Reading Temporality: The Present, Past, and Future of Slavery and Abolition in US Fiction Post-1945

“Reading Temporality” examines contemporary American fictions that depict slavery or, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term, its afterlives with emphasis on their orientation to that history, its presence within what Christina Sharpe termed the wake, and futurity. Drawing upon currents within Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, phenomenology, and political, race and queer theories, this dissertation adopts the term “pantemporality” from social scientists Valerie Walkerdine and Sadeq Rahimi, which refers to the hauntological presence and mutual accountability of past and future in subjective experience of the present. It is particularly interested in what is referred to variably as pantemporal hope or optimism, texts or patterns of thought that engage the detritus of the past not as determinative but responsible and responsive to futurity, in what novelist Kim Stanley Robinson calls the “anti-anti-utopian” mode. Chapter 1 works to clarify and pantemporality via engagement with its theoretical antecedents and then to define pantemporal optimism. Chapter 2 presents Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988) as a non-pantemporal novel followed by Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) as examples of simple pantemporality. Chapter 3 argues that Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) presents a moment before the solidification of racial ideology, creating an “impossible window” to a time before history became inevitable and opening space for imagining futures. Chapter 4 looks at Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998), and at the notes for her unfinished Parable of the Trickster with particular focus on their recursions of history and pantemporal model for thinking through the future represented by Earthseed and shaping change. Finally, Chapter 5 explores the use of speculative elements as a way to depict or make intelligible pantemporal time in Jesmyn Ward Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox (2005), positioning these novels as examples of a literary strategy wherein a speculative use of space comes to stand in for, and thus make more intelligible, temporality. Through their multivalent manipulations of space and time, their speculative realism, and the simultaneous ambiguity and fixity of their endings, these novels become models of pantemporal optimism.