William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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What is the central question about time and racial domination that frames the book?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Kerry Fichtor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with William Parris, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His book, Race, Time, and Utopia, Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation, is just out from Oxford University Press. How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination?
Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Ray's time in Utopia, Paris uses the tools of critical theory to draw out the utopian interventions in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs. Arguing that utopian thinking gives us normative purchase in the problems of our time, Parris shows not that these historical figures can tell us how or to what end we navigate our current crises. Rather, their insights and failures help us denaturalize our mode of life and develop self-mancipatory practices to realize what is not yet possible under the current conditions of injustice in which we have come to be. William Parris, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you for having me.
It's great to have you here. So will you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background as a theorist and how you came to write this particular project?
Yeah. So I think if I wanted to give a sort of a intellectual charting of how I came to write this book, I did my Ph.D. in philosophy at Penn State University, which was known for, amongst other things, continental philosophy, phenomenology. But, you know, as concerns this book, critical philosophy of race. When I started working on critical philosophy of race, I didn't come in knowing anything about philosophy of race. But as I was reading these figures, I realized I was less interested in questions about what race is or what the best concept of race was. Instead, and this is what eventually became my dissertation, a whole dissertation on invention and race and gender, was reading these figures as trying to undo
racial ascriptions, trying to find the creativity within what has been imposed upon you. And this notion of invention, if I want to give a sort of a broader trajectory of it, eventually became this question about utopia.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central question about time and racial domination that frames the book?
0:00–10:14
2
How did the pandemic and the George Floyd protests shape the author’s turn to utopian thinking?
10:14–22:24
3
In what way does W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of a “polity of time” help us understand racial domination?
22:24–32:18
4
What does Fanon mean by “racial fetishism” and why is it a problem of social practice rather than consciousness?
32:18–43:13
5
How does the capitalist organization of time reinforce racial domination according to the book?
43:13–53:10
6
What insights do Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and James Boggs offer about anchoring new social practices against automation and de‑industrialisation?
53:10–1:05:31
7
Why does the author argue that self‑emancipation must be understood in multiple dimensions (epistemic, aesthetic, political, psycho‑analytic)?
1:05:31–1:05:37
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