About This Case Study

The image on this module's cover is an argument about time. In John Gast's small 1872 oil American Progress, a luminous white figure floats westward across the continent, schoolbook in one hand, telegraph wire trailing from the other; light follows her from the settled East, and into the darkness ahead — where Native people, bison, and wild horses flee before her — the future is coming as daylight. The painting was not a private vision. It was commissioned by the travel-guide publisher George Crofutt and mass-reproduced as a chromolithograph in his guides to the West, which makes it advertising: a picture that sold westward expansion by making it look like the natural forward motion of the clock. This case study asks you to slow that picture down and read the theory of time inside it.

Two of the unit's ideas do the work. Chronopolitics — the politics of time itself — names the trick the painting performs: casting conquest as progress, some peoples as the future and others as a vanishing past, so that violence reads as mere sequence, the way things naturally move. Racial time, the philosopher Charles Mills's term, names the order that produces: a temporal hierarchy assigning whole peoples to "behind," "primitive," "not yet," with white modernity as history's protagonist. The analytical move is to read the image as an instrument: to ask what temporal work each pictorial choice does — who is placed where, who moves which way, what the light is arguing — and then to set beside it an image that runs time differently, so that Gast's clock becomes visible as a clock, not a fact. You will inventory the painting, map its times, apply the theory, and close by pairing it against a counter-image.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• John Gast, American Progress (1872) — object page and high-resolution image, Autry Museum of the American West (acc. 92.126.1). View the object page. Open the largest image you can and keep it in front of you.
• "Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures" — the Smithsonian's online exhibition materials, from which you will choose one counter-image in Phase 4. Explore the Searchable Museum.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on the image: American Progress depicts Native peoples as fleeing and "vanishing" — the painting's own racial logic, which this exercise examines rather than endorses. Read those figures as evidence of what the image argues, not as description of what happened.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• When you have seen this painting or one like it — in a textbook, a museum, a film — what did it seem to be "about"? Did it read as a picture of history, or as an argument about it?
• Can an image make a claim about time? What would it use to do that — where would you look?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Inventory (8–10 minutes)

Describe before interpreting. Working from the high-resolution image, list what is actually there, in four passes: the figures (the central allegorical woman, and the people and animals across the canvas — who, doing what, where); the technologies she carries or trails, and the ones appearing behind her; the light and dark, and exactly where the boundary between them falls; and the directions of movement — who moves which way. Resist meaning for now; get the picture down first.

For groups: Split the four passes among members, then assemble one shared inventory.

Phase 2: Temporal Mapping (12–15 minutes)

Now turn the inventory into a map of times:

1. Future, present, past. Mark which parts of the canvas are coded as the future, which as the present, and which as the past. What visual cues did you use to decide — light, technology, direction, dress?
2. Who moves which way. Set the figure's direction against the fleeing figures' direction. What does the opposition say about who belongs to what time — and about who is cast as having no future in the frame at all?
3. The commission. Recall that the painting was made as advertising for Crofutt's western travel guides. Whom was it selling the West to, and how does knowing it is an advertisement change what its "progress" is doing?

Note any part of the image your map can't cleanly sort — the ambiguities are part of what you are reading.

For groups: Build the future/present/past map together; where members coded a region differently, keep both and mark why.

Phase 3: The Theory (12–15 minutes)

Bring two concepts to your map. Chronopolitics is the politics of time: representing history so that some peoples occupy the future and others a vanishing past, and so that conquest reads as the clock moving forward. Racial time (Mills) is the hierarchy that produces — assigning racialized peoples to "behind," "primitive," "not yet." The related vanishing-Indian chronology holds that Native peoples belong to the past and are naturally disappearing — a claim that denies them a present and a future. Then:

• Point to the exact places in the painting where chronopolitics is operating. For each, name the temporal claim being made and the pictorial means making it.
• Where is the vanishing-Indian chronology doing its work? What does casting these figures as "departing" accomplish that a picture of conflict or removal would not?
• The strain test. Where does the racial-time reading fit the image tightly, and where does it strain? Is there anything in the canvas the framework doesn't fully explain — a figure, a detail, an ambiguity? Name it honestly.

For groups: Assign each member one region of the canvas to argue the theory through; then walk the full painting together.

Phase 4: The Counter-Image (12–15 minutes)

Make the clock visible by setting another beside it. From the Afrofuturism materials, choose one work that runs time differently, and:

• Inventory it briefly, then map its times as you did Gast's: where are its future, present, and past, and who occupies them?
• Set the two side by side as competing clocks. What does your counter-image make thinkable that American Progress forecloses — about who has a future, about which direction "forward" is, about what the past is for?
• The strain test. "Competing clocks" is a useful frame, but does it flatten either work — forcing a piece that was not made as an answer to Gast into that role? Say where the pairing illuminates and where it distorts.

For groups (gallery walk): Each member or pair posts their Gast-plus-counter-image pairing; the group walks them in turn, and each presenter names the two clocks in one line before discussion.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The temporal device in American Progress that works hardest is __________. Setting it beside a counter-image showed me __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which pictorial choice carries the argument, and exactly what another clock made visible.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your temporal map from Phase 2 and your paired counter-image analysis from Phase 4 — together they are a record of the painting's clock and of another one held beside it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phases 1 through 3 run as split work assembled together; Phase 4 works as a gallery walk, each pairing presented in turn. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The concept in full: Mills, Charles W. "The Chronopolitics of Racial Time." Time & Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317. Read the article (DOI). Racial time and the "Euro-chronometer" the painting runs on; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The answer to the vanishing-Indian chronology: Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Publisher page. Why Native peoples were never "behind" settler time; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The same claim in bronze: Monument Lab, National Monument Audit (2021). Read the audit. Who occupies public time, counted across roughly 50,000 monuments; it appears in the unit's Open Educational Resources.