The Temporality of Breath: Under Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Abstract:In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pandemic informs a larger theory of the relationship between race, temporality, and racial capitalism. By examining the links between race, time, and breathe across time and space—from the plantation to the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter movement—the author argues that the pandemic in not an exception to the normal but as a dispersed amplification of it.