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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.

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.

This chapter examines the political fiction of Aksum's rule of Kush that persisted into the sixth century. It first considers the extent and nature of Aksumite relations with Nubia during the reign of Kālēb and goes on to analyze texts in light of Aksumite relations with regions to the west of Ethiopia. It also discusses the evidence, preserved in Syriac by John of Ephesus and supported in part by limited archaeological evidence, for sporadic Aksumite contact with post-Kushite Nubia. It argues that Aksum did not exercise any political control in Nubia during the sixth century, much less later.

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.

This book explores the influence of warfare, commerce, and political fictions on the relations between two ancient African states, Nubia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum. Focusing primarily on the fourth century CE, it considers how the contact between Nubia and Ethiopia developed within very different regional spheres of interaction. Based on this interaction, the book argues that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area politically, economically, or culturally. It also suggests that the seemingly weak ties between Aksum and Nubia can be attributed to the geographical orientation of the Ethiopian Highlands and the middle Nile Valley. The book examines how Aksum and the Nubian kingdom of Kush coexisted in peace for most of their history before Aksum took up arms against the latter. This introductory chapter discusses evidence of Ethiopian–Nubian contact before the first century CE.

This book has explored the history of Aksumite–Nubian relations based on the available archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence. For the period before the rise of Aksum, there is good evidence of commercial and even political contact between Nubia and the Horn of Africa. By the turn of the first millennium BCE, however, the two regions seem to have gravitated toward two different axes: a Nile Valley axis in the case of Nubia and an Ethiopian Highlands–Red Sea axis in the case of Ethiopia. Thus for the Nubian kingdom of Kush, the most obvious point of contact with the outside world was Egypt. The book concludes by raising three important points. First, ancient Northeast Africa was not an integrated region politically, economically, or culturally. Second, political fictions played an important role in Aksumite royal ideology. Third, it is not clear whether Aksum's invasions of Nubia in the fourth century were the end result of strained political relations between them.

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.

Deeply troubled by social injustice, Pamela became an active member of the Labour Party, writing newsletters and marching in protests against the Spanish Civil War and Franco. In 1935 she met an Australian journalist, Gordon Neil Stewart, whom she married in 1936; her mother, Amy, lived with them after the wedding. Neil and Pamela travelled together in France just before the war (where Neil had lived for a few years after leaving Australia) and she continued to write short stories and novels. Her most memorable fiction in these years is The Monument (1938), a political novel sympathetic to the working class and passionately critical of prejudice, particularly that directed against Jews, and the first novel in her ‘Helena’ trilogy, Too Dear for My Possessing (named for one of the central characters). It is set in Bruges, a city she dearly loved.

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.

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.”