Exiting chronobiopolitical temporality with Black Utopia (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, course: Chronobiopolitics, language: English, abstract: Based on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, chronobiopolitics begins at the moment when it's impossible to distinguish between a political and a private, non-political life anymore, where subjects are set up in a chronological concept of progress or sometimes called civilization. Chronobiopolitics is creating a notion of time, a temporality, which is reproduced by its cultural aspects. By doing this, other cultures are going to be marginalized or eliminated and left with an interrupted cultural history. In the case of the African diaspora, a very dark history, better-called trauma, which ghosts are still haunting in our present social reality.

This essay will explore what it means for those people to live in a chronobiopolitical temporality and what kind of ghosts are haunting the diaspora. In addition to this, this essay aims to present a theoretical concept of thinking, which can free politics from the western narrative of temporality and governance. Different Ideas of "Black Utopia" can be found in music, literature, and many other forms of art. Two novels from the Afrofuturistic writer Octavia E. Butler will show us how black science fiction will deal with the ghosts of the past and how we can create new concepts of time. The idea is to replace the constitutive methods of thinking in political discourses with new constructive alternatives derived from the fiction of artists, which includes a transcendence concept of culture and people.

In a final step, this essay will underline the potential of those ideas, which can lead to a reflexive praxis in contrast to an apocalyptical disaster, which is intensively proclaimed since the Cold War. Black Utopia functions here as complete opposition to radical, violent revolts against western repression. While left youth protests, such as the punk movement in the eighties, proclaiming a dystopian future, these theories offer much more positive exits of the chronobiopolitical temporality, which will be concretized in the conclusion.