In this talk, Kandice Chuh considers the role of chronoception to the production, legitimation, and sustenance of the sensus communis. Thinking alongside such artists and intellects as Al-An DeSouza, Hito Steyerl, and Thao Nguyen Phan, Chuh attends to the lexicon of terms – futurity, pastness, duration, change, periodicity, and potentiality among them – that attests to the centrality of the sense of time to normative as well as insurgent conceptions of everything from history to social life, and beingness to beauty. Bringing forward the knowledge and sensibilities – the aesthetics and values – emergent from those normatively rendered the untimely, the backward, the somehow ever developing, consigned to the “waiting room of history,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, Chuh emphasizes the potency and pleasures of being out of (common) time. Attending to time in these ways, she proposes, is necessary to the interruption of the ordinariness of the violences that attend to worlds organized around belligerent accumulation. 

Kandice CHUH is a professor of English, American Studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is also affiliated to several other units including the Africana Studies program and the MA in Liberal Studies program. Her most recent book is the award-winning The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Duke University Press, 2019), and she is currently completing a collection of essays on pedagogy titled The Disinterested Teacher. She is also at work on Studying Asia, a book length project considering contemporary Asian racialization. Chuh has served as president of the American Studies Association (2017-18) and in a variety of other leadership positions in such organizations as the Modern Language Association and the Association for Asian American Studies, and has been recognized for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. She teaches and lectures widely on subjects ranging from aesthetic theories to transpacific studies, queer and feminist theory to considerations of “the good life.”