ABSTRACT

This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to ask after the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. In this vein, I analyze the racialized experience of coming “too late” to a world that appears predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the circumscription of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, fragmenting it into a duality of times. While white time is constructed as “open” and progressive, the times of racialized peoples are read backwards as closed and anachronistic. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I bring Fanon into contact with the work of Latin American thinker, Aníbal Quijano. I thereby aim at a reconfigured politics of memory.