Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time" (AK Press, 2025)
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The sale ends May 31st. So go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to the New Books Network. As we are recording, it is just after 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The ubiquitous presence of the clock on a smartphone or wristwatch continually asserts itself as the definitive gauge of time. This reliance belies a deeper truth.

that time far from being a mere succession of moments measured by the ticking of the clock is fundamentally embedded in the fabric of our social cultural and political realities it is shaped by and shapes in return the cultural norms societal dynamics interwoven global and local political economic systems and other factors that transcend chronological measurements

yet this more nuanced understanding remains overshadowed by the dominion of conventional time-keeping relegating time's vast multifaceted essence to an afterthought lost to the relentless forward march by the laws of quantum physics we should experience time both forward and backward

So why do processes like aging, birth, and car crashes occur only in one direction? Perhaps our linear perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to any facet of nature. Or so writes Rashida Phillips in Dismantling the Master's Clock on Race, Space, and Time. Rashida, welcome to the New Books Network. Thanks so much for having me.

So I have to tell you, in the period of time between our communication back and forth and my getting the book and reading it and setting up our discussion today, I've experienced the, what do they call it, the frequency illusion or the recency illusion. Your book has appeared in two other books I was reading, or your work has appeared in two other books I was reading in the time it took me to read the book. One was by an archivist called Michelle Caswell.

who writes on liberatory memory work. And the other was James Hale, who's a professor of English and philosophy out of the University of Rhode Island. I interviewed him last week about his book, which is about Black speculative fiction. And he cites your work as well. So I'll tell you, we talked about you in that podcast. And so I'm so excited to talk to you here today. I'll

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. So, you know, as an interviewer, typically I, you know, my questions typically have an arc to them. You know, books typically follow an arc. Your book, though, is this, it's a series of essays, but it's a series of essays that challenge time and space. And in fact, you invite the reader to consume the book in whatever order they

feels natural to them or responds to their curiosity.

And as someone who's a devout rule follower, I found myself like, oh my gosh, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. That's funny. That same, I mean, I'm a lawyer by practice and I'm also tend to be a devout rule follower. So this is also like, for me, a way of like disentangling that tendency as well. So yeah. Yeah. It's funny how-

how debilitating permission can be sometimes. So I read it in order. I read it from beginning to end. As you do, I did not deviate. But perhaps let's start with the title, Dismantling the Master's Clock on Race, Space, and Time. And some might recognize that title as a wink, perhaps, towards Audre Lorde. And so can you talk a little bit about her influence on your overall thinking? Yeah.

Yeah, the title is definitely referencing Audre Lorde's words around, you know, the master's tools can't dismantle the master's house. And it is really, you know, when in her saying that, right, what she's talking about is like, we can't use the same logics to disrupt our oppression. Like we can't use the same logics that created and justify our oppression.

oppression in order to disrupt it. And so, and she responded when she was asked, like, what does that mean? She basically said that, like, it means that only the, if you're, if you're using those same tools, it's only allowing the most narrow perimeters of change as a possibility and as allowable. And so that extends into reality, that extends into space and time. And, you know, that can be applied to so many different things. But definitely, when we talk about and think of

about how, at least in Western society, space and time is constructed. It's very much...

intertwined, entwined with our oppression, with the logics that justify white supremacy, that justify inequality, that justify oppression. And so I'm really referencing that and I'm referencing and thinking even about the logics of time and something as as

you know, every day as like what's on the clock, right? It has a history behind it. And that history is very much intertwined with and is justified by colonialism and justified by, um, uh,

white supremacy in so many different ways. And so I'm referencing that to say that like literally, you know, and, and the title also has literal meanings in terms of like, you know, there was a master's clock when you go and you visit, you know, the torture camps that they call slave plantations in America. Right. There is a mat. There's literally a master's clock that, that is, you know, the time that is used to, you know,

regulate and manage people and their labor and their lives. And so, and I give some examples of that. So for example, Thomas Jefferson, right, had a master clock that was built that had

different, showed different time than the clock that was outside of the house. And so the clock that was inside of the house was more precise. It had second hands, it had minute hands, but the clock outside the house only showed the hour or even the use of the bell as a tool to regulate people's, right? So quite literally the master's clock, if we're going to dismantle the logics of space and time that keep us sort of always behind on a timeline of progress, we have to literally dismantle that master's clock.

So yeah, so the title's referencing that. There's also another layer to it in that like...

Again, clocks, the system of clocks that tend to regulate a system are literally called master clocks and slave clocks. And so that's a feature of our language and how we think about even things that are supposedly inanimate objects, right? And so that language and those logics are built in even there. So like literally we got to dismantle this master's clock. And it is literally a tool of continued oppression and...

Yeah, both historically and in the present. Yeah, I think that the history that you have interwoven and listeners may be coming to this particular podcast through any number of channels. They may be coming to it through history, through African-American studies, through philosophy. We've sort of posted it in a lot of different places. And so...

This history piece in particular, I found was something, there were things in the book I had never even considered from a historical perspective. As you point out, it's so deeply ingrained in us. For example, you have a chapter entitled Time Zone Protocols that begins with a discussion of time zones and daylight savings time.

And that was something I've traveled all over the world. You know, I've been jet lagged with the best of them. And I never once thought about where did these come from? Can you talk a little bit about, I would love to talk more about that project and that work that's in here for time zone protocols. And I'm curious at the outset, was that something...

Was time zone something that was sort of gnawing at you? Were you doing other research and then you stumbled upon this area and thought, let me go find out more about time zones? Talk more about that. Yeah, that's a funny question. Yes, in a sense, like I was doing a lot of research.

Yeah, just general research about time and its history. And in quite a few of the books that I was reading, this conference came up, this conference of time, the Prime Meridian Conference came up. And I hadn't, I think, made the connection that our time

sense of time zones are really artificial and that they were like literally created for these these sort of economic and other purposes. And, you know, sort of reading about that history of that, it kind of started to dawn on me and I was like, OK, I need to dig deeper into this and also into the time period that it happened.

happened, you know, that this came up and sort of was thinking about that in the context of like, again, you know, post-slavery, post-emancipation. I have been doing some research around Juneteenth and like that temporal element of that waiting time between, you know, when folks in Galveston and other places were, you know, quote unquote, notified of, you

the Emancipation Proclamation and end of the Civil War. So it was all just like, okay, this is all happening around this, this sort of time period. Like, is there any sort of connection to this? And so also what happened to come up was this like opportunity through an artist residency at the Vera List Center of

for arts and social politics, which is based in New York at the new school. And their theme was around protocols. And so I had just been like, happened to be reading these, like this transcript of this prime Meridian conference that set the, you know, sort of the,

global sort of time scheme. And then it happened that the transcript was called Protocols. And so I was like, oh, okay, like this is like perfect for me to be thinking about and digging into like, what are these protocols of time that were constructed by this group of people

you know, in this secretive, not secretive, but in this meeting that basically set the stage for sort of our global, the globalization of time as well. And then also that led to like thinking about the time zones in America and, you know, where that derived from, which was really about train efficiency. And so, yeah, it was just all really interesting and compelling and sort of part of the longer arc of,

What I was researching around, again, how time literally, materially, psychologically, physically oppresses Black communities in particular. Yeah, and that was one of the things I found really fascinating. Again, this was all I...

all news to me. And I fancy myself as someone who knows more than the average person, particularly about this reconstruction era, late 19th century. And I was just like, I know none of this. And so around this setting of the national time and the national time zones, as you said, around the time of the railroads to literally make the trains run on time. But you have this anecdote

of November 18th, 1883, the day of two noons. Can you talk, just talk about the day of two noons? Yeah. So that was the day that the trains, basically the first national time zones were set. And again, you know, as you, as you noted, I talk about how this came about

Basically, because trains were not being able to run on time because every time was local. So every community had its own local time. And so the trains, you know, you pull into one station, the time could be five minutes difference. And that, you know, led to a lot of danger also. Right. So like there was a situation where trains were crashing into each other, flying.

And so it needed to be something that happened to sort of help that situation, though, you know, perhaps they took it too far with setting these time zones. And so the day of two news was the day that the time zones, all the four continental time zones synchronized.

And so some places had to move their time back to conform to this new, to these new time zones. And so those places may have experienced two noons, right? Like on their local time, it became 12 o'clock and then they had to conform, then conform their time to their, to their respective time zones. And so if they had to push their time back, right, like they may have experienced two noons that day. So,

So that was the sort of origin of that day of two noons. But again, just really tied to economic efficiency, things outside and in a way that sort of flattens people's ability to have those sort of localized time zones that may conform to, you know, local environmental considerations and conditions and just things that like

don't always get considered when you sort of flatten things and sort of globalize things into this one thing that is controlled by other people and not controlled by sort of, again, local communal circumstances. And this time zone protocols project, you mentioned that you were doing some study and whatnot that culminated in, there had been this Prime Meridian Conference recently

But you undertook a Prime Meridian unconference. Talk about the Prime Meridian unconference. Put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us something to break out of. Because the next generation 2025 GMC Terrain Elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard.

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Yeah, so basically wanted to stage a sort of counteract to this sort of prime meridian conference where, again, you had these delegates from around the world, all white men, no countries that represented people of color specifically, where, again, it was decided upon that the prime meridian for the world was

you know, the place where we count as the zero point for where time sort of begins would be located in Greenwich, England. And so, you know, no one and it took so it took a couple decades for it to sort of like conform to that. Like that conference was in a sense, even though it was agreed upon and it took place in Washington, D.C.,

you know, people resisted like different places like France and, and a few other places refused to like conform their time, but then eventually did conform to this sort of global globalized sense of time. Um, and then shortly after that conference, um,

took took place the Berlin conference, which was the conference that, you know, where they decided to divide up Africa. And there's overlap actually in some of the same people that were at that prime meridian conference at this conference where, you know, space is being claimed and stolen and staked out on, on the African continent. And so just that those counter, you know, those, those sort of, you know,

entanglements of time and space, again, at this global level in a way that continues to oppress, continues to colonize different communities, both on the African continent and in the United States and elsewhere around the world. And so we wanted to just stage something that had people sort of

start to undo those logics of time that are embedded in those things and that are embedded in our reality because, you know, we have been indoctrinated and grown with this, with this sort of these logics of space and time that are, you know, as I talk about my book really, you know,

foreign to us, really are unhealthy for us in a lot of ways, really tied back to the space times of enslavement and colonization because they are continuous into the present and into the future.

And so, yeah, I wanted to sort of reclaim, be able to reclaim local time through the time zone protocols project and the primary conference. And so staged this unconference that had delegates that were Black and Brown and Indigenous folks from across the country who created sort of different protocols with

attendees of time. So different ways of thinking about time, whether it's plant time or whether it's cloud time or whether it's marronage and maroon time or whether it's thinking about temporal safe harbor. So like all of these different ways of building new protocols of time that are healthier, more sustainable, more efficient,

oriented to our ancestral and our communal ways of experiencing time and being in time with other people, times that don't feel isolated, that don't feel accelerated, don't feel rushed. Yeah. And then we recorded all of those sort of people did workshops over a period of two days and

And the way that we set the stage for that space was to, we had two different tracks, but they were like located in the same room. And so you had two workshops happening in the same space where folks were like literally entangling sort of what they were doing and saying. And so it was really special. And prior to that unconference, I also did some online workshops.

workshops and groups with folks to examine sort of the research materials that I created and to also build some protocols of time through discussions with each other. And so that was a way of being able to go a little bit deeper into some of the research materials than what was allowed in the space time of the unconference. But those folks came to the unconference and engaged and helped to really just extend into time and space in a nonlinear way, sort of like

what was happening at the conference. And so, yeah, it was really special. I'm hoping to do a sort of part two of that sometime this year, but that is in the works. Okay. I think people may now be starting to get a sense of why this is a book that you say, hey, you don't have to read it, you know, front to back. You can move around within it because there's so many tying in of what

I think maybe we're taught to think are very discrete disciplines and ideas that you really show these are not separate and you're not taking these huge leaps. They really are very closely tied together. And one of the others that I thought was a really interesting tying together is you have a chapter that talks about CPT, right?

And it's iterations. And so can you talk a little bit about CPT and what one thinks of when they hear CPT, depending upon where they are and how they're oriented and those things? Yeah. So CPT. So that was a big focus of the book. And CPT for some of us, right, like that immediately signals color people's time, which is interesting.

tends to be seen as a negative stereotype about Black folks' ability to show up on time by the clock, right? And so you can immediately see why I would want to problematize that sort of notion of it being a negative thing tied into sort of like, again, these systemic oppression, structural oppression,

that is bought about by the Western notion, linear notion of time. And so CPT also has a counterpart in that, in the scientific realm. And this is something that I found while doing, you know, sort of my research

also nonlinear research method of just like being interested in all these different things and like coming across them, particularly in physics. But CPT in physics is a term that stands for charge, parity and time. And so it is basically a principle of physics that says that things are generally in our reality,

in the scientific makeup of our reality, symmetrical. And so when you're thinking about time, for instance, time...

should be able to run forwards and backwards. It is symmetrical. So like if you see a particle and you make that particle travel, that particle can travel forwards in time and should be able to travel backwards in time. And even Einstein's equations allowed for that, that time is reversible in that sense. And

And then the other two parts of it, charge and parity. So again, it's basically this sense that things are symmetrical in our universe and in space and time. So things should have parity or charges should have symmetry, basically.

And so there have been shown violations of these things. So again, that general rule that things are symmetrical in our universe is

there's been shown to be violations of that. Um, and so those violations tell us something about the universe that is different than like what we see on the surface, because on the surface, um, right, we don't see time running forwards and backwards. We don't see, we see things going in a straightforward direction generally because of how we think about time. And again, our logics of how we see reality. Um,

And so for me, that was an interesting parallel, both again, of course, the notion of the letters themselves, CPT and sort of that parallel, but just this notion that a violation of time, right, like in the colored people's time sense, we are violating time by not showing up.

on time. Like it's considered a violation. It's considered a faux pas. It's considered a feature of our, you know, biology that like we as black people don't show up on time. Right. And so, again, just troubling that notion that, first of all, when we talk about these violations of time, they're never individual. Right. Like it is very much individual.

structural, like why black people don't show up on time to certain particular places. Like, and again, for my work as a lawyer previously, right. Like the reason why a person who can't show, didn't show up to time on eviction at eviction court means that that person was being evicted a few minutes, you know, just by being a few minutes late. And so like, again, these sort of violations of time that have these, you know,

deep consequences that go beyond like we're just late to a thing. But, and that are also again, systemically derived by factors that are often beyond our control. But then also to say that that violation of time is not truly a violation. Like if,

we think about, again, how Black people experience time based on our culture, based on our communal norms, based on the sort of things that we've inherited from our ancestry, how the cultures on the continent experience and think about time that is vastly different than westernized notions of time. We're always going to be considered to be late on that western clock,

on that Western timeline, we're always considered behind, right? But that's not truly reality. That's not a reality that we have to accept. So yeah, so the book gets into that a lot and it gets, and it traces the history of this notion of color people's time to show that actually the stereotype comes

comes from in a lot of ways is tied to slavery and is tied to these sort of stereotypes that were manufactured, again, to make Black people look bad, to seem like we're uncivilized, outside of time, unable to do things without being mastered by someone and someone keeping us on the clock time. And so I examined a lot of newspaper archives, a lot of different publications

materials to look at and trace that timeline, if you will, of colored people's time, both through science and through this sort of social aspect, again, as it applies to Black people.

I want to ask you this question around your process for formulating ideas, especially in this, what we were just talking about. Because, you know, you mentioned that your training is in your legal training. You're a practicing lawyer. I also started my career as a lawyer. So I get that. And the way that I think about in law anyway is that

So you have a client, someone that you're working for, and you want the answer to be a certain thing, right? On behalf of your client, whatever it is, like you start with the answer and you find a way to try to get to the answer that you want.

I have never practiced as a scientist, but from what I understand the scientific method, from what I remember from high school, is in science, you have a question. You have a hypothesis. You don't have an answer. You simply ask a question and you go where the research tells you, which actually may not be what you think. Like it may be something totally different.

And so when I was reading your book, in my head, I was like, these are two very different approaches to problems. Legal, you're going to start with the answer and find your way, find out how to get there. And in science, you're going to start with a question and get what the answer is you get. And so...

As you were doing your own research and following your own curiosity, how do you think your own background as an attorney, but also as a Black person, a Black American, like how did you think about, you know, those orientations in your mind in terms of how you decided to connect the dots in this book? Yeah. Oh, that's a big question. Yeah.

Yeah, I've never thought about that. I think, oh, part of it is working on both of those angles, right, of like being very curious, having a question in mind, and then also like having a specific question.

specific pathways for getting to an answer that like are informed by those experiences and identities and like letting that leak into it. And I think unlike the scientific method, um, and what folks don't admit, but which is absolutely true is that folks try as much as possible to be objective in the way that you described. Um,

But it's not true that they're objective. They are showing up and their questions are absolutely informed by their identity and their experiences in the world. And even the sort of methods that they're choosing to use, right, are informed, deeply informed, maybe unconsciously, right, by those different constructs as well. And so like even your choice of

of method right and like approach and that's something like I had a chance to spend time at CERN um particle uh the big one of the biggest physics laboratories in in the world in in Switzerland um spent did an artist residence residency there spent a couple months with scientists there and just like being able to ask these questions about like

how time in particular shows up in an experiment and like how they choose those things, like how they choose how to count time. Right. Because there's no one specific way time might be derived based on like a cesium atom or like some other type of method or like maybe they are using traditional clock time.

or time becomes like meaningless in some experiments, or it just breaks down to such a small number that you, as a human, right? Like, what does that mean? Or like, it might stretch out into infinity, right? So there's different choices that are made about how questions are asked, and then like how they get to the answers themselves. And so I think I was cognizing of that. And like,

did not want to be objective in this, right. But also to like admit my limitations as well to, so I struggled with that in the book and I struggled with that even like in, in writing about this. And I think like the, the writings have been written over a 10 year period or so. Right. So like, I didn't just write them all like at once, which is also why the book is very nonlinear. But it shows like,

the growth in my thinking over time to be like, hey, actually, I can't

stereotype either on an entire continent of folks that like, I've never been there. I mean, I have been there, but I've never lived there. Right. Like I'm, I have a very specific American context and I need to think about that and get deeper in that. Right. And sort of approach this respectfully, carefully, and not just like sort of essentialize things either. Right. So like, I struggle with that as well of just trying to keep that balance. And I try as much as possible to like bring that in and be like, Hey,

These are things that I've researched. These are things that, you know, have come into my interest around these things. These are dots that I've connected. But this is not the full story. This is not, you know, there are...

societies, civilizations, communities on the African continent that do experience linear time or do think of time in traditional, you know, in Western traditional senses or have parallels to that. So I try to be as specific as possible and connect the dots that I'm going to connect, but while also being like, hey, I come from a very specific context and

And so that's why I also bring into the book, like some of my own thoughts and just background and experiences as well, because I always want to just leave open that space. They're like, hey, I don't know everything about this stuff either. This is this is a specific kind of like jumping around in an interest and subject matter that is very much informed by who I am as a black person in America, as you noted. So if that makes sense at all. Yeah.

No, it does. It does. It does.

I think so much about the gaze. I think more than I should think about the gaze. And who's watching and who's reading. And I tend to think a lot of problems arise when people don't realize they have a gaze. Right. That's the problem. Not that we have one or that we have a point of view because that's what makes us human. But I think it's the insistence upon objectivity. Yeah.

I think is the, is winds up being the problem. Yes. See, you know, you talked about this book is quite expansive in terms of different, different disciplines that it explores different ideas. You know, there's a lot of theory and theoretical concepts within it, but you also include a lot of very practical examples of the theories. And I'm thinking specifically about work in the housing space and,

And so can you talk a little bit about your work in the housing space and some of the concepts you get into in this book in terms of turning that theory into practice?

Yeah. So I, for over a decade, was a legal services attorney based in Philadelphia. So I worked at an organization called Community Legal Services and did a lot of different things there. I started off actually doing child care law. And so I was representing child care providers. I also did some representation of parents who were involved in the child welfare system, quote unquote, welfare system.

And then started doing mortgage foreclosure defense work. So it was doing like bankruptcies and supporting folks who were facing foreclosure. And then I moved into landlord tenant law, which is where I spent most of my time doing representation of folks who were facing eviction, facing displacement, facing loss of housing or loss, inability to access housing,

And so, so yeah, so through that work, I got to see and do a lot of different things. And parallel to that, I was coming into Afrofuturism and writing, you know, doing work around science fiction and speculative fiction, started an organization called the Afrofuturist Affair in Philly. And so this was all parallel to me.

doing this work as a lawyer and community. And so naturally those two worlds started to inform each other in very deep ways, particularly my understanding of time and how time was showing up in my work as a lawyer and the work that I was doing around housing, but just period, right? The ways in which time is sort of steeped in and embedded in the law in different ways.

um, and the legal system. And so, um, so yeah, so part of the work, um, included doing work around like preservation of housing and, um, in Philly as, as, as in many other places, things like gentrification, things like, um, displacement were really rising at a certain period of time. And so again, just like my thinking, um, was able to,

inform how I sort of approached doing my work as a attorney, particularly in eviction court. And the example that I just gave that I share often, which is that people who are facing eviction, right, their time is constrained significantly by these systems. And time shows up in all of these sort of

pernicious ways, including with eviction records and how eviction records function to deny people access to housing into the far future based on a present circumstance that's temporary or a past circumstance where people

things get locked in time in ways that, again, continue to harm people. Even though information may be incorrect, things may change, right? But the way that the law sets up time is that it locks in your record into the past in this way that, again, continues to have this impact on the future and inform the future in ways that it shouldn't. ♪

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So, yeah, so I had the opportunity to really think about that in terms of, you know, part of my work included doing policymaking and policy advocacy. And so being able to inform my thinking around like how I work within the community to build a policy that, you know, can address some of these temporal issues that that occur around.

in housing. And again, like you can examine every part of the system and time really shows up as like one of the key factors in how people are punished or devalued or kept out of housing in all these different ways. It like comes down to this time factor very specifically. So yeah, so that once that like informed my thinking, I think it became another tool that was powerful for me to like be able to do my work as an advocate.

Well, I think in the housing sense, too, the arbitrary nature of it. Right. Like it's not. Right. Unlike the trains that we were talking about. Exactly. Yeah. There's an arbitrary nature to housing deadlines and time. Oh, yeah. And those, you know, those kinds of things. It's extremely arbitrary. And it's.

And it ties back to these logics of property ownership and who, who gets to be, you know, gets the steward property, who gets to own it and the power and status that that ownership gives you. And so, yeah,

As I said, I did mortgage foreclosure defense work. And because we as a society value property owners more than we value tenants, I could make a foreclosure play out over seven years because there's so many laws and protections to enable people to keep their property versus an eviction, which can happen in decades.

Less than 21 days under the laws of, you know, and in some places, three days. Right. So just that that stark discrepancy in time, it's totally arbitrary and also tied to, again, this this sort of status and property ownership being the higher value, higher value use of things like land.

One of the things that also came into your discussion in the book around people's space and land and living and home were these ideas about space that had been transformed in good and bad ways over time and time capsules and quantum time capsules.

So can you talk a bit about quantum time capsules? Yeah. So, yeah. So the last chapter of the book talks about time is focused on time capsules. And it's really trying to trouble this notion of time capsules and put them in the context of time.

non-linear modes of time that, again, are healthier, more safeguarding of our histories and our memories than linear time is. And so some of the examples that I looked at and really what this came about, again, just doing some random research on something, I don't even know how I came across this, but

came across this pattern of time capsules that were like buried underneath these housing projects, these, these different sites of affordable housing across the country, like at different times, like it was just really weird that has come across these like different times when like these time capsules have been uprooted. And then, so that led me to like research,

researching around like why would these time capsules be buried under these housing sites and then like what information they had inside of them and was finding that these affordable housing sites were often like places where black people lived right because it was a housing that was affordable and because they've been disenfranchised from property ownership and have been segregated into these types of things right but anyway so they're they're

overwhelmingly these time capsules had information in them that were Black history in it. And then also these like sort of other time capsules that were inside of these like statues and like these other just other forms of like being

being able to uproot this history and then comparing that to like regular time capsules where you hardly ever hear of a time capsule that's been buried or, you know, you can, and I look through like records of time capsules that barely, that don't contain Black history as if like it's not important enough for,

for future generations to be able to find or know about these histories, right? And we're seeing that today, right? Like as our histories get erased from these federal, you know, databases and all that and museums and et cetera. And so, yeah, time capsules became a fascination and they were already like,

Part of the reason why I was doing research on it is because I had created a workshop with my partner like back in 2012. I think it was that was around time capsules, but thinking about them from an Afrofuturist perspective. And so it's like, OK, if you're going to create a time capsule and you're thinking and you have an Afrofuturist lens on it, right, like we're already talking about a different thing than just a regular old time capsule that gets buried in the present and then future generations open it.

And so I was trying to think of like, what would be the logics of a time capsule that's nonlinear, a time capsule that is quantum in nature, where time is not running backwards to, you know, forwards into the future, but can also run backwards, can also open up to other modes of time. And so, yeah, the quantum time capsule sort of became a, a,

metaphor, if you will, or a way of thinking about Afrofuturist time capsules in a sense, and like what a time capsule looks like when it's operating on Afrofuturist or Black or African, you know, sort of temporal logics versus like our regular Western linear logics. And so again, that research kind of in thinking and theorizing led to examples and looking for examples that fit the theory and sort of the scientific method, I guess.

or that would confirm the theory, right? And so again, these sort of other types of time capsules that I came across and then ones that I sort of categorized as being quantum time capsules, which are the sort of time capsules that you find in potter's fields where enslaved folks were buried or just sort of little cubby holes that enslaved folks were able to

carve out inside of their cabins, their homes, and put, you know, objects, spiritual objects, other things that were hidden, right? Like those types of things being time capsules that have been excavated at slave plantations. And so thinking about that and how those fit into sort of nonlinear logics, again, go outside of the like travel of the time capsule from the present into the future, right?

into the past, I guess. But again, like what about a time capsule that was never meant to be found? And I think about the ones that like, again, those that are buried underneath these housing projects that were probably not meant to be found, right? Because if you

carry forth the conclusion that this was housing that was meant to last into the far future and that they did not expect to be demolished. Like those time capsules weren't necessarily meant to be found, but because of what happened, because those, those housing projects became neglected and had to be demolished, you then do find these, these time capsules, right? So just how that upsets the logics of like what a time capsule is and is supposed to be in our society. Yeah.

I found that this whole idea very powerful, powerfully tied to a concept. You talked about the time capsules appear at the very end of the book, but for me, tied very closely to a concept that was at the very beginning of the book, which was retrocausality. Yes. So can you talk about retrocausality? Yeah. So retrocausality is basically...

It's basically that something is not causal linearly in time. So like,

In our society, again, or in Western sort of logics of time and space, you have cause and effect. You have something that causes a thing to happen and that's the effect. And so that's a sort of linear way of thinking about how things happen and unfold in time. But retrocausality, which has been observed in, again, in sort of quantum physics with particles, says that

the future can actually impact the past. And so something that is supposedly an effect or an outcome of a cause can actually work the other way around. And so, again,

particles have displayed this feature of something that is expected to be an outcome from the future is actually causing something to happen in the past. So I get a little bit into the science of it, but it's basically a phenomena of part of quantum physics.

So you talked about before that the concepts in this book came together in your mind before they came together on the page over quite a long period of time. And in fact, many of the essays are based on gatherings of people from all over the world in physical space. They're based on artworks. They're based on all of these different things. And so can you talk about when you sat down to write the book,

How you thought about adapting all of these ideas that had been existing, not just in your head, but had been existing in community, in physical community with other people.

into what is a narrative form inside the book? Yeah. You know, I was lucky to have been able to, along the way, have had opportunities to write essays or wrote them for like blogs or just other things that I was able to then adapt many of them. So in the book, actually, probably...

three of the seven chapters are new writings. Um, and then the rest are, um, things that were extended or adapted from other essays that I've written over time. Um, so I was very fortunate for that. Very fortunate that I already had sort of a container for some of these ideas, um, that I could build and extend on. And, um, yeah, I, I appreciate that. Um,

it did happen that way over time that I had the opportunity to try to manifest into reality the theories and ideas through art, right? And so being able to

already have the ideas and the theory in mind, and then to be able to try to actualize some of them through different artworks, and then have that inform the writing and to be able to have the demonstration of like, okay, here's these ideas that sound a little disparate and

May sound all over the place, but here's how they manifest in the world, you know, through these kinds of tools, through these experiments, through this sort of testing of ideas that we've been able to do in community with other people. Right. And so that's the other thing, like being able to take them from my head and from the paper to.

testing in community was the really important part of it. Because the way that I think about time, it's like, it's creative with other people. That's what these things have also shown me and taught me is that like when I'm in community, that's when we're creating time together. And that's when time is, is, is manifested in these,

different kind of configurations that go beyond, again, what's on a clock or what's on a calendar or what I'm told, you know, what I have to constrict to my job, my job hours versus my time at home, right? So being in community and being able to build these lessons and build the theories and test the theories and adjust the theories based on those experiments and those collaborations, I think was how some of that stuff came together. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

What's next? Working on a couple different things. I am building a part two to this book that is

more site specific. So a couple of years ago, my partner and I, um, with our group Black Quantum Futurism, we won a, um, creative capital artist grant and our project, um, was, um, called Confederate States of America. And so as part of that, my partner and I toured, um, went around to, um,

Seven of the original Confederate states visited the plantations there, enslavement camps, visited some of the all-Black towns and historically Black towns in these communities. And really what we were looking at and thinking about and researching, in addition to engaging with communities there, was what are the material cultures of time there?

and space that were present in these places. And so again, like, and some of that is actually included in dismantling the master's clock. So when I talk about Monticello plantation and Jefferson, we actually visited there, saw the, you know, some of the quotes and, and took pictures and did research on,

at the site around these different things. And so the next book is going to be focused on that and getting a little bit deeper into the sort of site-specific material cultures of time and space that connect back to Dismantling the Master's Clock. I am also working on a book of short stories. I say that very quietly because who knows? Keep it quiet. Um,

But it would be a book of short stories and sort of essays. So a whole chapter was cut from the book because it's long as hell. But I had a chapter about time travel specifically and time travel films and time travel stories and comparing sort of time travel films that use Western linear logics of time against sort of temporal,

film, films that incorporate Black temporalities and temporal structures. And so that book was, that chapter was very long and it was cut from the book. And I'm hoping to potentially intersperse it with some of my own short fiction. So we'll see. We'll see what comes of that. We look forward to it.

This book is Dismantling the Master's Clock on Race, Space, and Time by Rashida Phillips. You can find Rashida at Rashida.net.

I am your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me at SullivanSummer.com, on Instagram at TheSullivanSummer, and over on Substack at Sullivan Summer, which is where Rashida and I are going right now to continue our conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much.