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 Introduction Political Fictions Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots! —Suzan-Lori Parks, Elements of Style This book demonstrates that, across genre and era, African American writers have disclosed and explored the complex and high philosophical and material stakes inherent in time and its measure. They have long understood that time, justice, and the written word are deeply intertwined— so much so that this triad lies at the heart of the African American literary tradition, and from its very beginning. The publisher’s preface to Phillis Wheatley’s  book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first published book by an African American author, states that “the following poems were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were the Products of her leisure Moments.”1 To ascribe “leisure moments” to a slave, who owns neither her body nor her time, is simply astounding. Time was necessarily experienced differently by U.S. slaves and masters, if only because masters owned time itself. The clock will not readily benefit those denied not only the power to control their time but also the means to measure it. Wheatley observes that fact in her wellknown poem “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” wherein she notes the privileges of the men who are attending Harvard: “Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space, / And mark the systems of revolving worlds.”2 Because they have the power to “mark” celestial “systems,” the students therefore have the power to measure time. She, “an Ethiop,” advises them to use that power wisely: “Improve your privileges while they stay, / Ye pupils, and each hour redeem ,” with the poetic speaker understanding and underscoring time’s status in  as an unevenly distributed commodity (“redeem”).3 Wheatley’s poem, along with a great deal of the African American literature that follows it, complicates contemporary, and influential, understandings of modern time as increasingly uniform and collective. For instance, Benedict Anderson has argued that, in contradistinction to a religious “medieaval conception of simultaneity-along-time,” the simultaneity of modern   INTRODUCTION nationalism is “transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment , but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar .”4 In other words, modern identities such as nationality or citizenship are forged on the grounds of shared, secular temporality in physical space. But, as Lloyd Pratt has shown, modernity and its identities, particularly nationality, cannot be so easily understood as unfolding across one dimension in time, given the “temporal heterogeneity” and “nonsynchronicity ” documented in the antebellum African American narratives of Frederick Douglass and others.5 Likewise countering Anderson’s views, Wai Chee Dimock has recently made a case for “deep time,” arguing persuasively that “the uneven pace of modernity suggests that standardization is not everywhere the rule.”6 Dimock offers deep time as an alternative model that, in her view, overcomes “the glaring inadequacy of a nation-based model” in literary studies by “binding” American literature together with “other geographies, other languages and cultures” and by “threading the long durations of those cultures into the short chronology of the United States.”7 Yet the contingencies of nation-based citizenship, either allocated or withheld, shape our experiences and our literary texts, including (and perhaps especially) our experiences and representations of time, both in the here and now and in the long term. As E. L. McCallum has observed, although “citizenship has conventionally been conceived in terms of space,” it “is inalienably conceived through time as well, since it is granted through government, and government is inherently contingent upon time.”8 For example , raced slavery in the United States across centuries was predicated on the alleged premodernity of African Americans and on their federally codified noncitizenship status, a combination that matches neither Anderson ’s model of shared time among citizens of a nation nor Dimock’s model of transnational time across periods. Moreover, as Dimock herself has argued elsewhere, “we might think of literature, then, as the textualization of justice, the transposition of its clean abstractions into the messiness of representation.”9 Just so, prolonged, racialized injustice produced by and experienced within the nation has been registered and resisted in not-tidy ways by African American literature from  to the present. As a result, neither “simultaneity” nor “deep time” explains the work of African American writers, who regularly represent the complex, multivalent nature of time as experienced within the United States by its citizens and by those...

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