Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching?

Abstract

This paper argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. This entanglement is exemplified in the extension, recreation and adaptation of those colonial logics of the human and space-time beyond the time of both racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation. This paper further argues that the absence of a detailed and central examination of these junctures within legal knowledge – especially in teaching but also in research – can be addressed by recourse to science fiction. A specific area of science fiction, collectively termed here Black/African Science Fiction, has made inroads into unsettling Euro-modern law’s chronopolitics. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as an example, this paper argues that Black/African Science Fiction can help us to reframe legal knowledge to disrupt the inevitability of our current version of the future and the question of inevitability itself.