{"id":35121,"date":"2022-11-30T17:00:57","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/?p=35121"},"modified":"2022-11-30T11:56:16","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T10:56:16","slug":"black-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/black-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Time"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[353,846],"project_type":[725,726,735,736],"class_list":["post-35121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-online-publications","project-time-after-time","project_type-formats","project_type-text","project_type-spheres-of-practice","project_type-textual"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"When I was a teenager growing up in New York, my friends and I would tease each other. When one of us arrived late to a gathering, we\u2019d say, \u00bbYou\u2019re on African time today.\u00ab Or \u00bbyou\u2019re on Black time.\u00ab To be in Black time is to be unpunctual, slow, and unproductive. In the west, Black time is marked as deviant time. It\u2019s to violate an invisible norm: white time.\r\n\r\nI\u2019ve been thinking about this teenage joke in the context of the pandemic \u2013 a crisis that changed our relationship to time. Suddenly we were home, saving hours of commuting. Meetings, classes, events were canceled. Financial relief offered by governments opened up possibilities. There was time to rethink marriages and careers, to garden and bake and learn new languages. In spite of the havoc, there was hope that the pandemic might slow things down.\r\n\r\nBut for many, if not most people, the pandemic did the opposite: it created a time crisis. Especially for parents, those in the medical professions, essential workers, and working-class people, the COVID crisis set into relief another crisis that predated it: increasingly, we\u2019re expected to do more and more with less time and resources. Technology has only made things worse. Our time is continuously at risk of being hijacked with the ping of a text or an email notification.\r\n\r\nThe pandemic not only created a time crisis, though. It also coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement. This overlap isn\u2019t accidental, and also points to an overlooked link between time and discriminatory structures. Time is a double-edged sword, a tool used either to oppress or to set free. It\u2019s neither neutral nor objective, though we often treat it as such. Time is experienced, valued, deployed differently depending on culture, history, and political context.\r\n\r\nTake Black time. That teenage joke has a basis in the fact that cultural conceptions of time vary enormously. I was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and have traveled between there and my adopted country, the United States, my whole life.\r\n\r\nSwitching between \u00bbAmerican time\u00ab and \u00bbSudanese time\u00ab is always a shock. In Sudan, people expect you to visit them not for one or two hours, but for seven or eight. Better yet if you spend the night (Sudanese living rooms are furnished with beds, partly to accommodate day visits that stretch into overnight stays).\r\n\r\nAfter four or five hours of a social visit in Khartoum, I\u2019m mentally thrashing my teeth, biting at the bit, ranting and raving in my head about how was it possible<\/em> that these aunties of mine could think that I had all day to waste chit-chatting about nothing?\r\n\r\nI have things to do! Deadlines to meet! And even if it\u2019s simply that I want time alone<\/em>, I want time alone to rest so that tomorrow I can be more efficiently productive<\/em>. For rest is only a means to more productivity.\r\n\r\nIt was only after years that I understood: in Khartoum, time is often used to create social bonds; it produces solidarity and community. In New York, time is used to produce things \u2013 primarily things for getting oneself ahead. This is not to romanticize Sudan, where the labor of hospitality falls on women: the cooking, cleaning, hosting that creates the conditions necessary for community (though communities everywhere are built on the labor of women).\r\n\r\nBut the dissonance between Sudanese and American time points to the fact that the \u00bbtime\u00ab I was used to in the US, that I subscribed to as \u00bbright,\u00ab as normative, is rooted in a specific culture and economic system. I\u2019ll call it \u00bbwhite time.\u00ab White time is western capitalist time, understood as useful for producing material or intellectual goods for consumption. White time is linear, efficient, punctual, productive \u2013 for neoliberal capitalism.\r\n\r\nThe measurable seconds, minutes, hours that structure white time assume a linearity that is \u2013 for many Black people, people of color, formerly colonized people, queer people, any group shaped by histories of violence \u2013 an illusion. Black time is a joke, but it\u2019s also deadly serious. It\u2019s marked by layers of trauma: historical trauma of slavery and colonialism, out of which arises societal trauma of structural racism, out of which arises economic trauma of continued dispossession. Often, these overlapping traumas feed into familial or intimate trauma.\r\n\r\nTime marked by trauma is warped. Past, present, and future blend together. That\u2019s why there\u2019s a ghost in Toni Morrison\u2019s novel Beloved<\/em>. The dead baby comes back as the trauma of slavery haunting the Black mother, Sethe, in the present. Sethe escapes slavery. But she can\u2019t move into the future. How can she?\r\n\r\nTime is not only shaped by trauma. It\u2019s also used to traumatize. The more oppressive an economic or political system is, the more compulsively it controls time. During the Holocaust, the Nazi dictum posted on the gates of concentration camps, \u00bbArbeit macht frei,\u00ab was a disturbingly ironic statement about the way the Nazis controlled time to carry out the simultaneous objectives of exploiting and exterminating prisoners. Every second of the day was regulated and used up in labor. Prisoners often dropped dead. Concentration camps harnessed time as an instrument of torture. During the slave era, most field slaves were forced to work to the maximum (up to 18 hours during harvest season) and given minimum time to rest \u2013 just enough to ensure that they continued to be productive. Of course, countless people died.\r\n\r\nAs historian Caitlin C. Rosenthal has shown, time-intensive labor practices under slavery served as direct inspiration for modern business management practices. For instance, the \u00bbtask\u00ab system, which was developed as a means of organizing slave labor (it required that each slave completed a minimum quota of \u00bbtasks\u00ab within an allotted time), was adapted by two founders of modern business management, Henry Laurence Gantt and Frederick Winslow Taylor.\r\n\r\nThis is not to equate late capitalism with slavery \u2013 workers are paid, even if badly, and they have rights, even if fewer and fewer \u2013 but it\u2019s useful to consider the links between these two systems. Today, accounts of Amazon warehouse workers having to pee in bottles because it takes too long to walk to the bathroom, in order not to miss the \u00bbfulfillment\u00ab demands of the company, point to the ways that capitalism keeps workers subject by controlling time. The \u00bbgig\u00ab economy that has become prevalent is built on paying workers little enough so that they have to work more and more (two, three, four gigs simultaneously). Time comes under the control of an ever-ruthless market. No room to rest, protest, or be creative. No time to challenge a system built on the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.\r\n\r\nBut there are signs that people are fed up. During the pandemic, some of us experienced \u00bbslow time,\u00ab others a \u00bbtime crisis,\u00ab and most of us got a taste of both \u2013 if in unequal doses. We\u2019ve realized that our relationship to time can be different. Between January 2021 and February 2022, nearly 57 million Americans left their workplaces, a 25 percent increase from the same period before the pandemic; and the rest of the world is reflecting a similar trend. The \u00bbGreat Resignation \u00ab is partly driven by the fact that people are tired of employers who exploit their time while paying them terribly for it.\r\n\r\nQuitting one job for a slightly better one isn\u2019t enough, though. Younger people \u2013 millennials and Generation Z \u2013 are waking up to the fact that the upward mobility hustle is a time waste. Inflation is spiking, affordable housing is out of reach, the climate is going to hell. Those who ascribe \u00bblaziness\u00ab to these generations misread a shift in values: young people are realizing that there are more meaningful (rather than profitable) ways to spend their time.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s also why emergent initiatives \u2013 such as a Universal Basic Income (UBI) \u2013 are more popular amongst the young. Basic Income is radical because it can liberate people not just from economic precarity, but from time deprivation. It gives time not only to the rich but to the poor, to mothers, to artists, to those who are working not for the profit of a corporation but for the public good. It can open up exactly those spaces for rest, protest, and creativity necessary for confronting the challenges we face \u2013 from climate change to white supremacy to the gig economy.\r\n\r\nWe should lay claim to Basic Income, to slow time, to any notions of time that challenge the logic of the market. That includes Black time. Because it\u2019s out of sync, Black time disrupts the \u00bbefficiency\u00ab of neoliberal capitalism. It reminds us that there are conceptions of temporality that exist outside the norm of white time. Black time registers the traumas that shape the histories of marginalized groups. In slowing things down, it makes space for solidarity and community.\r\n\r\nBy prying open these pockets of time, we can create new possibilities. We might even be able to get rid of an exploitative economic system altogether. As the author Ursula K. Le Guin says, \u00bbWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.\u00ab But that takes time."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Fatin Abbas<\/strong> is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel<\/em>, out from W. W. Norton in the United States and Canada in 2023. Her fiction has appeared in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing<\/em>, Freeman\u2019s: The Best New Writing on Arrival<\/em> and The Warwick Review<\/em>, amongst other places, and her nonfiction writing has appeared in publications including Le Monde diplomatique<\/em>, Zeit Online<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, and Africa is a Country<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

<\/p>"}],"intro_preview_headline":"Fatin Abbas","intro_preview_txt":"In this essay, first published in Kulturaustausch<\/em> magazine, Issue 4, 2022, Fatin Abbas reflects on our relationship with time: from the time crisis the pandemic created to how time is neither neutral nor objective and how our perceptions of time are shaped by myriad factors.<\/span>","intro_preview_img":34821,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"Fatin Abbas","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":true,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":"","post_copyright":"ccl_individual","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"2022 ifa (Institut f\u00fcr Auslandsbeziehungen) and the author. All rights reserved.<\/span>","post_related_posts":[35125,35141,35154],"related_posts_post":[20936]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35121\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/20936"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35154"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35141"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=35121"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=35121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}