About This Unit

In John Gast's 1872 painting American Progress, a luminous white figure floats westward across the continent, stringing telegraph wire, schoolbook in hand, while light follows her and darkness — into which Native people, bison, and wild horses flee — retreats before her. The image is a theory of time disguised as a landscape: civilization advances, some peoples belong to the future and others to a vanishing past, and the violence of conquest is recast as the clock simply moving forward. This unit names that theory chronopolitics — the politics of time itself — and assembles the scholarship that exposes it. Charles Mills, in one of his final essays, argues that white modernity built a "racial time": a temporal order that cast the colonized as primitive, behind, perpetually not-yet — and that justice requires resetting what he calls the Euro-chronometer. Michael Hanchard shows the same structure operating as lived inequality — waiting rooms, wasted years, foreshortened lives — while Mark Rifkin demonstrates that Indigenous peoples were never "behind" settler time but inhabit their own temporal sovereignty, which the vanishing-Indian myth was invented to deny.

The unit's second movement asks what other times are possible — and finds them already in practice. From Afrofuturism's premise that a people who survived an apocalypse are uniquely qualified to imagine futures, to Kara Keeling's queer and Black cinematic temporalities, to Rasheedah Phillips's Black Quantum Futurism — which draws on physics, Afrodiasporic tradition, and housing-policy practice to treat the past as changeable and the future as already here in places — the unit closes the project not with a summary but with an opening: progress was never the only shape time could take. Learners end where the module's archives, fragments, and stories have been pointing all along: the record of the past is an argument, and so is the calendar — both can be remade.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Define chronopolitics and "racial time," and explain how temporal claims (progress, backwardness, "not yet ready") have functioned as instruments of racial rule.
• Analyze a visual or textual artifact of the progress narrative — American Progress above all — for the temporal work it performs.
• Compare at least two counter-temporalities (Afrofuturist, Indigenous, queer-of-color) and explain what each makes thinkable that progress time forecloses.
• Apply a futures-oriented framework (Black Quantum Futurism or a comparable practice) to a concrete community question, and reflect on what changes when the future is treated as makeable now.

Keywords

• Chronopolitics
• Racial time
• Progress narrative / manifest destiny
• Afrofuturism
• Temporal sovereignty

Open Educational Resources

• American Progress (John Gast, 1872) — object page and high-resolution image, Autry Museum of the American West (acc. 92.126.1). View the object page.

Museum object (primary source) · Public domain by age.

The unit's primary source and the module's own cover image: Gast's small oil — commissioned by travel-guide publisher George Crofutt and mass-reproduced as a chromolithograph in his guides — became the most legible single statement of manifest destiny ever made. The object page anchors close reading: the allegorical figure (often identified as Columbia/Progress), the technologies she carries, the light/dark gradient, and the peoples painted as departing. Learners read it as chronopolitics in pigment; the case study supplies the protocol.

• Phillips, Rasheedah — Dismantling the Master's Clock official reading guide. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2025. Download the guide (PDF).

Reading guide (free PDF companion to the unit's anchor book) · Open access.

The publisher's free companion to the unit's Key Scholarship anchor: chapter-by-chapter questions and "guided reflections for individuals and collectives" that make Phillips's demanding, multimodal book teachable without the book in every hand. For an OER, an unusually direct gift — the guide's collective-reflection prompts feed the unit's practicum, and its existence models the open-infrastructure ethos this project shares.

• "Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures" — exhibition resources, National Museum of African American History and Culture (2023–24). Explore the exhibition materials.

Museum exhibition (online materials, objects, media) · Open access.

The Smithsonian's landmark survey of Black futures-making — from Sun Ra's cosmology and Octavia Butler's manuscripts to flight jackets, funk, and film — presenting Afrofuturism not as a genre but as a century-deep tradition of claiming tomorrow. The online materials give learners the movement's visual and sonic archive in one place, with national-museum interpretation that itself marks how far margin-to-center travel has come: the tradition the academy long ignored, installed on the National Mall.

• Monument Lab — National Monument Audit (2021). Read the audit.

Research report + dataset · Open access.

The first systematic audit of the American monument landscape: roughly 50,000 records analyzed to show who stands in public time — the top fifty individuals commemorated are overwhelmingly white men; enslavers outnumber abolitionists; women and Black and Indigenous figures barely register. Monuments are chronopolitics in bronze — claims about which pasts deserve permanence — and the audit converts the unit's theory into data learners can query for their own city. Pairs with the Gast case: the painting claimed the future; the statues claim the past.

• Cooper, Brittney. "The Racial Politics of Time." TED Talk, 2017. Watch the talk.

TED Talk (video) · Open access.

Cooper examines racism through the lens of time: how time has historically been stolen from people of color — lost moments of joy and connection, lost years of healthy life, progress deferred — and how the theft is narrated as natural. The unit's most accessible entry point: the racial-time argument in plain, candid speech, worth watching before the scholarship and returning to after it, when its closing challenge — to reconsider your own place in time — has the full theory behind it.

Key Scholarship

• Phillips, Rasheedah. Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2025. Publisher page.

Book.

The unit's anchor and the module's most forward edge: Phillips — housing lawyer, artist, co-creator of Black Quantum Futurism — traces how Western linear time was built and racialized (colonial navigation, plantation schedules, standardized time zones, Daylight Saving) and how Black communities have always subverted it: Juneteenth's recalibrated emancipation, tenant organizing against eviction's clock, ritual, and "time travel" as practice. Her question — what could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? — is the module's closing dare. Multimodal, rigorous, and movement-rooted; the free reading guide in the unit's open resources makes it teachable. (Reads: horological history and housing policy against Afrodiasporic temporal practice.)

• Wooden, Isaiah Matthew. Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025. Publisher page.

Book.

Wooden examines contemporary Black artists across drama, film, performance art, and photography — playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O'Hara; visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier; filmmaker Tanya Hamilton — whose work troubles normative configurations of time in twenty-first-century Black life. The book's claim is the unit's second movement in the register of art criticism: normative time is specious, and Black temporal experimentation — intentional, sometimes ludic, unbound from teleology — reclaims time to reimagine Blackness in its multiplicities. The unit's contemporary-arts thread: counter-temporality as ongoing creative practice, not only theory. (Reads: performance, photography, and film against normative time.)

• Mills, Charles W. "The Chronopolitics of Racial Time." Time & Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

Among the last major essays of the philosopher whose work threads this whole project: Mills extends Zerubavel's "time maps" to argue that racialized groups have been assigned political times — white modernity casting itself as history's protagonist and the colonized as primitive, belated, or timeless — and closes with a call to reset the "Euro-chronometer," whose oppressive temporality, he notes, has come in left as well as right versions. The unit's title concept in its definitive statement, and the philosophical bridge from the project's epistemology-of-ignorance material to its futures turn. (Reads: the period maps of Western political philosophy against the colonial record.)

• Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Keeling reads cinema, music, and digital culture — Sun Ra's Space Is the Place, Black queer film, speculative finance — for temporalities that escape both progress and profit: queer time and Black futurity as practices of living in the wake of foreclosed futures while making others perceptible. The book supplies the unit's queer-of-color thread and its media-analytic method: learners leave able to ask of any film or feed whose time is this running on? (Reads: experimental film and sound against the futures markets that would price tomorrow.)

• Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Rifkin dismantles the temporal trick at the heart of the unit's painting: casting Native peoples as "vanishing" — belonging to the past, anachronistic in the present — was settler colonialism's way of denying them a present and future at all. Against inclusion in a single shared timeline (which quietly makes settler time the master clock), he argues for temporal sovereignty: Indigenous peoples' own durations, calendars, and orientations to ancestors and descendants as exercises of self-determination. The unit's Indigenous counter-temporality, and the direct scholarly answer to Gast. (Reads: allotment-era policy and Native literature against the "vanishing Indian" chronology.)

• Hanchard, Michael. "Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora." Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 245–268. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article (foundational).

The essay that put "racial time" into circulation: Hanchard shows temporal inequality as a lived dimension of racial domination — the waiting, the deferral, the "not yet" perpetually addressed to Black political claims — and names Afro-Modernity: the diaspora's own modernity, assembled from the Middle Passage onward, neither imitation nor outside of the West but its critical double. A generation before the unit's newer texts, the margins-to-center pattern in miniature: long canonical in Black studies, now indispensable to the sociology of time. (Reads: diasporic political movements against modernity's self-description.)

Case Studies

• Reading American Progress: The Cover Image as Chronopolitics

John Gast's American Progress (1872), the module's own cover image, with Afrofuturist counter-images · Visual-analysis gallery walk.

A visual-analysis activity in which learners close-read the project's own Module 6 cover — Gast's 1872 painting — with a structured protocol: inventory (figures, technologies, light), temporal mapping (what is cast as future, present, and past, and who moves in which direction), commission context (the painting was made as advertising for Crofutt's western travel guides), and theory application through racial time and the vanishing-Indian chronology. Then the counter-image move: each group pairs Gast with one work from the Afrofuturism materials that runs time differently, presenting the two as competing clocks in a gallery-walk format. The project's visual identity becomes its final teaching object.

• A Community Futures Protocol

Black Quantum Futurism's practice and the Dismantling the Master's Clock reading guide · Futures practicum — the project's closing activity.

The project's closing practicum: learners run a small futures exercise for a community they belong to — a block, a campus organization, a congregation, a family. The protocol has three steps: name one community question with a clock on it (housing, schooling, a closing institution); map the official timeline it is on — deadlines, budget cycles, development schedules, and whose chronometer they follow; then write the community's own timeline for the same question, including the past that official time omits and the future the community intends, as a back/future-casting memo or a time-capsule letter five years out. The deliverable pairs the two timelines with a short reflection on what changed when the clock changed — the module's arc of silence, fragments, and stories answered by the learner authoring time forward.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Gast: American Progress renders conquest as daylight arriving. Identify the painting's three most effective temporal devices — choices of motion, light, or placement that make violence read as time passing — and find one present-day image (an ad, a rendering of a redeveloped neighborhood, a tech keynote slide) that uses the same devices. What is being "vanished" in yours?
2. On Mills: "Not yet" — not yet ready, not yet qualified, not yet the right time — has been racial rule's politest instrument. Locate one historical and one contemporary "not yet" addressed to a racialized group's claim. Who held the clock in each case, and what finally moved it?
3. On Rifkin: Inclusion in a shared national timeline sounds like equality — and Rifkin argues it can be a quieter dispossession. Explain his case using the "vanishing Indian" figure, then assess: when is joining the common clock a gain, and when is keeping one's own time the deeper sovereignty? (Compare the refusal arguments elsewhere in this project if you know them.)
4. On Afrofuturism and Keeling: "The future is already here in places." Identify one practice, space, or work you know that runs on a different time — slower, cyclical, ancestor-facing, or future-dwelling — and analyze what it makes possible that the dominant schedule forecloses.
5. On Phillips and the practicum: After mapping your community question on two clocks: which differences between the official timeline and the community's surprised you? If the past is, as Phillips dares, "as changeable as the future," what one past event would your community most need to re-author — and what would doing so (commemoration, repair, retelling) actually look like?
6. Synthesis across the unit: Mills diagnoses the Euro-chronometer — a temporal order that assigns whole peoples to "behind" and "not yet." Phillips answers with a practice: if the past is as changeable as the future, both can be re-authored. Take one clock that governs a community you know — an eviction timeline, a school calendar, a redevelopment schedule, a holiday cycle — and analyze it both ways: what racial-time work does the official clock do, and what would re-authoring it in Phillips's sense concretely involve? Which is harder to see — the politics in the clock, or the possibility of another one — and why?

Further Readings and Resources

• "Reclaiming My Time." Online exhibition, National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2024. Explore the exhibition.

Online exhibition · Open access.

The Smithsonian's design exhibition — named for the phrase Representative Maxine Waters made an anthem in 2017 — gathers work by contemporary Black designers on rest, labor, and leisure: seating, lighting, photography, and graphic design that treat rest as a necessary element of resilience. The unit's lightest-touch entry in its deepest register: reclaiming time not as theory but as chairs, posters, and the right to sit down. The online materials carry the exhibition beyond the building.

• Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 (2014 reissue). Publisher page.

Book.

The source of "denial of coevalness": Fabian's classic critique shows how anthropology wrote the people it studied into another time — "primitive," "traditional," "developing" — while interviewer and interviewed in fact shared the same present. The discipline's own chronopolitics, named from inside; the academic ancestor of everything in the unit, and the demonstration that assigning someone a different time is a relation of power, not an observation.

• Eshun, Kodwo. "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287–302. Read the article (JSTOR).

Journal article.

The theoretical statement of the unit's second half: Eshun frames Afrofuturism as "chronopolitical intervention" — a struggle over the projective control of tomorrow, in which Black speculative practice contests futures already being written by markets and states, and assembles countermemories that reorder the past to open the future. The essay where the unit's two halves — the critique of progress time and the making of other times — meet by name.

• Black Quantum Futurism (project site and publications). Visit the project site.

Project site · Open access.

The living infrastructure behind the unit's anchor book and closing practicum: the collective practice of Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa, synthesizing quantum physics with Afrodiasporic ontologies of time through zines, sound, workshops, and projects like the Community Futures Lab — a North Philadelphia storefront that recorded a neighborhood's oral histories and futures as redevelopment displaced it. Where the unit's theory is already practice, and the direct source of the practicum's method.

• Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. 1993. Publisher page.

Novel.

The novel that anchors contemporary Black futures pedagogy: Lauren Olamina, a Black teenager in a collapsing 2020s California, founds a practice on the principle that "God is Change" — a temporal theory in fiction's clothing, in which survival depends on treating the future as something to be shaped rather than awaited. The literary companion the unit's theory keeps citing, and the most common single entry point into the tradition the Smithsonian exhibition surveys.

• Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Publisher page.

Book.

The cognitive-sociological toolkit Mills builds on: Zerubavel maps how communities plot the shape of the past — lines of progress and decline, mountains and valleys, ruptures and continuities — before filling in any content, and shows those plotlines doing political work in commemoration, calendars, and origin stories. For learners who want the general machinery beneath racial time: how any group's history gets a shape, and what the shape smuggles in.

• Mahadeo, Rahsaan. Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. Read the book (JSTOR).

Book.

Racial time studied ethnographically: Mahadeo works with Black youth to show how time itself is racialized in their everyday lives — who is made to wait, whose time is policed, whose futures are discounted — and how young people perceive, name, and transgress the clocks imposed on them. The unit's concepts operationalized in present-day sociology: chronopolitics not as theory but as fieldwork, in the generation the unit's learners belong to.

• Goldberg, Jess A. Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. Publisher page.

Book.

Abolitionist justice reenvisioned through literary studies: Goldberg reads Black Atlantic literatures of slavery — William Wells Brown's The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel, Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Claudia Rankine's Citizen — as texts that disrupt the grammar of law and order and propose nonlinear theories of time, imagining relationality built on care rather than inheritance or property. The bridge from the unit's temporal turn to the project's carceral questions: what "justice" means when it is unhooked from the sequence of crime and punishment.

• Goffe, Tao Leigh. "Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism." South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2022): 109–130. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

Alongside stolen land and stolen life, Goffe names a third axis of racial capitalism: stolen time. Reading contemporary apocalyptic storytelling — Watchmen, Parasite, Black Mother, Exit West, On Such a Full Sea — she shows how Blackness bends narrative and historical time, and finds in marronage a radical form of waiting: maroon time, slow and deliberate, against the linear story that colonialism was inevitable. The unit's temporal critique carried into racial capitalism and the media its learners already watch.