"Any given society will be comprised of multiple forms of life. That is to say, people will adhere to diverse patterns of organizing and justifying how they make use of their time. One might think that for all of us, time is divided by seconds, minutes, and hours and thus we all live in the same form of life. We are all given 24 hours in a day, and it is up to us all, individually, to decide how best to maximize the value we can squeeze out of the time that we are given. In this view, abstract and homogenous time is the "natural" state of the world. Some people may want to spend their time by focusing on their careers, families, or volunteering, for example. What matters is that we are all free to choose what we will do with the finite seconds, minutes, and hours that we have. The assumed naturalness of "clock time", as Lewis Mumford describes it, allows us to develop a sense of injustice as the unjustified control or evaluation of another's time. To impose one form of life onto another is to violate their dignity as a self-determining agent who has their own reasons for shaping the pattern of their life in light of their own values and goals. So, preliminarily, we might distinguish between forms of life by examining how a bundle of social practices normatively shape the use of time"--
Racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time. Utopia has been one response to this domination. 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. Racially unjust societies are forms of life where the justifications for how to organize time around life, labor, and leisure are out of the hands of the dominated. In Race, Time, and Utopia, William Paris 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.
Rather than focusing on inclusion and equality before the law, as found in liberal theories of racial injustice, Paris 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. This transformation is nothing less than the democratic transformation of how organize and narrate our shared time. Bringing into conversation the work 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?"
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?"
