In the opening of Unpayable Debt (2022), Denise Ferreira Da Silva turns toward the temporality of modernity and its racialized gendered others, asking, “How to break this perverse circuitry” (13). Her work on Octavia Butler’s writing exposes linearity as central to the “confection of post-Enlightenment descriptors and pillars” (59). Following da Silva’s question, this seminar engages writing that locates the temporal cracks in the ontological givens of modernity and presents the possibility for alternative temporal modes. We investigate how temporality shapes conceptions of the racialized, gendered subject and how contemporary writing across languages crafts alternative temporal responses to the “perverse circuitry” crafted through colonization. While queer theorists like Elizabeth Freeman (2010) have questioned chrononormative time and concepts of futurity based on re/productivity, recent work in trans studies has critiqued progress-oriented understandings of transness. Moving with and beyond gender studies, this seminar orients to time from an interdisciplinary perspective. Scholarship in black studies and native studies, in particular, illuminates how time functions in the problematic distinction between “human” and “thing” between sovereign subjects and racialized others. This seminar gathers scholars from various fields investigating new directions in temporality studies, elucidating how contemporary writers and artists work with temporal modes to envision alternative presents and futures.

We invite writers, artists, translators, and scholars to join a dialogue on temporality in literature related to the following questions:


Temporal experiments in black studies: How does literature challenge linear progress narratives of blackness, and what expansive possibilities of blackness arise through temporal fractures?
Native and decolonial orientations to spacetime: what examples of temporal orientations emerge that present “ways of inhabiting time that shape how the past moves toward the present and future”? (Rifkin 2, 2017). 
Trans* temporalities: What is the role of time in the construction of racialized gender, and how is this taken up creatively in queer and trans literature?
The aesthetics of lateness and slowness: How do pace, acceleration, and deceleration challenge received and enforced conceptions of time and the subject in late-stage capitalism?
The relation between temporality and processes of becoming: How do the gerund and present tense shift understandings of subject formation? How do these relate to philosophies of being and becoming for racialized gendered subject formation?


If applicants have questions about any aspect of potential proposals, please reach out to the seminar organizer, Liz Rose (lizrose@sas.upenn.edu).