A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?
Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.
Praise for Dismantling the Master's Clock:
"The straightening and whitening of time are as viciously colonial, as brutally geocidal and genocidal, as the settling and owning of space. Rasheedah Phillips brilliantly and rigorously alerts us to this condition while also showing us how we walk with and wait on one another in rhythm. Dismantling the Master’s Clock is a queer, black, reconstructive tour de force." —Fred Moten, author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
“This book is a fruitful offering to a world with ever-increasing anxiety about the future. With incredible precision, the text delivers an invitation to reconstruct all that we accept in relation to time and existence. The brilliant Rasheedah Phillips untangles and explores history, memory, and quantum perspectives like so few others can.” —Kimberly Drew, author of Black Futures
"I often speak to friends about a virtual workshop I attended guided by a Black woman on how to time travel. How I sat in awe experiencing a life-altering experimentation with time. I am utterly blown away by the work of Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ ... bold declarations about time, Blackness, and the power of space feels like a special, underground portal silently healing us and shifting culture. Dismantling the Master's Clock is our path to deep connection and power. This is revolutionary work." —Tricia Hersey, author of Rest Is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reframe Your Life
"Whether the device in hand is a quantum time capsule, a newly crafted time zone protocol, or instruments for bending the arrow of time, the praxis is one of grounded theory, laser-focused on changing the material conditions of possibility for reconfiguring geographies, architectures, calendars, and constellations ... Phillips invites us into a real-world laboratory of situated analysis and experimentation that takes seriously the material nature of imaginings." —Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
"In this well-researched and expansive text, Rasheedah Phillips offers a detailed history of how standardized colonial time constricts Black life and decolonial freedom ... The time you will spend with this book will not drag you from point A to point B; it will expand into the field of deep black contemplation we've been waiting for." —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
"Dismantling the Master's Clock is a gorgeous weaving of art, science and activism. Rasheedah Phillips inspires the mind and recharges the heart with this volume."—Michelle M. Wright, author of Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology
“Dismantling the Master’s Clock reorganizes … the bereft economies of juridical time, which function to unhouse and displace according to linear and measured schedules … by bringing into sharp focus alternative tempos, promises, and cadences.” —Katherine McKittrick, author of Dear Science and Other Stories
“When the world is collapsing in grief and we enter into the billionth year of being told that we’re all about to die or maybe dead already, Phillips insists on a renegotiation of space and time that uplifts and loves Black people, holding us tenderly in a space where we can thrive. This is a call to mutiny against the violence of colonized, imperial, genocidal time. Amen!” —Legacy Russell, author of Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us
Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.
