Carceral Time and the Restructuring of Black Life

Seminar with Nicole R. Fleetwood, inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Contemporary black diasporic art and the American carceral system are two focal points of Fleetwood’s research. In the seminar, she explores the multiple temporalities that impact the lives of incarcerated people and their loved ones. Carceral time is a broad framework that encompasses sentencing guidelines, the disparate temporalities that separate incarcerated and nonincarcerated people, the afterlife of imprisonment (such as parole and e-incarceration), and the long duration of racialized captivity and erasure in settler nation states. The seminar will focus specifically on how carceral time restructures Black intimacy and quotidian life. Nicole R. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, and the author of a number of books: Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011); On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and the price winning Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020). In connection with the latter book, she also curated an exhibition on the same topic at MoMA PS1, New York.