Kinneret Lahad, A table for one: A critical reading of singlehood, gender and time (Manchester University Press, 2017).
Saidiya Hartman, “The belly of the world: A note on Black women’s labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–173. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
For a detailed discussion on the temporalities of waiting for Zimbabean immigrants see: Johannes Machinya, “Migration control, temporal irregularity and waiting: Undocumented Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of deportability in South Africa.” In: Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi, eds. (Routledge, 2020), 96–112.
Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that waiting as a form of submission, Lahad argues that to be kept waiting is a social assertion that one’s time and social worth are of lesser value in a rigid, sequential ordering, representing and producing temporal orders. See Lahad, A table for one (2017).
Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 102.
Pierre Bourdieu, "Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence," Pascalian Meditations (Stanford University Press, 2000).
Ibid.
(Mbembe and Roitman, pp324) Conversely, waiting, as argued by AbdouMalique Simone, also signals a mode of being that is rooted in a notion of hope, of “eventuality.” In AbdouMalique Simone in conversation with Mpho Matsipa, “Inoperable Relations,” African Mobilities 2.0 podcast series (2020), ➝.
➝.
For a detailed discussion on world-making and the relation between racism and zoological framings of Black people that moves beyond a critique of bestialization, see: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world (NYU Press, 2020); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Losing manhood: Animality and plasticity in the (neo) slave narrative,” Qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences 25, no. 1–2 (2016): 95–136.
Anna Badkhen, “Bright Unbearable Reality. Migration as Seen from above,” The New York Review of Books (January 2, 2021), ➝.
Lahad, A table for one (2017), 104–105.
The liminal is an intermediate phase that is an important stage in rites of passage. Thus, the individual positioned in the liminal phase is not a member of a group previously belonged to, nor of the group one will—or hopes to belong to upon completion of the next rite. Positions assigned and arranged by law, custom, convention and ceremony. Ibid., 102.
Hartman, “The belly of the world,” 169.
Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017).
Tina M. Campt, Listening to images (Duke University Press, 2017).
Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture 7, no. 2 (1995): 323–352. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001). Here, Mbembe is concerned with: the time of existence and experience, the time of entanglement. Mbembe offers three postulates: 1) The time of African existence is neither linear time nor a simple sequence to the time where a single age exists within society. Thus, time is an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures – each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones. 2) This time is made of disturbances, not necessarily resulting in chaos and anarchy. Instabilities, unforeseen events and oscillations do not always lead to erratic and unpredictable behaviors. 3) This time is not irreversible. all sharp breaks, sudden and abrupt outbursts of volatility, it cannot be forced into any simplistic model and calls into question the hypothesis of stability and rupture underpinning social theory, notably where the sole concern is to account for either western modernity or the failures of non-European worlds to perfectly replicate it.
Anna Fishzon, “Queue Time as Queer Time: An Occasion For Pleasure And Desire In The Brezhnev Era And Today,” The Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017): 542–566.
Brittney Cooper, "The Racial Politics of Time," TED (2016), ➝.
Fishzon, “Queue Time as Queer Time,” 551.
Numerous scholars working the black radical tradition have also argued that belatedness—defined as “Colored People Time” (CPT)—might be a tactic for stealing back time from an extractive and racist society and its institutions. See: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The university and the undercommons: Seven theses,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 101–115.
Mojisola Adebayo, for example, argues that Blackness, queerness, and performance are inseparable. Mojisola Adebayo, “Everything You Know About Queerness You Learnt from Blackness: The Afri-Quia Theatre of Black Dykes, Crips and Kids.” In: Queer Dramaturgies. Contemporary Performance InterActions, Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Porter, 2017:493. Fishzon, “Queue Time as Queer Time,” 557.
According to Anna Fishzon, Jack Halberstam describes queer temporality as a mode of time deeply invested in the present, undoing narrative and futurity indifferent to reproduction, generational inheritance and national history. Thus, queer temporality is helpful in in thinking through affects, embodiments and social relations because soviet citizens lived through profound loss and a shrunken future. The concept of “queer time” has been traced back to Jack Halberstam in relation to the “constantly diminishing future “of gay communities during the AIDS pandemic that forced an emphasis on the immediate present and an “erotics of the compressed moment” that is disarticulated from heteronormative temporalities within western capitalist societies,” Ibid., 544. According to Fishzon, “queer” can be understood as “nonnormative logics and organizations of community whose subjectivity is marked by a deviation of sense and acts that disturb dominant categories, assimilationist strategies and ideological interpellation.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 203–229; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Alys Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Alys Weinbaum, “Gendering the General Strike: W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism's ‘Propaganda of History’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 no. 3 (2013): 437–463; Neferti Tadiar, Things Fall Away (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Neferti Tadiar, “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31 no. 2 (2013): 19–48.
Lahad, A Table for One, 105.
Fishzon, “Queue Time as Queer Time,” 560.
The author would like to thank ArkDes, the Andrew Mellon Grant for Mobility, Temporality, and Africa’s Future Politics, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), the School of Architecture and Planning (University of the Witwatersrand), Sabelo Mcinziba, Monica Rhodes, and Karen Dawn Blondel for their support in developing these ideas about mobility, blackness, mapping, and cultural practice.