Rasheedah Phillips

Afrofuturist artist Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism asks what Black liberation could look like in a universe where the past was as changeable as the future. Dismantling the Master’s Clock is a groundbreaking debut work that synthesizes philosophy and the history of science with Black cultural traditions, speculative fiction, and Phillips’s own art practice to argue for a more equitable access to time and the future.  While some processes, like aging, birth, or car crashes, seem to occur in only one direction of time, by the apparent logic of the universe, human consciousness should experience time both backwards and forwards. Though past and present organize our lives like unarguable fact, the physicists who study time are much less certain. Linear time is an illusion, explains Rasheedah Phillips, a construct even science contests. It is based more on Western history and systems of social order than on nature or the variety of human existence. Both indigenous African conceptions of time and quantum physics recognize how the past, present, and future act upon and modify each other. Afrodiasporic identity is itself a time-traveling phenomenon in which the past is always present. Phillips unfurls time’s legacy of racial from maritime navigation for colonial expansion and the timekeeping methods of plantation overseers, to the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time and the Western Scramble for Africa, time has been a homogenizing project of the last few centuries. Phillips unsettles dominant assumptions of space and time, highlighting how Black communities have long subverted these through alternative temporal frameworks.

Space-Time Collapse is a new experimental writing, sound and image series that applies Black Quantum Futurism theory and practices to spatiotemporal collapse events and phenomenon.

Space-Time Collapse is an experimental writing and art/activist series in which Black Quantum Futurism-- as both a praxis and a movement-- imagines future(s) and recovers pasts, using experimental writing, cosmic visions, and exploratory images in Black speculative practices where ancient anti-clock time theories and practices vibrate, grow, and live. Space-Time Collapse Part II considers time, memory, and temporality as experienced by the people of the African diaspora over time and across space, while exploring how these communities create and enact alternative cultural, communal, and personal temporal-spatial frameworks. The book dreams and speaks in oral futures, witnesses spatial-temporal autonomy, and demands housing justice among other essential tools. Included in the collection is research, images, interviews, and writing from Community Time & Memory in North Philly, a BQF collaborative art, preservation, and creative research project exploring the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement-- forces that cause activated space-time collapses within marginalized North Philadelphia communities. Contributions from local writers and activists revive the historical memory and quantum histories and detail some of the spatial-temporal interventions and memory preservation projects happening in the neighborhood. Submissions by non-local writers and artists reflect on how the experiences of the North Philadelphia community are not unique; the affordable housing crisis, gentrification, and spatial-temporal displacement of Black and poor people are all happening in similarly-situated communities throughout the Afro-diaspora. Thus, their contributions will explore Afrofuturistic, Black speculative, and Black quantum tools for addressing these issues, speaking into existence both ancient and new visions for deconstructing old problems.Featuring works Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips, Quentin Vercetty, Faye Anderson, Soraya Jean-Louis, Arturo Castillon, Jason Harris, R. Stanford, Dox Thrash House, North Philly Peace Park, Natalie-Claire Luwisha-Bowditch, Marcus Borton, and Womanist Working Collective. Cover by Jessi Jumanji.

The interweaving stories in Recurrence Plot and Other Time Travel Tales present characters whose stories challenge the notion that time flows in only one direction. If you want to understand what is happening at any given point in time, you cannot only look to the past for clues. You must consider the future. A journalist races against time itself to expose the entity preying on young male teens in Philadelphia. A crystal, memory-storing bracelet transports a young mother back to the day of her own mother’s traumatic death. An unknown force of nature causes time to start flowing backwards. . . Using quantum physics as an imaginative landscape, Phillips’ debut speculative collection Recurrence Plot attempts to walk the fine line between fiction and reality, fate and free will, and past, present, and future.