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

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.

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