Race, the World and Time: Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia (1914–1945)

Abstract

This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with reference to the precarious sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia during the interwar period. It suggests that the experiences of these states, understood through the discourses which sought to both support and undermine them, point to a shift away from juridical division in global order and towards a hierarchy framed in terms of racialised temporalities. While postcolonial scholarship can help us to understand this shift, it has not fully comprehended the interpenetration of multiple forms of temporality in the service of colonial and racial ordering. For interwar intellectuals and activists committed to pan-African liberation, the desire for a new world order free from racialised stratification meant an engagement with sites of black sovereignty that was, by necessity, ambivalent and strategic in its approach to the politics of time.