’s labor power and would be, thus, in a continuous mode of work. Planting and hoeing? Work. Sleeping and praying? Work. Transatlantic enslavement would then have been the condition that eliminated the possibility of non-work-time; it was, essentially, an attack on—through the creation of a violently exclusionary, categorically distinct—temporality. This temporality, the temporality of racial capital—the temporality, then, of western theological-philosophical thought—is always a racialized temporality, a temporality grounded in the capacity to produce racial difference, racial distinction as a timeless timeliness.”109 (emphasis in original)

But so, too, is resistance, in and as music and dance:

“With such a rendering, it would appear—at first blush, at least—that work-time as enslavement is totalizing. However there is an excess, an excess in and as choreosonic, an excess that not only resonates—vibratory frequency—as dissent[;] this dissent, this choreosonic force is a critique of the very conditions under which work-time as enslavement emerges.”110

To return to Sharpe’s notion of “wake work,” then, Black life—which is to say Black insistence on life—in the wake has a sound that resonates in Black music, and its sound helps create and invites Black folk into ways of being that sustain in and push back against all-encompassing, governing death, sounding, in Sharpe’s words, “an ordinary note of care.”111 This ordinary note of care, while not invulnerable to the violences of anti-Blackness, is eternal and spiritual,

109 Crawley, 172. 110 Crawley, 172. 111 Sharpe, 132.

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stretching across generations and into temporal regimes meant to silence it, as pervasive as the anti-Blackness that conditions its necessity. As I have illustrated here, it is an element of a conspiracy beyond, between, and against the Divine, religiosity, ancestry, art, and politics, a conspiracy assembled so that Black folk might yet live. Black life and Black resistance in the wake are, in other words, a matter of soulcraft—particularly, of how a people endeavors to create internal and external conditions under which survival with integrity and love is possible and, somehow, desirable.

(Work-)Time as enslavement, enslavement as anti-Blackness, anti-Blackness as a contemporary paradigm for world-building that reconfigures time and space—these comprise the setting for the paradoxes inherent in resisting an inexorable, painful milieu. And from this mighty hold and its echoes, a prophetic witness against it emerges—speaking and embodying what truly is and might yet be—and is tended to by the held. “The holds multiply. And so does resistance to them, the survivance of them: ‘the brittle gnawed life we live, /I am held, and held.’”112

112 Sharpe, 73.

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