Funk the Clock - by Rahsaan Mahadeo

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Funk the Clock work offers a distinctive understanding of how a selected population can experience connections between time and race... This work also challenged this reviewer to move beyond a narrow view of "acceptable" ways to resist this conformity and to see the participants' efforts not as a lack of structure but as resistance to existing social constructs.

About the Author

Rahsaan Mahadeo is an Assistant Professor at Providence College. Prior to earning his PhD in sociology at University of Minnesota, he worked as a youthworker and social worker in Providence and Boston.