On Epiphenomenal Temporality

This talk will delve deep into the often nuanced ways our assumptions about time in the Humanities impact the epistemological formations of our discipline. Beginning with the girding structure of the linear progress narrative and finishing with what Wright dubs ‘Epiphenomenal spacetime’, her argument will intersect with contemporary and canonical formations of Blackness within and without academe while intersecting with discourses on the temporal shift from Newtonian to theoretical particle physics. Time, as Wright will show, has everything to do with the representation of racial collectives in the Western tradition.

Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015). Writing through gender studies, queer studies, science studies, time studies, Black European Studies, African American Studies, and African Diaspora Studies, her work focuses on Black identity formation in both creative and academic discourses.