Each Hour Redeem

Daylanne K. English’s latest work Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature embraces the ambitious project of being “the first to explore how time, in both philosophical and material senses, has been treated throughout the African American literary tradition as a fundamental aspect of literary form, of daily experience, and of U.S. citizenship” (2-3). Arguing that “African American writers have represented a profound connection between differential temporalities and differential justices in the United States,” she demonstrates that they have consistently “revealed how racialized injustice discloses the shortcomings within dominant period philosophies, particularly philosophies of time.” Moving through the African American literary canon with an admirable economy, English maneuvers among discussions of novels, plays, and poetry in a broad sweep of genres and periods in order to demonstrate that “the African American literary tradition ... has documented not only that unevenness of time but also time’s integral relationship to federal and state law” (3). By titling her introduction after Pauline E. Hopkins’s famous condemnation of constitutional equity as a political fiction (in the 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South) and concluding the text with the hope that literary experimentations can ultimately lead to political truths, as in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, she signals her intent to focus on the centrality of time and justice in African American literature.

Aesthetics · American literature · Art · Citizenship · Economic Justice · Injustice · Literary criticism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society