The Temporality of Breath Under Racial Capitalism

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pandemic informs a larger theory of the relationship between race, tem-porality, and racial capitalism. By examining the links between race, time, and breathe across time and space-from the plantation to the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter movement-the author argues that the pandemic in not an exception to the normal but as a dispersed amplification of it.