In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment b ... More

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment became figural of any age at all, and age itself came to signify the inhumanness of blackness. Black Age posits that age is an analytical category that reveals where alternative humanisms exist, and is a figure of a counter-historical temporality of modernity. By building on Hortense Spillers’s influential theorization of blackness as having been “ungendered” during transport across the Atlantic Ocean, this book argues that blackness is concomitantly “unaged,” a process thought of as “Oceanic lifespans.” This book uncovers how critical observations of black age’s untimeliness arise from black feminist critiques of liberal humanism from the 1970s onward. By focusing on black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative black life.