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This essay argues that temporality becomes inseparable from the intersectionality of race and gender in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God . By emphasizing the need to negotiate unequal, androcentric conventions, Hurston historicizes the experience of time as predetermined, restricting, and subjugating from the position of a Black female subjectivity. In response, Hurston develops a strange temporality necessitating refusal through successive negations that, paradoxically, advance this subject toward greater autonomy. Hurston combines linearity and non-linearity to capture this dialectical conflict, instantiating in novel form the autonomy and agency that Lindsey Stewart aligns with a “politics of Black joy.” This process defines what I call Hurston’s temporality of refusal , which renders the novel coextensive with a form of becoming that is otherwise unavailable across Hurston’s transnational contexts.

This article examines how John Rechy's outlaw sensibility not only mobilized an early form of Queer Chicanidad but also inspired an experimental narrative discourse to critique the neo-imperial governance of the US-Mexico borderlands in the mid-twentieth century. Juxtaposing the recurrence of discrimination against marginalized groups in the United States with the reemergence of empire in the borderlands, Rechy's work articulates a historical genealogy of transnational displacement and migration, which shows how the ostensible freedoms of the present remain rooted in the unfreedoms of the colonial past. Rechy offers a narrative epistemology of border-thinking: a disclosure of transnational consciousness, positioned between temporal and spatial borders, which highlights the unavailability of existential freedom and the need for political struggle. In exploring the contours of Rechy's outlaw aesthetics this article offers a new understanding of Rechy's work that helps expand the fields of global modernism, postwar American literature, and Chicanx studies.

During the twentieth century, US interventions in the hemispheric American South introduced a reemergence of empire that expanded the inter-imperial nexus already constituted by the remaining influence of French, Spanish, and British metropoles in the region. This context, which established the geopolitical preconditions of the Latin American boom period, motivated Alejo Carpentier to think hemispherically through experimental narrative form and, in doing so, pose a timely historical problem for which an alternative, \"untimely\" temporality was needed. This peripheral modernism, which ultimately inspired the experimentation of magical realism, lays bare a little-discussed problematic about the overlapping and recurring imperial formations that are intimately linked to an equally under-studied relation between literary form and the perceived form of history. Carpentier asks us to rethink modernism through the global register of the hemispheric American South, if only to reconsider how modernity itself might be reconstituted for and from the periphery.

My dissertation, “The Present Impasse: Hemispheric American Modernism and the Poetics of History,” shows how U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American authors innovated with narrative to conceptualize the course of history as U.S. expansionism threatened to replace, rather than rout, French, Spanish, and British empires. Alejo Carpentier, John Rechy, and Zora Neale Hurston, I argue, experimented with temporal elements of narrative emplotment, such as order, duration, and frequency, to align the passage of time with the unfolding of history. In doing so, they mediated the collision of repeating and overlapping empires in the hemispheric American South: an experience rendered cyclical in narrative discourse and, as such, one that contests the linear progress most commonly associated with modernity. Their work, therefore, presents a new modernist understanding of historical time: one in which the expectation of social change collapses back onto the experience of the past and promises not a divergent future but rather an eternal return of the same. In this way, cyclical time marks an impasse in narrative chronology that parallels the “present impasse” from which history is perceived to encounter the antinomies of colonial Enlightenment and reproduce the racialized social relations of empire. In response to this impasse, each work introduces the need for an alternative temporality of “the untimely,” i.e., an iteration of the premodern past or the unmodern present that nonetheless highlights the conditions of possibility with which modernity may be reconstituted in the future.Beyond my first chapter, which details the advent of U.S. intervention and expansion in what Édouard Glissant termed “the Other America,” my second chapter focuses on Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949) to showcase the untimely dimension of the marvelous real, or lo real maravilloso: a transatlantic aesthetic and philosophical treatise that introduced a “historical counterpoint” to U.S. empire in Cuba and Haiti. My second chapter shifts from the Caribbean to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to examine how Rechy’s City of Night (1963) responds to successive waves of internal colonialism by fashioning an untimely temporality that attempts to envision a reparative experience beyond racial and sexual intersectionality. My fourth chapter demonstrates how Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) approaches the reemergence of empire with an affirmative concept of history that proposes a philosophy of self-determination and calls for decolonial change in the hemispheric South. This chapter is followed by a brief comparative coda that demonstrates how each author contributed to the emergence of what we could call, if only heuristically, a hemispheric American modernism: one that distinguishes itself from European and Anglo-American modernism and illuminates the neo-imperial challenges against which the next generation of authors, amid U.S. Civil Rights and “Third-World” independence movements, would have to face.