Abstract

This essay engages the ideas of historian of religions Charles Long to examine the significance of African American work with creative uses of time and timing as a survival tactic inside the regimes of enslavement and racialization. The modern form of domination that has taken shape in the history of European colonization and imperial aggression has clearly elevated the disciplines and technologies of the eye as its modus operandi - nowhere more evident than in the emergence of racialization schemes as the primary form of social shorthand governing the on-going project of accumulation and control. The struggles of African heritage peoples in the "New World" against such have regularly interrupted the controlling monologue of the eye with ever reinvigorated and re-innovated polyphonies of the ear.The resulting consciousness is a primary modality of a profoundly religious creativity.