Virtual Event: Habiba Ibrahim

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes HABIBA IBRAHIM—Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington and author of Troubling the Family—for a discussion of her latest book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life. She will be joined in conversation by scholar NICOLE KING, author of the forthcoming Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction.

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About Black Age

Although more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggression—particularly against Black children—concern the victim “appearing” as a threat. But why and how is the perceived “appearance” of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time?

Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. She argues that Black age―through nearly four centuries of subjugation—has become contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, rather than the number of years lived or a developmental life stage, Black age came to signify exchange value, historical under-development, timelessness, and other fantasies borne out of Black exclusion from the human.

Ibrahim asks: What constitutes a normative timeline of maturation for Black girls when “all the women”―all the canonically feminized adults―“are white”? How does a “slave” become a “man” when adulthood is foreclosed to Black subjects of any gender? Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of Black exclusion from Western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative Black life, arguing that, if some of us are brave, it is because we dare to live lives considered incomprehensible within a schema of “human time.”

Praise for Black Age

"This truly revelatory book uncovers the flesh of black age. Through a focus on black untimeliness, Habiba Ibrahim reveals a counter-history of modernity. Ibrahim adds vital new dimensions to the study of blackness as an alternative relation to time. This tremendous book reveals that black life is a state of being alienated from the time of one’s own body and a radical refusal of patriarchal adulthood." —Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

"Habiba Ibrahim’s Black Age opens up powerful new vocabularies and paradigms for thinking about Black cultural expression—and indeed Black life. Through beautifully argued analyses of literary texts, Ibrahim produces startling and profound insights into age, temporality, modernity, race, subjectivity, and the very category of the human." —Gayle Wald, author of It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television