Thesis Supervisor: Ana Teixeira Pinto  

Thesis: A Politics for Dissolution or: "Let’s do the Time Warp again...": the Construction of Time and Race, Bedfellows in Modernity

August 2020

Abstract

This thesis maps the chronopolitics of Modernity’s spaciotemporal complex as an effect of racial capitalism. It proposes that exiting racial capitalism requires exiting linear Time, as established by the Enlightenment and the tools of scientific reason. As such, the role of Time figures not only as the primary descriptor of our World, but the vital site of Raciality. This argument is situated in a critique of Kant’s Racial Theory and Modernity’s Temporal and Racial legacy through a close reading of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s text, "The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology" and Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s two texts, "On Difference Without Separability" and "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Question of Blackness Toward the End of the World." As the pillars of Time and Race evolve and reinforce each other, key developments in physics and various abstractions of Time flit between the two. Sometimes, this experimentation and. abstraction serve to redirect, and other times reinforce, a dominating narrative of subjugation, with its heavy-handed and pervasive role in forming the World’s juridic, economic and symbolic structures.

Author: Risa Horn