Dismantling the Master's Clock
On Race, Space, and Time
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Dismantling the Master's Clock
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Narrated by:
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Kenyé Askew
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.
©2025 AK Press (P)2025 AK PressCritic reviews
"Phillips explains how reconceiving time, space and matter in ways that align with Blackness can liberate us all."—Ms. Magazine
"Dismantling the Master's Clock is all at once a theoretical Afrofuturist powerhouse, a love-letter to Black community, and an empowering call for all people to reevaluate the ways that Western perceptions of time and race have created systemic harm for Black communities...a significant cultural achievement and a blueprint for lasting temporal change."—Joy Sanchez-Taylor, Strange Horizons
"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, co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study