Alert to the historical and contemporary dynamics of black life—and their striking overlaps and continuities—recent black studies scholarship has seen an outpouring of methods that use the historical realities of pasts and presents to theorize what blackness is, what blackness has been, and importantly what blackness might be. The violent histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and their afterlives have enabled us to achieve a certain precision in mapping the nature of black being as well as in anticipating its futures. Still, anticipation is not a perfect science. What do we make of those moments when the anticipated outcome fails to arrive? And how do we develop modes of analysis that refrain from ceding anticipatory logic the authority to frame black being as the always already given, rather than as matter that is open to wonder and surprise, to the contingent and the unanticipated.

This panel considers how black being is usefully approached as a temporal entity, one whose movements through time help to define the nature of its constitution. In this vein, we are interested in the complex, multi-scalar relationship between time and black being, and in how this symbiotic relation is vital to both the production and the critical analysis of the ontological conditions of blackness. This attention to the time of black being builds on literary theorist Fred Moten’s claim that blackness is a “product[] of time” (Moten 2008: 192).

In the final analysis, we explore how, alongside those large-scale structures of time that inflect and help to constitute black being (for instance, the historical past and the present), we must also attend to those small-scale temporalities--like the moment or instant. We consider how these seemingly minor structures of ontological time--whether the performance of school dress, a walk down the street, a tennis match, or laboring on a repurposed plantation--are as important to the making and understanding of black being as those epochal temporalities that often serve as the conceptual foundations of black studies theorizing.

Jarvis Givens uses autobiographical writings, school ephemera, newspapers, diary entries, poems, and oral histories to underscore the centrality of student narratives for understanding the socio-historical formation of black student subjectivities in American schools. When stitched together and interpreted in light of one another, such first-person accounts reveal distinct aspects about being and becoming a black student. Examining writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, political leaders like James Weldon Johnson and Angela Davis--all of whom render accounts from their earliest years of study--he examines the effects of antiblack educational domination on black being.