| This study places two recurrent topics of black letters and thought---time and agency---at the center of a coherent vision of the African American tradition from the antebellum period forward. With a primary focus on prose narrative, "Words for the Hour" includes works by William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler and Gayl Jones. Defining temporality as the assumptions and constructions of change, duration, and order that individuals use to activate their agency in relations among past, present, and future, I show that it has long been both a means by which white supremacy has attempted to limit black agency and a ground of black resistance to white supremacy. The literary interventions of my chosen writers denaturalize white supremacist temporalities in culture and politics, show their effects on individual African Americans, and analyze the larger role of temporality in the United States. The texts that I discuss show that white Americans cannot readily track the temporalities by which black Americans live: at best, they make do with fantasy constructions as they impose their temporalities upon black lives. I conclude by observing African American literature's importance as an arc of responses to the many ways that white supremacy importunes its subjects, overwrites their agency, and strips their time of any humanitarian potential. |
