Race, Time, and Utopia

Abstract

Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation argues that racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time, and utopia has been the response to this domination. The racially dominated are not free to define what counts as “progress,” they are not free from the accumulation of past injustices, and, most importantly, they are not free from the arbitrary organization of work in capitalist labor markets. Racially unjust societies are forms of life where the justifications for how to organize time around life, labor, and leisure are out of the hands of the dominated. Utopia has been a crucial resource for the refusing submission to time domination by opening pathways towards alternative futures. This book provides a theoretical account of utopia as the critical analysis of the sources of time domination and the struggle to create emancipatory forms of life. Rather than focusing on inclusion and equality before the law, as found in liberal theories of racial injustice, Race, Time, and Utopia analyzes the neglected “utopian” tradition of emancipation in black political thought that insists freedom can only be secured through the transformation of how we organize social time. Bringing together the work of W. E. B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with the critical theory of Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst, this book reconstructs a social theory and normative account of forms of life as the struggle over how time will be organized. Race, Time, and Utopia asks, “can there be freedom without a new order of time?”