Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature by Daylanne K. English

Daylanne K. English’s latest work Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature embraces the ambitious project of being “the first to explore how time, in both philosophical and material senses, has been treated throughout the African American literary tradition as a fundamental aspect of literary form, of daily experience, and of U.S. citizenship” (2-3). Arguing that “African American writers have represented a profound connection between differential temporalities and differential justices in the United States,” she demonstrates that they have consistently “revealed how racialized injustice discloses the shortcomings within dominant period philosophies, particularly philosophies of time.” Moving through the African American literary canon with an admirable economy, English maneuvers among discussions of novels, plays, and poetry in a broad sweep of genres and periods in order to demonstrate that “the African American literary tradition … has documented not only that unevenness of time but also time’s integral relationship to federal and state law” (3). By titling her introduction after Pauline E. Hopkins’s famous condemnation of constitutional equity as a political fiction (in the 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South) and concluding the text with the hope that literary experimentations can ultimately lead to political truths, as in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, she signals her intent to focus on the centrality of time and justice in African American literature.

Each chapter examines, in turn, the various periods of African American literature from the colonial era through the present. English begins in Chapter One to challenge the dominant Hegelian perspective of African Americans as locked in a premodern time, analyzing the multiple life narratives of Frederick Douglass in order to establish early authors’ racially differential experience of time and justice. Through extended analyses of novels by Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt in Chapter Two and works by Richard Wright, Ernest J. Gaines, and Parks in Chapter Three, English argues that the “strategic anachronism” in literary aesthetic forms such as the anti-lynching drama “serve[s] to represent and protest the unchanging nature of racially inflected justice” (96). She argues in Chapter Four that this continuity of historical representation is temporarily punctuated by the more politicized literary movements of the twentieth century in what she terms the “imagined presentism” of the Harlem Renaissance (19) and the “strategic presentism” of the Black Arts Movement (20). The literary deployment of time during each of these movements actively engages the exigencies of accessing justice by acquiring full citizenship and suggests the reality of the cultural-political lag that unfortunately eroded the optimism of the twentieth century’s cultural, literary, and political movements. Chapter Five explores contemporary author Walter Mosley’s hard-boiled detective fiction as an anachronistic literary strategy that “describes and inscribes both past and present-day injustice and discontent” (134) and the works of Barbara Neely as exercises in establishing “blackness outside the forces of the law” (131). This analysis of black community extends into the conclusion, in which her theorization of black diaspora and temporality suggests that the “failed” (123) projects of realized collectivity in twentieth-century literary movements give way to efforts to heal the “temporal damage” (161) rendered by racial injustice across centuries. An alternative “desire for [collectivity], expressed via the imagination and theorization of black ‘contemporaneity’ or continuity” (159) is posited even as the myriad ways blacks have been kept waiting for justice is evinced in the plays of Parks.

Among English’s many notable contributions in this volume is her documentation of African Americans’ consistent challenge to the contemporaneous philosophies of their time. From Hegel’s African developmental stasis theory during the slave era, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s, William James’s, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s turn-of-the-century pragmatism and Henri Bergson’s “open future” of “pure possibility” (12), through the contemporary era’s Heideggerian notion of “being there” (20...