John Murillo III

First arrangement: Black (in) time: untimely Blackness. Prelude: Untimely fragments and the beginnings of a reflection ; Black holes and generations ; Untime -- Second arrangement: The untimely works and worlds of impossible stories. Prelude: Trauma work ; Of shadows and diamonds ; Elliptical in love dot dot dot -- Third arrangement; Transmissions from out of nowhere. Prelude: No place, not any place, out of place ; Nowheresville ; Stanky shrines and hollow bastions -- Outro: Out of time in the middle of nowhere.Item embargoed for five year

This is the contest winning piece, which was originally drawn from what ended up being an early draft of my dissertation's first chapter; this version was deemed unworthy by powers out of my control, which propelled me to embrace its creative elements for the submission to Indiana Review's nonfiction contest (which, thankfully, for my psyche, my confidence in my writing, and for my physical health, won). I'll upload it (or link to it) after it's published at Indiana Review, first.

(Informal description) This paper begins to build a bridge between theoretical physics, black studies, and black literature in order to 'map' what I envision the Black Imagination to be. I theorize it as a universe unto itself, with its own physics (distorted, relative to the antiblack world/universe's physics). So in a fundamental way, I'm interested in how this Black imagination and its physics might tell us something interesting about the Black Position (Wilderson). In this essay, I'm interested in building toward a serious question about the Black imagination's temporality, and how that might reveal something instructive and fundamental about Blackness's relation to time. I understand this relation to be gratuitously violent, nonlinear, and unethical, and I call it "untime."