Chronopolitics and race, rag-time and symphonic time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

I take the term "chronopolitics" from Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other, which argues that "Time belongs to the political economy of relations between individuals, classes and nations" and that "there is a 'Politics of Time'" (x). For Fabian, time is always political because it governs the envisioning of otherness; the way that it has traditionally done so in Western society is by imposing an apparently insurmountable conceptual barrier between subject and object, exercising what Fabian refers to as an "epistemological dictatorship" that licenses oppression by creating and legitimating fixed hierarchical categories, the most pressing of which are, for us, those of race. Fabian labels this conceptual operation "allochronism," a denial of the dialectical relationship between subject and object that divests the object of knowledge (whether person, body, art form, culture, or race) of the ability to act in and occupy the same temporal space as the observing subject of knowledge. Fabian's conclusion is that "a clear conception of allochronism is the prerequisite and frame for a critique of racism" (182).

Johnson's novel precedes Fabian in its critique of allochronism and of the attendant practices of racism. Johnson shares Fabian's belief that where there are temporal practices, there are power relations and constructions of otherness. He highlights the extent to which the narrator's alliance of himself first with ragtime, then with a particular form of classical music is part of his negotiation of the racial and temporal politics that shape his movements. In Johnson's hands, these musics appear not as detached aesthetic practices but as technologies of temporal and subjective shaping that are heavily invested in the struggle over the proper shape of American culture and not without their own relationship to political and institutional power.

Although Johnson sets these two musics and these two conceptions of time against each other, they are not polar opposites. The division at work here is not like the distinction that Mirce Eliade and others make between linear and cyclical time. (4) The two times operative in Johnson's novel are perhaps best thought of as official and vernacular time. They depend on each other for their constitution; official time a reification of vernacular time, and vernacular time shaping itself in the interstices of official time. Both times emerge out of a specific positionality within a complex of social and economic conditions and practices, not out of any fixed cultural or biological essence. Thus, while classical music is a tradition having its provenance in Europe, and ragtime is a music unimaginable without the forced historical yoking of African subjects and American geography, neither form corresponds absolutely to the racial formations dividing the American polity. Ragtime is a music with a complex provenance, emerging as it did out of both an African American performance tradition rife with Africanisms, and out of a cultural situation characterized by an insistent give and take between Euro-American and African American forms and cultural traditions. (5) Exemplary here is the way that the great stride pianist James P. Johnson plundered the European classical tradition for techniques that he used to heighten his pianistic animations of Renaissance-era Harlem rent parties; according to Eileen Southern, "Johnson spent many hours listening to recordings of European piano compositions, so that he could use 'concert effects' in his playing of jazz piano" (390).