A Change Is Gonna Come: African American Literature, Jazz and the Intersections of Time, Race, and Justice

Abstract

A Change Is Gonna Come: African American Literature, Jazz and the Intersections of Time, Race, and JusticeEACH HOUR REDEEM: Time and Justice in African American Literature. By Daylanne K. English. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2013.JAZZ IN THE TIME OF THE NOVEL: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. By Bruce Barnhart. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. 2013.With a gruff and forceful delivery, the rapper Killer Mike raps on his song Reagan that declared the War on Drugs like a War on Terror. But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever. But mostly black boys . . . But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turned the profits because free labor is the cornerstone of U.S. economics. Cause slavery was abolished unless you are in prison. You think I am bullshitting then read the thirteenth amendment. Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits. That's why they give drug offenders time in double digits. He notes related injustices suffered by the African American community on Anywhere But Here. This time with a more relaxed, almost singing style that conveys a certain resignation about the ways African Americans are treated by the police, he laments that even though it's black top from the mayors to the cops black blood still gets spilled. They raided her house no drugs were ever found but a black grandmother lay killed. Like the dream of the King when the sniper took his life on the balcony of Lorraine's Motel. . . . So you ask what happens to a dream deferred, Langston, well it kills itself.1 In both implicit and explicit ways, Killer Mike links his critiques to concepts of time. His answer to Langston Hughes' famous question speaks to the likelihood that the dream has not only been deferred, its presence and the possibility of realizing it in the future has been erased. His vivid portrayal of racial profiling, excessive prison sentencing, and the extreme use of police force points to the fact that African Americans live in a different time from whites, a time where justice and law enforcement is still executed as unfairly as it was long ago. The recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of the police underscore the reality that Killer Mike is not just a pop musician exaggerating real life to sell records. Rather, his songs are both an indicator of the ways in which African Americans currently experience time and justice as well as a critique of the forces that structure that experience.Fans and scholars of black music are well aware of the music's long history of social critique. Black music-whether it's by rappers like Killer Mike, NWA, or Public Enemy, contemporary jazz artists like saxophonist Howard Wiley, whose 2010 album 12 Gates to the City is about Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, spoken word artist Gil Scott-Heron, or classic jazz albums by Max Roach and Charles Mingus, and by musicians from much earlier-has always had an element of social, cultural, and political critique. Indeed, a large segment of black music, and black literature and arts in general, has concerned itself with time and justice.2 The two books reviewed here show that just like their musical counterparts, African American writers also address the complex relationship between time, justice, and race. More specifically, Daylanne K. English and Bruce Barnhart demonstrate the ways in which the concept of time can be used as either a disciplining and regulatory force, or as a tool to critique and challenge dominant constructions of time. They highlight the complex methods writers use to approach and critique the interweaving concepts of time, justice, and aesthetic form.3 English and Barnhart are concerned with historicizing, theorizing, and identifying the ways that the structuring of time can work to marginalize African Americans. They point to specific events, trends, and examples that African American writers have responded to in their writing, and they show how these writers use different literary genres, subject matter, and form to not only critique structures of time that marginalize them, but to provide new future possibilities as well. …