“Happen Is Never Once”: The Temporality of Modernism’s Black Atlantic

The works of William Faulkner and Aimé Césaire demonstrate that the Black Atlantic’s circuits join the triangle trade not only spatially, but also temporally and historically. Furthermore, they articulate the temporality of a twentieth-century subject defined along the axis of the African diaspora—one who must manage both the (presumably) linear and progressive order of global capitalist industry and the historical vertigo and disenfranchisement of the transatlantic slave trade. This essay analyzes the formal techniques of both writers, particularly their use of temporal conflation, to show that rendering the “shock” of modernity demands addressing the slave trade that linked, and in many ways produced, the modern world.