Funk the Clock

Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black

Rahsaan Mahadeo

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781501774232
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology

Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead.

In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with.

Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e., time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Whose Time Is It?
• 2. Teefing Time
• 3. The Makings of a “Maybe Environment”
• 4. “Keisha Doesn’t Get the Call before Kimberly”
• 5. Tabanca Time
• 6. Transgressing Time in the Fast Life
• 7. Why Is the Time Always Right for White and Wrong for Us?
• 8. Prescience within Present Orientations
• Conclusion
• Methodological Appendix: Interview Schedule
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index