Fugitive Time

Matthew Omelsky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

“Fugitive Time represents the strength of diasporic thinking around a range of black aesthetic production that disrupts the Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist binary through visions and understanding of time beyond the historical. By positing black aesthetics as the site of black theory and political thought, Matthew Omelsky demonstrates that alternate temporalities are the key to understanding blackness, embodied experience, aesthetics, and history.” - Samantha Pinto, author of (Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights) “Bold and nimble, Fugitive Time follows the fugitive dreams and utopian urges that animate our black radical tradition. This pursuit brings Matthew Omelsky across a sprawling archive of fiction, photography, painting, poetry, plastic arts, music, cinema, and the quotidian-spanning the United States, Martinique, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Britain, Saturn, and uncharted worlds to come. In the process, this book builds its own mighty momentum that will move readers to vivid revelations about the space-times of black life. Full of beauty and urgency, Fugitive Time is a remarkable contribution to the study and cultivation of black radical imagination.” - La Marr Jurelle Bruce, author of (How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Black Beyondness  11. Toni Morrison’s Anachronic Ease  332. AimÉ CÉsaire, Wifredo Lam, and the Aesthetics of Surging Life  623. Black Audio’s Archival Flight  994. Sun Ra, Issa Samb, and the Drapetomaniacal Avant-Garde  1325. Yvonne Vera, NoViolet Bulawayo, and the Imminence of Dreaming Air  172Coda. Fugitive Ether  205Notes  209Bibliography  239Index  259