Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature

Chapter 1: Ticking, Not Talking: Timekeeping in Early African American Literature

  Ticking, NotTalking:Timekeeping in Early African American Literature Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am brought here. We boil wild plums for jam and cake eight times since then, so I must be sixteen. —Toni Morrison, A Mercy With little controversy, African American literature has conventionally been understood as following a distinct timeline, as possessing its own literary genealogy and history. The towering Norton Anthology of African American Literature, with its explicit aims “to make available in one representative anthology the major texts in the tradition and to construct a canon inductively,”1 dates that tradition from  to the present, identifying Lucy Terry’s  poem “Bars Fight” as the “earliest known work of literature by an African American.”2 Even when they dispute the Norton’s selection process or its point of origin for the tradition, competing anthologies concur that African American literature forms a separate tradition both literarily and temporally. The editors of Call and Response, the Riverside anthology of African American literature, “believe that African American literature is a distinct tradition, one originating in the African and African American cultural heritages and in the experience of enslavement in the United States,” while the editors of the Prentice Hall Anthology “employ an approach that places African American aesthetic contributions within historical context,” arguing that literature and history “define” one another.3 On the other hand, ascribing a distinct temporality to black people has been far more controversial—and rightly so. For to the degree that black people have been described and perceived as being in or of another time, they have also generally been excluded, and in distinctly racist ways, from dominant definitions of Western modernity. For instance, many eighteenth - and nineteenth-century white European and U.S. philosophers believed that black people represented an earlier, less evolved form of   TICKING, NOT TALKING human and asserted that they were neither fit nor ready for modern times. In a posthumously published volume of his collected lectures, The Philosophy of History (), Georg F. W. Hegel (–), claimed that “in Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example God, or Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being.”4 In Hegel’s developmental model of culture, the only hope for “Negroes” to come into modernity, including its culture and law, lay in their contact with the white West: From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery. . . . Slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence—a phase of education—a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is Freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal. (–; emphasis in original) Slavery becomes, in his view, the necessary condition for “Negroes” to gain maturity and “the essence of humanity,” or, as Paul Gilroy succinctly explains, for Hegel “slavery is itself a modernising force.”5 Having thus dispatched black people as presently unworthy of justice, as residing outside modern consciousness and below a “higher” plane occupied by white Europeans, Hegel proceeds to dismiss an entire continent: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit. . . . What we properly understand by Africa is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped spirit, still involved in conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History” (). As Michelle Wright observes, Hegel “located the Black outside analytical history, mired in a developmental stasis from which only Western civilization can rescue him.”6 But note that Hegel’s framework for human development is not solely or strictly teleological but is also broadly and fundamentally temporal. For TICKING, NOT TALKING   him, time is the essential dimension of...