Interlude 2: Time Travel

Abstract

Extract In this short interlude I reflect on a dynamic whereby the racialization of many of the subjects in this study imbues them with the power to transcend temporal boundaries.1Close By taking up the interface of race and time travel as a cypher of segregated time, my purpose is to propose a hermeneutic identifying affective attachments that might otherwise remain encrypted. Toward that end, I locate an investment in race as a vehicle of transcending time as part of the spectrality of race. Simultaneously present and absent, the racial other as an instrument of time travel is an affectively imbued ascriptive identity that can become politically manifest when the time is right—or more pointedly—when the time is white. As such, I regard white apprehension of racial others as vehicles of time travel as a psychoaffective attachment in the Fanonian sense of an epidermalized past that (re)surfaces in nonlinear ways. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis whereby settler encounters with Indigenous peoples allow them to go back in time in order to move forward and form a new American race; to immigrants who can alternately take the country back to its founding or act as agents of devolution; to African American female bodies as transcending time in the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler’s Kindred: the capacity for racial others to serve as vehicles of time travel recurs as a potent (science) fiction of white temporalities.2Close