Time and Refusal in Contemporary Black Radical Thought: An Introduction

This introduction offers an overview of some central strands through which contemporary Black radical thought has conceived the temporal dimension of practices of refusal. Tracing the connection between time and refusal that emerges across the works of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman and other contemporary Black thinkers, we position refusal as a radical temporal practice that can unsettle the racialized grammars of time inaugurated by the histories of transatlantic slavery and Western colonization.