Author Talk with Rahsaan Mahadeo: Funk the Clock

Author Rahsaan Mahadeo will speak about his book, “Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black.”

Rahsaan Mahadeo is an outgoing Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Providence College and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota. Rahsaan was born in Boston, but raised in Providence and the Mt. Pleasant branch was his local library. He graduated from Mt. Pleasant High School and then attended the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island. As a scholar of race, time, the human and the episteme, Rahsaan studies how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how racialization and racism condition youth’s perspectives on time. In his first book, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time while Young, Perceptive, and Black (Cornell University Press), he explores how black and other racialized youth in urbanized space reckon with time. Rahsaan’s work forges new directions in the sociology of time, the life course perspective, urban sociology, and ethnic and racial studies. His writing has appeared in Critical Sociology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Theory in Action, The Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development, Contexts, From the European South, The Poetry Project Newsletter and Truthout.

Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead. In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with.

Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e., time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.

CONTACT: Lee Smith; lsmith@clpvd.org; 401-272-0106 x4203