Faith in Fugitive Time
Safiya Sinclair's Poetic Temporalities of Racialization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2353350 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elliot C Mason (0000-0003-0448-2329, Uppsala University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 7-8 |
| Pages | 123-139 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theory Culture & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/02632764241311251 |
| OpenAlex | W4406628198 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
Time is of increasing concern in Black studies, with scholars studying the ways in which standardized narratives of time are historically imposed on racialized populations. This essay reads Safiya Sinclair's 2016 poetry collection Cannibal as offering a fugitive temporality that ruptures the stability of the racializing present. In Cannibal, Sinclair's speaker does not attempt to release herself from the racializing condemnation of the past. Rather, she summons a fugitive social past in the present, antagonizing the homogeneity of the present by exposing it to the repressed and relegated wounds that haunt the foundations of modernity's racializing program. In Cannibal, this summoning is occasioned through a practice of faith. Following J. Kameron Carter and Fred Moten, among others, this essay studies the ways in which this fugitive poetic temporality of faith builds on contemporary developments in the critique of time, religion, and whiteness in Black studies
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Faith · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Poetry · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · Temporalities · Temporality · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |