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I argue for literary, philosophical, and political motives in Walter Mosley’s return to a kind of writing born in and of 1930s cynicism, hard-boiled detective fiction. Like Richard Wright’s mid-century naturalism, Mosley’s choice of genre constitutes a complex form of strategic, literary anachronism that investigates the persistent bias within U.S. political histories, its penal system, and its philosophies.

The introduction establishes my analytic categories, vocabulary (especially strategic anachronism and strategic presentism) and central arguments by focusing on very different texts in a transhistorical “case-study” approach. Texts include: Sojourner Truth’s 1850 Narrative, Angelina Weld Grimké’s 1916 anti-lynching play Rachel, and Walter Mosley’s 2006 nonfiction book, Life Out of Context.

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous pragmatist legal saying was that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I argue that Hopkins, Chesnutt and Dunbar published novels in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that challenged American philosophical pragmatism by representing racially specific experiences of law and time.

I return to Suzan-Lori Parks, whose insight “Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots!” appears as the first epigraph in the book. I focus on Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays in which she penned a play every day for an entire year; the plays were then performed across the nation over the course of a year, 2007. Parks’s project has seemingly overcome the problem with time, producing the “being there” that Mosley called for but could not represent.

Beginning with the under-studied Dasein poets, this chapter argues that during the Black Arts era, African American writers represented black people as fully of their times, partly by connecting the literary with the musical. A presentism founded on black identity and simultaneity (Heideggerian dasein, or “being there”) emerged, a presentism similar but not identical to that of the Harlem Renaissance.

I focus on Grimké’s anti-lynching play Rachel (1916), Wright’s naturalist novel Native Son (1940), Gaines’s elegiac novel A Lesson Before Dying (1994), and Parks’s postmodern play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), arguing that these apparently quite disparate texts all take black male mortality as their content and repetition as their fundamental form, signifying the persistence of racially coded justice across time.

I develop the relationship between the material history of timekeeping and the content and form of 18^th and 19^th century African American and Black Atlantic texts, including: Gronniosaw’s and Equiano’s slave narratives, Wheatley’s poetry, and Douglass’s autobiographies. I argue that early African American writers’ ideas about, and experiences of, time produce more useful tropes than does Gates’s discursive “talking book.”