Police Time: Equiano, Blackness, and Custody

Abstract

Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) highlights the role that police power plays in restricting Black people from accessing “liberal time,” a conception of temporality that is teleological and invests individuals with potential for growth and development. The literary component of this temporality is the genre of autobiography and Bildungsroman. I argue that police power, through careful regulation of Black bodies and their relation to time and narration, make liberal time possible. Episodes in Equiano’s narrative draw attention to this regulation, which I call “police time”: a conception of temporality that sees Blackness as devoid of history, a vagrant emptiness that is capable of disrupting the liberal order and its “peace,” and hence needs to be “suspended.” Building on Equiano scholarship about autobiography, the possible fabrication of his own past, and police power, I read Equiano’s narrative as confronting police time and trying to fill the void that police see in his Blackness with a history instead.