What is Black Aesthetic Time and How Can We Learn From It? Come to Daphne Lamothe’s Black Heritage Month Lecture to Find Out

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Dr. Daphne Lamothe will be the Commonwealth Honors College Black Heritage Month speaker on February 12.

In an era where society prioritizes efficiency and speed, this poses a challenge to those working in higher education. As Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Smith College, Dr. Daphne Lamothe has been thinking more and more about these virtues and what they mean for us, including with the rise of AI.

But what about reflection, exploration, and analysis? In Lamothe’s time as a professor of Africana studies at Smith, she said that she grew to value these concepts at an even higher level. It’s worth thinking about what we are giving up when we prioritize saving time.

“Americans tend to idealize ideas of the future and the pursuit of progress, which is connected to the value we place on speed and efficiency. But on a personal level, most of us don’t actually experience time in a one-dimensional way,” she asserted.

For example, though you move through the present, you can simultaneously get sucked into a memory or a daydream. The hard distinctions between the past, present, and future, aren’t as clearly defined in real life. This has important implications for how we understand our lives and the lives of those around us.

As a scholar of Black literature, history and culture, Lamothe expands, “Learning about the Black experience can introduce you to a more layered and complex understanding of temporality, which is another way of saying how humans exist in time.”

Growing up in a Haitian community in the US, Lamothe had to learn to adapt to different cultural expectations around time.

“I have to work at being punctual knowing that American society is ruled by the clock, but I also have to remember that, unless I’m prepared to roll up my sleeves and help the host get ready, I shouldn’t show up on time for a family party unless I want to wait for the other guests to arrive. In that context, ‘on time’ is too early and ‘late’ would be exactly on time,” she explains.

A more nuanced understanding of time goes beyond cultural practice—there is a distinct relationship between Blackness and a groundedness in history and historical time.

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Daphne Lamothe started working on her book, Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects, around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012. Martin was a 17-year-old Black boy killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch person in Sanford, Florida. Around this time, there was also a sense of optimism regarding race in the country because Barack Obama had just been re-elected president. But it leads one to question: how can these drastically different events coexist in the same period of time? 

“I was really interested in Black aesthetic time as a way of thinking about racialized subjectivity as an inhabitance of different temporalities; informed by history, experiencing a complicated and precarious kind of freedom in the present, and imagining yourself into the future,” says Lamothe.

Indeed, there is great opportunity to explore this within art and literature. This inspired Lamothe to coin “Black aesthetic time,” a concept that speaks to the aesthetic as a place where the complex relationship between Blackness and time can be explored. Black aesthetic time shares some central ideas with the concept of Afrofuturism (the envisioning of a new future for the African Diaspora through science fiction and speculative fiction).

"In these times of great uncertainty and crisis, what’s the right way to respond when American society seems to be moving toward conflict and polarization? What are we called to do in response to these current events, and also, how do we develop the capacity to be in relation with the other?” Lamothe asks.

Learning more about Black aesthetic time and virtues of slowness may be a good place to start, and there’s no one better suited to sharing this work than Lamothe. After being named the 2025 William Sanders Scarborough Prize winner for Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects, Lamothe became the only scholar who’s ever been honored multiple times for this award, and she is widely respected in literary and African American studies.

To learn more about Black history, Black futures, and how they’re grounded in the humanities as a field of inquiry, come to The Virtues of Slowness in Times of Urgency: Black Time and Aesthetic Possibility from 5-6 p.m. on Thursday, February 12 in the Honors Events Hall.