Dismantling the Master’s Clock

Dismantling the Master’s Clock

Join us on Mon Mar 10 2025 at 7:00 PM at Harriett's Bookshop for an evening of thought-provoking discussions and reflections. A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

“A queer, Black, reconstructive tour de force." —Fred Moten
“The field of deep Black contemplation we've been waiting for." —Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“Phillips invites us into a real-world laboratory of situated analysis and experimentation that takes
seriously the material nature of imaginings." —Karen Barad
“This is revolutionary work." —Tricia Hersey
“An invitation to reconstruct all that we accept in relation to time and existence.” —Kimberly Drew
“A gorgeous weaving of art, science, and activism [that] inspires the mind and recharges the heart." —Michelle M. Wright
“Dismantling the Master’s Clock reorganizes our collective worlds … [from] the bereft economies of juridical time.” — Katherine McKittrick
“A call to mutiny against the violence of colonized, imperial, genocidal time. Amen!” —Legacy Russell

Host or Publisher Harriett's Bookshop