Dismantling the Master's Clock

A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.

Why do some processes--like aging, birth, and car crashes--occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips's own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master's Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

"The straightening and whitening of time are as viciously colonial, as brutally geocidal and genocidal, as the settling and owning of space. Rasheedah Phillips brilliantly and rigorously alerts us to this condition while also showing us how we walk with and wait on one another in rhythm. Dismantling the Master's Clock is a queer, black, reconstructive tour de force." -- Fred Moten, author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

"In this well-researched and expansive text, Rasheedah Phillips offers a detailed history of how standardized colonial time constricts Black life and decolonial freedom ... The time you will spend with this book will not drag you from point A to point B; it will expand into the field of deep black contemplation we've been waiting for." -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

"When the world is collapsing in grief and we enter into the billionth year of being told that we're all about to die or maybe dead already, Phillips insists on a renegotiation of space and time that uplifts and loves Black people, holding us tenderly in a space where we can thrive. This is a call to mutiny against the violence of colonized, imperial, genocidal time. Amen!" --Legacy Russell, author of Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. She is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.

• Publisher: AK Press
  
• Publish Date: January 28, 2025
  
• Pages: 392
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Paperback
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781849355612
  
• BISAC Categories: Art & Politics, Physics - Quantum Theory, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Black Studies (Global)