UC Irvine

This dissertation takes as its primary concern post 1989 Black Studies and its practices and deployments of time and temporality. With the so-called afterlife of slavery as the primary tense, the project unfolds from a sustained interrogation of Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America as the construction of afterlife before the coining of the term itself in Lose Your Mother a decade later. Situating Hartman as a primal mother and Scenes of Subjection as Taking the afterlife of slavery as the tense that can best explain black time, in the first chapter I look to the ways that afterlife has been taken up, or translated, in historiographies of slavery. I show how the weak reading fails to account for the temporality that Hartman construct through Scenes, producing instead texts that rely on Emancipation as an event, despite Hartman’s clear declarations to the contrary. In the second chapter, I turn to another set of Hartman’s readers, those who take afterlife to be a theoretical concept and an eternal permanent condition of blackness. Focusing my attention on Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror and time without duration as proper to black time, the first parts of this chapter critique this concept through engagement with Warren and his sources to get at the ways in which this strong translation of afterlife naturalizes blackness and is presented in and through metaphors of nature. I turn to other theoretical texts to articulate black time as it derives from this strong reading. The theoretical register here takes on the quality of a biblical lament for the loss of doubt that haunts both authors. In the third chapter, I turn to Hartman’s origins. Returning briefly to Warren’s text to consider the problem of the Social Contract and what sort of temporality we get by thinking of blackness contractually and through exchange, this third chapter view’s Hartman as not only primal mother, but the mother as child of Hortense Spillers and Orlando Patterson. Interrogating Hartman’s engagement with both scholars elicits a four-part problematic that will unfold through the rest of the text: the name, the giving of a subtraction, total natal alienation, and the trade slave. This four-part schema is, I argue, constitutive of blackness, and so to derive black time one has to think through this constellation that all circle around the debtness of blackness. The fourth chapter proposes a monetary theory of blackness to correct the ways the slave and the black are usually understood, proffering black time as an interminable debt term for a transaction that cannot close. In the final chapter, I turn towards the future orientations of black studies that derive from the weak or strong readings to illustrate how their concepts of eradicating the afterlife fundamentally rely on its continued existence. For the conclusion, I offer a temporality of interminability through a critique of Heidegger’s Being-towards-Death.