METROPOLARITY reunites at South Street’s Wooden Shoe Books on this year’s ides of March in celebration of our own Rasheedah Phillips‘ monumental book release: Dismantling the Master’s Clock.
All four of us—Rasheedah Phillips, Alex Smith, Ras Mashramani, and myself— will be live in the flesh and ready to read our lamentations and exaltations in honor of this most precious volume’s release into the world.
If you are reading this, you are cordially invited to attend.
March 13, 2025
7pm
Wooden Shoe Books
704 South Street, Phila PA 19147
A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
Why do some processes–like aging, birth, and car crashes–occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?
Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.
About the Author
Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, writer, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.