Overview

Showing how twenty-first-century Black theater and media arts challenge dominant conceptualizations of time Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media— drama, film, performance art, and photography— that trouble dominant conceptualizations and normative configurations of time in relation to race in the twenty-first century. Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores the ways in which an intentional and sometimes ludic engagement with time and temporality has enabled these artists to probe urgent questions and themes concerning the conditions of contemporary Black life. Wooden surveys a diverse array of performance-based and visual texts to explore the rich practices of contemporary Black expressive culture: dramatic works by playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O'Hara performance art and photography by visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier and feature-length cinema by director-producer Tanya Hamilton. These works expose normative time as specious and evidence the transformative potential in honing practices of Black temporal experimentation and intervention. By putting this cross-disciplinary set of texts in conversation with each other, Wooden sheds new light on the shrewd ways that they each reflect an investment in unbinding time from the exigencies of normativity and teleology, as well as on their shared commitments to reclaiming time to reimagine and represent Blackness in all its multiplicities.

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9780810148222

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Reviews

""Isaiah Wooden's interdisciplinary approach--examining theater, visual art, and film--distinguishes it from other recent books on the topic of Black aesthetics and temporality. Reclaiming Time will join a growing body of work on Black artistic production and the notion of time. A meticulously researched and compellingly argued book, Wooden thoughtfully and thoroughly argues that contemporary Black expressive culture continues to tell us something about the way Black people enact agency over their lives by resisting dominant categories and uses of time."" --E. Patrick Johnson, Northwestern University ""Reclaiming Time provides fresh insight into the key concepts of reclamation and temporality at the intersection of theater and performance studies. Mining the unique quality of culture to consider how artists offer alternative temporalities that mitigate the impacts of white supremacy, Isaiah Wooden responds to the question of what other worlds are possible outside the regulatory framework of Western standard time. With artful analysis and engagement, this book brings to bear a new set of future possibilities."" --Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University

Author Information

Isaiah Matthew Wooden is an assistant professor of theater at Swarthmore College. He is a coeditor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern University Press).

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