Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time By: Rasheedah Phillips

Author: Rasheedah Phillips

Afrofuturist artist Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism asks what Black liberation could look like in a universe where the past was as changeable as the future.

Dismantling the Master’s Clock is a groundbreaking debut work that synthesizes philosophy and the history of science with Black cultural traditions, speculative fiction, and Phillips’s own art practice to argue for a more equitable access to time and the future. 

While some processes, like aging, birth, or car crashes, seem to occur in only one direction of time, by the apparent logic of the universe, human consciousness should experience time both backwards and forwards. Though past and present organize our lives like unarguable fact, the physicists who study time are much less certain. Linear time is an illusion, explains Rasheedah Phillips, a construct even science contests. It is based more on Western history and systems of social order than on nature or the variety of human existence. Both indigenous African conceptions of time and quantum physics recognize how the past, present, and future act upon and modify each other. Afrodiasporic identity is itself a time-traveling phenomenon in which the past is always present.

Phillips unfurls time’s legacy of racial from maritime navigation for colonial expansion and the timekeeping methods of plantation overseers, to the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time and the Western Scramble for Africa, time has been a homogenizing project of the last few centuries. Phillips unsettles dominant assumptions of space and time, highlighting how Black communities have long subverted these through alternative temporal frameworks.