Race, Time, and Utopia

Racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time. The racially dominated are not free to define what counts as "progress," they are not free from the accumulation of past injustices, and, most importantly, they are not free from the arbitrary organization of work in capitalist labor markets. Utopia has been one response to this domination. William Paris here provides a theoretical account of utopia as the critical analysis of the sources of time domination, and the struggle to create emancipatory forms of life. He analyses the neglected "utopian" tradition of justice in black political thought that insists justice can only be secured through the transformation of society as a whole. Bringing into conversation the work of W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with the critical theory of Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst, Paris reconstructs a social theory and normative account of forms of life as the struggle over how time will be organized, asking "Can there be freedom without a new order of time?"