Abstract
This article introduces “Demon Time” as a theoretical concept for examining Black time geographies. Building off the theorization of demonic space, I theorize that demon time is an alternative Black temporality. I use the soundscapes of the Black church, the Black barber/beauty shop, and the strip club to think through demonic temporality as a mode of reimagination, a reimagining of Black subjectivities, a mode of recovery, an iterative process of recovery from anti-blackness, and a mode of resisting, a continual resistance of normative logics and western ideologies. These Black soundscapes produce Black timescapes which are anchored to time-spaces of Black cultural production. Thus, demon time offers us a way to reorient how we understand Blackness in moments of economic, social, and ecological crisis, while also allowing us to think about the incommensurability of Black temporalities across Black regions in the US.
Reclaiming my time
On 27 July 2017, during a House Financial Services committee hearing, Congresswoman Maxine Waters told former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and the world that she would be “reclaiming her time”! This response was prompted by Mnuchin’s inability to answer any of the questions that Congresswoman Waters leveled his way. As he continued to evade question after question, the congresswoman responded to his evasive tactics by continually uttering that she was “reclaiming her time”. While the viral clip lasted only 41 seconds, it became yet another Black Twitter moment as hashtags, clever memes, and snappy rejoinders immediately emerged letting everyone know that they too were going to reclaim their time. Black people, especially Black women, resonated with this simple yet impactful statement about the importance of Black people’s time and their ability to claim it.
Black temporality is intimately connected to Black subjectivity. The subject position of Black people in the Americas, the diasporas, and Africa are connected to western conceptions and enforcement of time (Hanchard, 1999). Central to this for cultural theorist EP Thompson is the direct relationship that time has to capitalism and the expansion of European industrialization (Thompson, 1967). But if we attach this to the Black radical tradition (BRT) through the work of Cedric Robinson (2000), and his notion of racial capitalism and Walter Rodney’s (2018) framing of the underdevelopment of Africa through extraction and expropriation from the west, then we can also see that time is racialized. 1 Centering the process of racialization in time shows us that time is much more than simply an agent and apparatus of capitalist labor regimes as it is also a method of racialized violence.
While time is an often-invisible organizational force, Black people have always been keenly aware of it, as their very survival depended on this awareness. Black people continually move between various temporal modalities to at best persevere despite deeply entrenched inequality to at worst, endure systemic inequity and dehumanization. From chattel enslavement to Jim Crow to this present moment of late-stage capitalism, mass incarceration, and ecological disaster, Black people have savvily navigated and negotiated western conceptions of time through alternative Black temporalities. These alternative temporal registers provide not only agency but are instrumental to Black interiority and cultural production.
Using the cultural studies methodology of articulation triangulated with autoethnography and participant observation, I argue that demon time is an alternative Black temporality. Further, I contend that when linking demon time to McKittrick and Wynter’s notion of demonic space, a Black time-space compression occurs. To think through these theorizations, I employ the Black soundscapes of the Black church and the strip club—which I ground in a critical discourse analysis of the television show P-Valley—to examine the ways Black people use these places to reimagine, resist, and recover in an anti-Black world. Each of these soundscapes represents an integral Black place conjoined to a genre of Black music (gospel, R&B, hip hop), which, while distinctive, is interconnected. Further, I use the formulation of demon time to think about the spatial relationality of Blackness as an analytical concept that is not monothetic nor insular but one that is contingently capacious.
Demon Time
Demon time is a Black vernacular phrase that has recently emerged in hip hop culture. In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion remixed her single Savage by adding Beyonce to the song. 2 In her verse, Beyonce mentions the term, Demon Time. She refers to it as she declares “Hips TikTok when I dance (Dance), On that Demon Time, she might start a Onlyfans” (Pete and Knowles, 2020). This playful quip flirts with the geographical imagination of the listener while playing into the erotic fantasies of what a Beyonce Onlyfans account would look like. Additionally, this term is in the title of a song by Lil Yatchy (Jackson et al., 2020), a popular Gen Z rapper, which was released two months after the Savage remix. In this song, Lil Yatchy raps with an irregular cadence about his sexual prowess, his wealth accumulation, and the women he can and will have flown out. In both instances, this term references Black libidinal energies and economies within Black sociality. Demon time for Beyonce and Lil Yatchy is fleshy, bold, brazen and centers pleasure through inconspicuous and conspicuous consumption. I define demonic time as a Black temporality that is predicated on Black erotic’s (Morgan, 2015) and libidinal economies (Wilderson, 2010). Colloquially, demon time has come to be understood as the time where things go down; typically it refers to what occurs late nights at strip clubs or what happens during late night Instagram live sessions. Thus, demon time becomes another Black temporality that can speak to Black agency, resilience, and alternatives in this moment of economic, social, and environmental crisis and distress.
During the initial COVID-19 lockdown, when normative temporality was completely upended, demon time became a port in the storm of uncertainty. Being sequestered in their homes, many Black people increased their use of social media and utilized digital space to access demon time to abate the affective disorientation of the COVID-19 lockdown. Instagram became the locus for many Black people through the affordances of Instagram live. Using Instagram in ways that it was not previously imagined, Black folks created digital places for community and accessed alternative temporalities to weather the beginning of what would become the global pandemic. Furthermore, Black folks accessed demon temporality through live streams (digital spaces) that replicated and, in many ways, intensified the libidinal and Black erotic aspects of the strip club.
Former professional athlete and club promoter Justin LaBoy is attributed with the origination of this concept and digital practice. During the initial COVID-19 lockdown in the United States, strip clubs and lounges were deemed nonessential, leaving a void in the lives of people who centered their social lives and economic livelihoods around the club and party scene. LaBoy quickly pivoted to Instagram due to its live stream capabilities creating what he described in a complex article as “a virtual strip club” where strippers/dancers could make thousands of dollars in matter of minutes all from the comforts of their home (Harris, 2020). Thus, demon time becomes a temporal intervention to the economic uncertainty of the global pandemic when people realized they could not rely on the state to save them from the fiscal unpredictable conditions predicated by COVID-19.
Despite demon time being framed as a contemporary phenomenon, it is very much inculcated in Black geographies and temporalities of the past. The Transatlantic Slave Trade that transported millions of Africans from the continent of Africa to the Americas was not merely a movement of Africans of varying ethnicities from one place to another (Gilroy, 1993). It was a shifting, reshaping and reorientation of what would become Black culture, power, and knowledge in the Americas. And as horrific as it was to the men, women, children, and all the folks who were stuffed into the bowels of those ships and transported so far away from home, it did not destroy them. In many ways it functioned as a catalyst of relationality. As Historian Michael Gomez explains: The Middle Passage was a birth canal, launching a prolonged struggle between slaveholder and enslaved over rights of definition. Both the European and the African would find themselves deeply influenced by the culture and presence of the other; it would not and could not be a one-way street. But the Middle Passage was also a death canal, baptismal waters of a different kind. At the very least, the African died to what was and to what could have been. (1998: 13)
In Development Arrested, Clyde Woods utilizes the blues to develop an epistemological intervention. Woods employs the blues as a conceptual framework to think critically about the subjectivity of Black people in the South. At the scale of the region, Black temporalities can be seen and most definitely can be heard. Discursively, the South as a region is constructed to be slower and less rushed than other regions. This is readily reflected in Southern cultural practices. While this is predicated on rural/urban binaries, this too creates distinctive temporalities that can be seen in the everyday lives of Black people in the south through their everyday and ordinary practices: going to the barbershop/beauty shop, going to church, funerals, and weddings.
These time signatures can also be seen in the work of Regina Bradley (2021), whose field-defining work on southern hip hop has made sure folks are hearing “what the south has to say” to Kiese Laymon (2019) who has crafted deeply personal and powerful southern literature that reorients not only our understanding of Black masculinity but of the relationship that Black men have to their bodies to LaMonda Horton-Stallings (2013) who peels back the multifaceted layers of Black queer space and time that permeate the spatial imaginaries of the south. Each scholar individually and collectively shows the contours and granularities of the Black southern experience that illuminate how Black time-spaces can be spaces of agency, sites of resistance as well as constricting and restrictive in their persistence to cohere around hegemonic variations of Blackness.
Tapping into these complex spatial and temporal constellations, Woods utilizes the blues to reimagine Black geographies and temporalities. The blues is another genre of Black music where you can readily see how it shifts and shapes Black time-space. He states that the blues epistemology has two primary premises. The first premise is that “there is a constant and continual reestablishment of collective sensibility” in the face of constant violence that is both material and epistemic (Woods, 1998: 29-30). In the second premise, he explains that African American culture is still couched within a plantation social relationship, which was a site of contestation (conflict vs cultural formations) (Woods, 1998: 29–30). He goes on to define it as “an intellectual tradition that embeds local geographical knowledge, philosophical insights, social interrogations, and self-definition in dynamic socio-linguistic traditions” (Woods, 2007: 49). When thinking about the blues through the work of Woods, we can see that the blues changes how we inhabit space and western standard time (normative modes), the blues allows us to find power and resistance in white supremacist spaces, and it allows us to reconcile our pain, our joy, while thinking toward better days ahead. Blues become one of many Black alternative temporalities in the south to navigate the violence and dispossession of anti-Black racism.
Demon time illustrates that western temporality is but a fiction and not a naturalized phenomenon. It is a discursive coherence that codifies uneven power relationships. “Demon time is a Black time-space where Black bodies are “bending spacetime out of being the unpredictable uncontrollable element (Butler, 2023: 27). Demon time (and other alternative Black tempos) illuminate how time is not linear, that it can be sped up but that it can also be slowed down and played with. While demon time is a spatial intensification of capital accumulation. It often sits with, against, or adjacent to alternative temporalities such as the ones produced in Black Churches where time is slowed, where it might meander, or even glide during a liturgical praise and worship or slide seductively like the movements of a stripper doing a private dance. All these varying tempos are relational. In every instance, it accesses and is intimately connected to Black sociality and interiority. This is important when thinking about the ways time orders our lives, orders our labor, orders the social relations we are embedded in, and orders how we are impacted by the various structural manifestations of time, i.e., time to degree completion, birthdays, anniversaries, work shifts, retirement, and incarceration. Black alternative temporalities allow for a reordering and reconsideration of Black social life.
Black folks are continually losing time and the most concrete manifestation of this is premature Black death. Thus, demon time is not a cure but a treatment to anti Blackness. Demon time allows Black folks to combat many of the structural inequalities that often impact Black lives like phantoms that are constantly ticking away. Tik Tok Tik Tok. Time is against Black people. From the moment that Black lives are conceived, time is weaponized against Black folks. From the adage “Black Don’t Crack” to the adultification of Black children, western frames of temporality are at odds with Blackness and Black People. 3 Black alternative temporalities respond to moments of crisis. These crisis responses allow for a respite, a reimaging, and a reformulation of Black subjectivity. This reformulation of Black subjectivity is not only predicated on precarity fueled by anti-Blackness. Play, Black joy, and Black pleasure (of the spirit and the body) are deeply integral to the form and function of alternative Black temporalities. Living, breathing, thinking, and being, one second at a time on one’s own terms is at the heart of alternative Black temporality.
Black time-space
Black time-space is a theoretical framework that centers Blackness in the production of space and in the articulation of time. Toni Morrison reminds us in “Playing in the Dark” that we live in a “wholly racialized world” (Morrison, 1993: 4). Following this logic, I contend that formations of time-space have co constitutive relationships that are predicated and buttressed by asymmetrical power relations that are embedded and woven into modernist logics of race, gender, ability, and sexuality, etc. These formations maintain and structure not only the ideologies of white supremacy and anti-Black racism which are fundamental aspects of modernity but our hegemonic understandings of space and place. These hegemonic understandings translate to dominant forms of spatiality and spatialization which dictate, structure, and frame how we inhabit and move through the world discursively, through our spatial imaginary and materially, in material space through investment, divestment and dispossession of capital and political power in public and private spaces. Pivoting to this framework allows for a reimagining of Black subjectivity while also opening the conceptualization of spatialization, temporality, and the relationship between the two. Thus, Black geographies become an essential optic to examine the way both time and space articulate race as an analytic, racism as a set of institutional practices, while also helping us reimagine Blackness as an operative category.
In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick argues that “spatial acts can take on many forms, and can be identified through expressions, resistances, and naturalizations” (McKittrick, 2006: xix). Understanding this is key to thinking about the way Black spatiality operates. Black spatiality is never static, it is continually being made, unmade, produced, and unproduced. Black Geographies are constituted by absence, which can be sometimes invisible, other times silence or hushed or at other times spaces of intensification, which are hypervisible, overtly loud, and deafening. As McKittrick (2006) explains: While the power of transparent space works to hierarchically position individuals, communities, regions, and nations, it is also contestable – the subject interprets, and ruptures, the knowability of our surroundings. What this contestation makes possible are “black geographies,” which I want to identify as “the terrain of political struggle itself,” or where the imperative of a perspective of struggle takes place. (6)
For McKittrick, Black geographies and cartographies are predicated on demonic space. Drawing from the work of Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter, McKittrick employs a demonic model to retheorize and shift our understanding of space through a centering of the unspatiality and incommensurability of Black women. Further, this is couched in a premise that speculates on the intellectual potential that this epistemological recalibration will bring to human geography. Demonic space is a space of relationality and contingency. It is constructed beyond the bounds and conceits of western thought and modernity. It is legible to some, illegible to many, yet it maintains a spatial grammar that is continually present in traditional and Black geographies. Thus, we are utilizing demonic space to reposition our understanding of Black subjectivity and geographical knowability (McKittrick, 2006). Demonic space provides an intervention to spatial logics predicated on knowability. And where there is demonic space, there is also demonic time that intervenes in our formulations of temporality and its relationship to agency.
Black time space compression
Space time compression is an analytical concept that is predicated on the Marxist notion that space is annihilated by time (Marx, 1973). Harvey (1989) extends this presupposition through his theorization on space time compression in geography which centers capital (and technology innovation) as the catalyst for the temporal spatial dynamics between global capital accumulation and circulation through advancing technologies. Despite the primacy of this spatial claim, Massey critiques Harvey assertions as she explains that this privileging of the global, delegitimizes the importance, the particularity, and the spatial contingency/relationality of place (Christophers et al., 2018). The local for Massey becomes a better frame of analysis as she expounds that through it you can still see varying subjectivities and uneven power relations. Thus, from Massey’s critique emerges the theorization for a sense of place that recognizes while space can be compressed, shifted, and shaped, how this happens is contingent on local relations of power.
McKittrick’s conceptualization of a Black sense of place is formulated through its engagement with Massey’s notion of place (1994) and Smith’s conceptualization of deep space (Smith, 1992). In On plantations, prison, and a black sense of place, McKittrick frames and then unpacks how she connects, understands, and situates Black geographies through an analysis that looks at the intersections of place, Blackness, and violence (McKittrick, 2011). Pulling back at the Black geographic palimpsests, she explains that “a black sense of place is therefore tied to fluctuating geographic and historical contexts” and that it is “not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, as it is also about power in relation to the flows and movement” (McKittrick, 2011: 949). Extending this provocation, a little further, I argue that the merging of McKittrick’s notion of demonic space to my concept of demonic time allows us to theorize about Black time-space compression.
Essentially, Black time-space compression is the suturing of demonic space and time. Demonic time-space reorients Black people both spatially and temporally as they weave inside and outside of western temporality and default (white and colorblind) spatialities. This ability to move outside of normative time and space is predicated on Black agency, resilience, and resistance but it is not solely due to them; Black pleasure and play also serve as mechanisms through which this time jumping happens. Much like Neil Smith’s (1992) notion of scale jumping, Black people are continually able to jump time and scale through Black cultural production, Black labor practices, and their relationship to extraction, capital/cultural dispossession, and in some cases recapture and remix through mimicry (Bhabha, 1984) and hybridity (Hall, 2021).
Further, I contend that Black time-space compression is predicated not on the annihilation of space but on the bending, the folding, the twisting, and the playful way Black folks engage with space and time. Both space and time are courted and wooed, materially, discursively, and digitally through libidinal and ludic (play) sensibilities that are produced by and through Black culture production and what Clyde Woods (2002) calls Black indigenous knowledge. Moreover, this compression and bending of space and time is not merely framed on technology innovative as it is produced through the counter and alternative use of technology by Black folks for play, for pleasure, for resistance, and for reimaging the anti-Black world that they live in. These Black time spatial compressions create and are part of Black time-spaces which are portals that situate, cohere, and ground these alternative temporalities to traditional and alternative geographies.
Black timescapes and soundscapes
The Black church and the strip club as well as Black barber shops, beauty shops, the corner, the porch, and the south (as a region) serve as cultural, social, economic, and political (materially and discursively) anchors in the Black community (Alexander, 2003; Bailey and Shabazz, 2014; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Davis, 1999, 2013; Eaves, 2017; Harris-Lacewell, 2006; Mills, 2013). Each space constitutes a Black time-place in a particular spatial modality at a particular scale. The connective tissue that connects and animates these spaces are the Black cultural productions of music and sound. As ethnomusicologist Matthew Morrison notes, Blacksound “is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of all popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States” (Morrison, 2019: 789). Further, he contends that Blacksound is an integration of historical, material, and hermeneutic analysis of performance, publications (sheet music, minstrel manuals, pop music charts, reviews, and so on), recordings, and other ephemeral technologies vis-à-vis the aesthetic construction of race and racism within popular entertainment. (Morrison, 2019: 789)
Blacksound is an essential element of Black time-place sensibilities. With the invention of the phonograph, the connection between Black folks and Black sounds was severed. As Weheliye explains, this technology offered the ability to split sounds from the sources that produced them, resulting in a ‘post technological’ soundscape of orality and musicality in twentieth-century Black culture (Weheliye, 2005). This technology intervention allowed for Black music, Black sounds, and Black culture to be dislocated, dispossessed, and extracted from Black folks, which reconfigured the traditional and Black geographies of the United States. However, this reconfiguration positioned Black individuals to foster new relationships in its aftermath by inventing new practices and by drawing on prior Black indigenous ways of knowing to confront the changing geographies of anti-Blackness These strategies and practices are foundational to the construction, production, and utilization of Black alternative temporalities that were propagated via Black sonics and soundscapes.
In Phonographies, Weheliye locates a scholarly lacuna in geography when he explains that there is a gap in geographical scholarship that studies the confluence of space and sound (Weheliye, 2005). He goes further to suggest that “geographers need to consider the ways in which sound produces spaces and music critics how sound is fashioned by space and vice versa” (Weheliye, 2005: 109). While he acknowledges that Susan J. Smith (1997) made a call from inside of the house of geography to study sound, his call comes from outside of the house as Weheliye is a Black studies scholar who centers Blackness and racialization in his framing of sound in relation to modernity, while there has been a concerted effort to incorporate the study of sound in geography over the last 20 years (Boland, 2010; Gallagher et al., 2017; Kanngieser, 2012; Smith, 1994, 2000; Wilson, 2020; Wissmann, 2016). Much of this work has focused on sound and sonic geographies as a methodology, the relationship between sound and phenomenology and the way sound informs affective spaces (Gallagher and Prior, 2014; Macfarlane, 2020; Pavia, 2018; Revill, 2016). While each of these areas are fruitful intellectual enterprises, this particular focus overlooks Susan J. Smith’s seminal piece that framed how to study geographies of sound using geographies of race as a conduit to understand systems of knowledge production and power (Smith, 1997).
This lack of engagement theoretically also includes another missed opportunity as Weheliye conceptualized the concept of acoustic space. Acoustic space can be understood as an intermingling and correlational relationship of physical, social, and digital space (Weheliye, 2005). This reframing opens space, figuratively and literally, as it allows for us to think about not only the spatiality of sound but how race and space intersect at various axis points explicitly and implicitly. Acoustic space opens a bridge to put sonic geographies into conversation with geographies of race and Black geographies. Because what could Black sonic geographies contribute to our understanding of resistance, recovery and reimagination of Black people?
These prescient contributions are readily evident in the work of geographer Brandi Summers. In Reclaiming the Chocolate City, Summers argues that “go-go is the expressive, sonic apparatus that held this displaced population together through their memories and connections to each other and their city” (Summers, 2020: 32–33). Summers uses the sonics of go-go, a sub-genre of Black music from DC, to illustrate how Black residents not only resist gentrification and dispossession but uses it to understand their place making practices. She goes on to explain that “Reclamation aesthetics presume Black life as placed, not placeless” (Summers, 2020: 43). This is powerful corrective as it does three very important things. First, it allows for Black humanity to be centered. Second, it shows how theorizing beyond visual cultural allows for the consideration of both spatial and temporal elements as well as the aural information that the music constructs as sonic language has both an aesthetic and a politics (Summers, 2020). Third, it provides a blueprint and frame of reference for scholars to think about the aesthetics and agency of Black musical traditions and the ways these cultural productions have material presence and resonance.
The work of Weheliye and Summers through acoustic space and Black sonic geographies allows us to think about the multiplicity of Black time-spaces and Black soundscapes, especially, as it concerns the micro, meso, and even macro geographies of the Black barbershops, homes, churches and even of specific regions and territories. Weheliye’s theorization of acoustic space allows us to pivot and consider not only how sound shapes space and place, but also how technology (digital) spaces can be framed through sound and how these spaces are connected to Black geographies, while Summers’ utilization of go-go music shows us that we could employ other Black sonics from across the country to think about a range of relationships that are predicated through the local Black sonic geographies, such as those by Bounce in New Orleans, by Hyphy in the Bay area, by Chopped and Screwed in Houston, or by Trap and Snap in Atlanta, or Drill in Chicago. 4 Summers reminds and homes in on Massey’s contention about the power of the local as she shows us how local Black sonic geographies can be welded to resist, restraint, and reimagine the politics and tactics of gentrification. In each of these spaces, multiple genres within the Black music tradition collide and sonically construct, shift, and shape Black time-spaces which became the gateways and corridors to a multitude of alternative Black temporalities.
The sonic gospels of the Black church
Black churches are often considered to be the premier cultural institution of Black life in America (Cone, 1977; Dubois, 2011). Black churches are incubators of Black religiosity, spirituality, and political power (Glaude, 20002018; Higginbotham, 1994). However, Black Churches also structure and shape time and space for Black Americans especially in the southern portions of the US. Black churches through call and response by preachers, praise and worship teams, and gospel choirs construct soundscapes that reframe Black spatial temporalities i.e., Black time-spaces. As Latoya Eaves reminds us “Black geographies are not always cartographically inscribed” (Eaves, 2017: 84). Many Black geographies of the south are in fact sonically inscribed. The Black time-spaces of the Black church are a prime example of this sonic inscription.
Just as E. Patrick Johnson exclaimed “that almost everything he knew about quare theory, he learned from his grandmother” (Johnson, 2001: 2). I too would like to proclaim that almost everything I know about alternative Black temporalities as a mode of resistance and recovery I learned from my grandmother. My grandmother’s father built the church that I grew up in and while she was a member of that church for the entirety of her life. She was in that church but not of that church. While she might not have called herself a feminist, she practiced an ethos of Black feminist care. Care was her praxis, and it was central to how she navigated the world as a Black woman. She was critical of the church as an institution but understood the restorative nature of it as a Black time place and as a Black soundscape. She would always remark to me that she never went to church for the pastor unless it was a good speaker; instead, she explained that she was there for the music. The music is what in her words touched her spirit and brought her back year after year. The church choir was the center piece this space for her and the sonic gospels that it produced often acted as a balm to her mind, body, and spirit.
For my grandmother and many other Black folks, the Black church sounds like home. There is a warmth and fullness to Gospel music. From full lush chords to complex harmonies of the piercing soprano, the melodious alto, and the trumpet tenor to the hum of the organ to the steady beat of the drum, the soundscape of the Black church is a robust repository of Black hope, love, pain, and most importantly, joy. However, nonmusical sounds contribute to this home as kinship is predicated and maintained through iterative sonic practices such as the laughter of children after church, the hushed conversations during church, the creakiness of the doors and of the pews as folks come in later or leave early. Each sound contributes to the Black ways of knowing a space and a place even if we have not ever physically set foot there. These sonic resonance crafts a shared and scared knowledge that binds, weaves, and constitutes a home, imperfect yes but a home, nonetheless.
Despite my grandmother’s more pragmatic relationship to the church, as a child, I eagerly rode the wave of Protestantism couched within Black cultural affectations. The Black church became my first third space/place. 5 Unlike many other kids at church, I welcomed the time I spent in church and saw it as a space to learn and inquire about the world that so puzzled me. I can remember my Sundays being all day affairs. I would get up early Sunday morning, eat breakfast that my grandmother had made for me, and go to Sunday school at around 9 a.m. before church started. Sunday school rolled over into regular service that would not end until around 2 p.m. and this varied as Black preachers manipulated time with the ebb and flows of the affect that was generated during their sermons. These seemed the norm until I worked as a teenager as I then understood that Black churches operated on one set of temporalities and white churches operated on another one. This was quite visible to the restaurant industry as it was understood that the first customers earlier on Sunday would always be white people and that the later customers would be Black people due to their length of church service. Many would always casually remark on why Black churches would take so much longer by simply saying it was either the preacher who would not stop talking or it was the music that kept the spirit alive.
Reflecting on this temporal typology that I lived through in conjunction with the tacit knowledge gained by living/working inside and outside of the region of the south, I argue that these ideological temporal differentiations were not coincidental but a holdover from what I am naming as Jim Crow spatialities. I define Jim Crow spatialities as the leftover residue of affective, legal, and psychic tactics that were employed and operationalized to maintain Jim Crow spatial practices. Further, I contend that in addition to serving as legal and extra-legal institutional catalysts that animated intense spatial segregation, Black devaluation, resource divestment, and spatial terror and violence;. time also becomes both an oppressor buttressed by anti-Blackness and a potential stop gate to mitigate harm. Time functions dialectically and becomes a way to combat structural violence, even if that violence originates from euro centric notions of time and temporality.
Purifoy and Seamster employ the concept of creative extraction to explain the parasitic relationship between Black towns and White towns in Texas. 6 They define this concept “as a critical development paradigm for white towns as well as a blueprint for the destruction of Black places” (Purifoy and Seamster, 2021: 53). They go further to explain that this theorization has utility because it shows the mechanics of how Black towns endure theft, erosion, and exclusion due to uneven sociocultural and political economic relationships between Black and white towns. Through the case study on the town of Tamina they illustrate that white urban/suburban development is predicated on the underdevelopment of Black towns, i.e., Black spaces and places.
Building from this theory, I argue that Jim Crow spatialities (and its legacy spatialities) function as temporal extractive spaces. These temporal extractive spaces extract time from Black folks that could be utilized for pleasure, for rest, and for recovery. Times of leisure becomes forfeit as a result. They erode time through Black folks having to wonder about the possibility of a microaggression occurring in white spaces and the resulting collateral damage that can come from an encounter. Even if an microaggression or racist incident does not occur, a lot of psychic energy is spent on the ‘what if’, on how to navigate the space, and what to do to get out of the space if the encounter turns deadly. Furthermore, they also engage in temporal exclusionary practices, as Black individuals must be acutely aware of where they can and cannot go. The green book that was used as an aid to circumvent sundown towns across the US is a great example of the preparation it takes for Black folks to safely navigate exclusionary spaces. 7 This navigation, while necessary for the safety for Black folks, is laborious and damaging not only to the mind but also the body and spirit. Time lost equates to more than a loss of minutes or second or even hours from one day. It is a loss of personhood and self-autonomy of Black folks. This is the Black temporal disadvantage in practice (Mahadeo, 2019). 8 So, alternative temporalities through Black soundscapes become essential spaces to combat these temporal extractive logics. Despite its imperfections as an institution that inflicts harm and violence upon Black people, the Black church also serves as an alternative Black time-space, creating Black soundscapes that often offer a respite from the anti-Blackness of the world.
The strip club: Where things go down
From the cult classic film, The Players Club (1998), to the popular reality franchise Love and Hip Hop (2011), strip clubs have become an integral nexus point of culture, capital, and controversy in Black culture. In Black American culture, the Black strip club is juxtaposed against the Black church. This opposition is predicated on an either-or ideology that sees people as either saints or sinners. Moving around morality as a central conceit, other dissenting opinions are couched within a vehement critique of that frames stripping as labor practice that is unilaterally degrading and exploitative to women. However, many scholars who study strip clubs and sex work explain that these workers are not without agency, as they assert that these workers are embedded in complex power regimes where their subjectivity is relational and contingent to already existing structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. (Brooks, 2010; Miller-Young, 2014). This results in these workers being able to be empowered and/or disempowered based on the context of the situation. Despite this oppositional framing, strip clubs and churches often serve parallel and even perpendicular functions in the Black community. Just gospel music animates the sound and temporal landscapes of Black churches, hip hop functions as the nuclear reactor that powers the alternative temporalities of strip clubs.
While the Black church sounds like home, the Black strip clubs sound like the “world”. Colloquially, in the Black American church tradition, the world is a reference point for pleasure, sin, and all other worldly vices. In this context, being worldly is pejorative and is indicative of those who are ruled by the ‘ flesh’ and consumed by pleasure. In other words, the Black strip club is the home of the libidinal. Like the juke joint of yesteryear, the Black strip club becomes the epicenter for Black excess. Excessive consumption and production of pleasure, capital, and pain. Formed by multiple Black music traditions that include R&B and various hip-hop styles, this soundscape is created through a commingling of hyper masculinity and hyper femininity in the “key of get money”. There is a hyper capitalistic imperative built into the logos of the strip club that translates sonically into staccato beats and raunchy lyrics coupled with incomparable bravado.
The mythos of the strip club is connected to the increasing importance of hip hop in Black cultural production. Since the later part of the 20th century, strip clubs have become increasingly relevant and connected to hip hop culture as hip hop has become a focal point within both the US and the global popular cultural imaginary. Further, the emergence of Atlanta as a hip hop center has typified the relations between hip hop and strip clubs, as Atlanta hip hop culture became intimately entangled in strip club culture. Strip clubs became not only a place of play and pleasure but spaces of business, where producers, music executives, artists and even a pipeline for female rappers emerged. 9 As Balaji notes, Atlanta “strip clubs such as Magic City, which cater mostly to black men, become sites of cultural production, as they turn into unofficial gatekeepers” in southern hip hop culture (Balaji, 2012: 323). Thus, strip clubs become epicenters for sonic and temporal landscapes fueled by hip hop music and its associated cultural practices.
Hip hop is a spatial enterprise that is locally and globally productive. Echoing the words of Katherine McKittrick, simply put, hip hop matters are spatial matters (McKittrick, 2005). Hip hop as a cultural formation is a producer of space and place. While these spatial practices vary, they are gendered, racialized, classed, queered, and tap into uneven structures of power. As Rashad Shabazz expounds, Black men in hip hop have overcorrected their exclusions from public space by reproducing spatial exclusionary logics that pushed Black women out of hip hop spaces (Shabazz, 2014). However, he also contends that despite these exclusionary spatial practices, hip hop is also a place making enterprise, and that hip hop geographies at their core are intersectional, contingent, relational, and connected to exceeding complex regimes of power. Thus, hip hop is a black cultural producer with a rich complex and deep political history, which can engender feminist, queer, and progressive politics (Chang and Herc, 2005, Hunter, 2011; Johnson, 2021 Perry, 2006; Rose, 1994, 2008; Shabazz, 2021; Spence, 2011), despite it being wedded and interwoven into neoliberal, sexist, anti-Black, homophobic, and ablest ideologies. Moreover, hip hop produces soundscapes that create alternative Black timescapes. Hip Hop is an ally (sometimes even an opp) that aides and abets in the production of Black alternative temporalities.
Demon time in the valley
P-Valley is a television series created by Katori Hall. Adapted from the play Pussy Valley, P-Valley premiered on 11 July 2020, on the Starz’s network. Set in Mississippi, in the fictional town of Chucalissa, this dramatic series explores racism, homophobia, domestic violence, misogynoir, ecological disaster, and dispossession through the interconnected narratives of the four main characters: Uncle Clifford, Autumn Night, Keyshawn, and Mercedes, while each storyline is gritty, raw, and delves into the Black interiority of each of the characters and could easily work in isolation as standalone tales. These stories together produce a resonant harmony that illustrates the complexity of the Black experience in the Americas. These stories have struck a powerful chord with Black audiences as this show, in its short time, has become highly lauded and appreciated by the Black community. 10
Moreover, I suggest that the organic nature of these narratives is exciting and riveting because they are readily relatable. These narratives allow the viewers to see the rawest versions of themselves (or others that they may know) in a way that shows that they are human despite it all. These snapshots offer insight into the lives and personhood of Black folks in Chucalissa, explicitly demonstrating how the production of space and place reshapes power relations that cut across various taxonomies of identification, underlined by temporality. In particular, the story of Mercedes and her mother Patrice complicates dominant narratives of Black motherhood and the relationships between mother and child. This longstanding relationship changes over time. Initially, we assume that Mercedes’ contentious relationship with her mother because she is a stripper, but we later learn that it is merely a part of a much longer standing issue.
As the narrative unfolds, we see that their relationship is strained because of motherhood: The Black motherhood practiced by Patrice and the Black motherhood that was denied to Mercedes. When Mercedes became pregnant as a teenager, she was forced by her mother Patrice to have the child and then put her up for adoption. As the story progresses, we learn that despite Mercedes giving her child away, she is still involved in her life by teaching her and other teen girls how to dance after school. This is where we are introduced to Terricka who is now 14 years old and very much her biological mother’s daughter. We learn that despite them having some form of relationship, it is further complicated because Mercedes has been slotted into the role of big sister when she really wants to mother this child, while simultaneously having to navigate and maintain boundaries put in place by Terricka’s adoptive mother who is an upper-class Black woman.
This storyline highlights the parallel yet perpendicular relationships between the strip club and the Black church as well as Black motherhood and Black childhood. Demon Time becomes the connective tissue in this narrative as it illustrates the ways it can be utilized to redress harm predicated by the state, by one’s family, or by oneself. Moreover, demon time becomes a way to find solace in spaces where joy and happiness are fraught, find power when power is being structurally redirected, and allows oneself to continue to imagine a better future despite the conditions of the present.
Mercedes is positioned as a seasoned stripper hellbent on retiring from the industry to open a dance school versus her mother, Patrice, as an aspiring evangelist who wishes to lead her own church. The strip club, The Pynk, is the central locus spatially in this town. The Pynk serves as a counterspace to the Black Church throughout season one. Despite being situated on opposite ends of the moral spectrum, The Pynk and the church are connected by familial relations and capital accumulation, circulation, and dispossession. This connection is predicated by Mercedes who funnels money from her work as a stripper to fill the coffers of the church for her mother who hopes to curry favor with the pastor to become a fixture in the congregation as a budding evangelist. The climax of this storyline unfolds as Patrice goes behind Mercedes’ back to steal not only her money that she saved to open her dance but also the location of the school. Mercedes’ reaction to this revelation exploded into physical violence. Despite the social mores of a child attacking their mother, the damage that Patrice inflicts on Mercedes via this betrayal is of a much greater magnitude. As Mercedes had poured so much of herself and her time into dancing, saving money, and ‘mothering’ the other strippers, she hoped to show them that they too could leave the strip club and, in the words of reality TV star Joseline Hernandez, “never have to go back”. 11
P-Valley shows us not only that contradictory politics and practices can occur under the guise of good intentions, but it also highlights the need for alternative Black temporalities such as demon time, because the central message of this story shows that sometimes your greatest foe can be the person who should be your greatest champion. The strip club as a space and place of hip and hop culture is predicated on hyper Black erotic ethos, hyper libidinal economies, and the hyper capitalist accumulation. The soundscapes of this place are punctuated by up-tempo, frenetic, beats, rhythms, tempos, and cadences over flirty, aggressive, and overtly sexual and raunchy lyrics. That can empower (or disempower) some at the drop of a dime or a beat.
This is illustrated in P-Valley anytime Mercedes dances, as she commands the attention of all eyes that are on her. Further, it is shown that she can generate the capital to not only support herself and her mother but also a local Black church. Demon time emerges as alternative Black temporality that is centered around the bending and twisting of time, where capital is accumulating at an intensified rate, and given to those who would not position to be at the top of hegemonic social stratified structures. As Phillip Butler explains “demon time is a reference to sex work, celebration, violence, and unleashing a way of being grounded in the deep recesses of one’s own internality” (Butler, 2023: 24). Demon time, in this instance, shortens the time needed to raise a substantial amount of capital in a world where low wages have become a standard practice to increase profit and to assist the 1% with the maintenance and growth of their hyper capital accumulation. Thus, Demon time produces a counterhegemonic stratification that positions Black women, in the case of the Black strip club, at the top of this tower of unequal power if only for the duration of a dance.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Black time
On 24 June 2021, R&B singer Jazmin Sullivan released Tragic as the first single for her upcoming fourth studio album. This punchy midtempo begins with Maxine Waters voice stressing that when you are on her time, she can reclaim it before pivoting to Jazmin’s lush and raspy vocalization that rides smoothly over the beat. This use of sampling is indicative of Black cultures’ propensity to contingently reimagine and reformat the lived experience into cultural production. This cultural citational practice seamlessly weaves the affect from Maxine Waters to Jazmin in a way that shows that their very different issues are connected: Maxine Water’s inability to be answered without deflection and Jazmin’s ability to have a suitor who treats her the way she should be treated. As Jazmin tells her paramour in the chorus that she will “reclaim, reclaim, reclaim, reclaimin” her time this song whether heard in the car, in a beauty shop or in a bedroom, creates a Black time-place that reimagines the subjectivity of Black people (Sullivan and Kali, 2021; 2022). These lyrics push back at patriarchy by a repositioning that lets the listener know that they must put their pleasure first to reclaim not only their agency, but their humanity by placing themselves and their time first.
In this article, I have introduced the concept of demon time to examine Black time geographies. I have put Black geographies into conversation with sonic geographies to think through what Black space time compression looks like while grounding my analysis in the Black soundscapes of the Black church and the Black strip club. Two contradictory spaces that are intimately connected and deeply entangled in the Black cultural geographies of production are the bedrock of US popular culture and its global dominance. Demon time is pleasure, Demon time is pain, and Demon time is very much doing what you can with what you got.
As Tao Goffe reminds us “racial capitalism requires history, race, and time” (Goffe, 2022: 111). Being aware of this requirement allows us to recalibrate and recruit demon time as both a Black geographic theory and as a method. Theoretically, demon time offers us an ontological pivot that could serve to release us from the shackles of self-imposed taxonomies that we treat as naturalized phenomena. However, as a method, demon time provides a potent intervention in the study of dynamic and every changing multiscalar social forces that are currently shaping space and place across environment, cultural, and social boundaries. It allows us to see the multitude of entanglements of uneven power relations while we grapple with the relationality of space as well as the varying calculi of difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.).
Despite not always being knowable, Black culture continues to be productive. As Fred Moten notes, one characteristic of Blackness is improvisation (Moten, 2003). This situates improvisation as an alternative Black cultural practice that continues to create alternative socio-spatial temporalities. Demon time is an alternative temporality predicated on an improvisational response to intensifications of crisis (global anti-Blackness, late-stage capitalism, climate change, etc.) that relationally seeks to recuperate Black humanity through the centering of pleasure, happiness, and joy as well rest and quietness. Black culture is Black life. Black life permeates Black time, space, and place. Reclaiming Black time reaffirms the humanity of Black folks, mitigates harms, and allows them to find joy, peace, and even quiet in an anti-Black world.
