Introduction: Black Beyondness
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Published:November 2023
The introduction opens with an overview of the concept of fugitive time, offering three descriptive vignettes of aesthetic objects that exemplify this distinctly black time consciousness. It provides an exposition of fugitivity and time consciousness (phenomenology), as well as the book’s global scope and its relation to recent black studies thought and discourse. The introduction then discusses the question of antecedents, the representations and modes of thought that precede and make possible this book’s focus. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) are examined as paradigmatic forerunning texts to the concept of fugitive time, and through them the notion of the “black beyond” is constructed. The introduction concludes with an overview of individual chapters and their archives, as well as the book’s contribution to global black cultural studies.