About

P. J. Brendese is an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the relationship between democracy and memory, exploring how political power influences what aspects of the past are remembered, who is permitted to recall historical events, and the contexts in which these memories are commemorated. Brendese's work engages a wide range of thinkers, including Sophocles, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, to analyze the role of disavowed memory and the politics of collective memory within democratic processes throughout history. His scholarship examines diverse historical cases such as democracy in ancient Athens, South Africa's transition from apartheid through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mexico's efforts to strengthen democratic accountability after the "dirty war," and the ongoing legacy of slavery in U.S. race relations. Through these studies, Brendese develops a theory of memory that accounts for how the past persists in unconscious and habituated practices, shaping the possibilities for freedom, political action, and imagination.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Environmental ethics
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Social Science
• History
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Art

Selected publications

• Memory, Pluralism, and White Supremacy

  2023-02-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter considers white supremacist memory activism in terms of the incapacity of post-identity politics to reckon with white identities mobilized in the service of domestic terrorism. At stake politically and theoretically is the amnesiac disavowal in the alignment between Anglo-European political liberalism and left-liberal arguments maintaining that racial identity should be subverted. Arguments that reject race discourse fortify the notion that identity is a form of memory that preserves difference. In so doing, they enact a willful forgetting of whiteness as race and the deadly legacies of white identity politics.

  PublisherDOI

• Prelude and Acknowledgments

  2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract This book about the racial politics of time was written under multiple shortages of time and layers of duress that were political, professional, and personal. Politically, it took shape in an atmosphere shot through with incessant displays of murderous white supremacy, the uptick of militant nativism, and an acceleration of transnational fascism—and that is hardly an exhaustive list. As if the situation were not dire enough, the project unfolded amid an encroachment of an apocalypse wrought by a climate crisis that many white nationalists disavow. Remarkably, a critical mass of whites ignore planetary catastrophe while mobilizing against what they take to be the real end times: the end of white supremacy. On another level, everyday forms of stealing time have long been taken for granted by too many white people. Here is James Baldwin: What is it that you wanted me to reconcile? I was born here almost sixty years ago. I am not going to live another sixty years. You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time. My brothers’ and my sisters’ time. My nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?1Close

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  2023-05-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form

  PublisherDOI

• Notes

  2023-05-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Subject Political Theory US Politics Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

  PublisherDOI

• Segregated Time

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract When Martin Luther King Jr. argued on behalf of civil rights he was told that he was “too soon.” Today, those demanding reparations for slavery are told they are “too late.” What time is it? Or perhaps the appropriate question is: whose time is it? These questions point to a phenomenon of segregated time: how certain political subjects are viewed as occupants of different time zones, how experiences of time diverge across peoples, and how these divergent temporal spheres entwine to serve white supremacy. While racial segregation and inequality are typically conceived in terms of space, Segregated Time explores how they are also sustained through impositions on human time. In this study, P. J. Brendese takes a time-sensitive approach to race as it pertains to the acceleration of human disposability, dynamic identity formation, and the production and allocation of economic goods. The chapters examine the temporal borders of migration politics, how the extended lifetimes of some are built on the foreshortened lives of others, how racial stigma conveys debt and “subprime time,” and how whiteness functions as a store of credit through time. Segregated Time illuminates the temporal orders whereby racial others are regarded as behind the times, violently cast out of time, compelled to “do time” in a carceral society, and forced to live on borrowed time in an epoch of climate catastrophe. Drawing upon a range of Africana, Latinx, and Indigenous political thought, Brendese advances an innovative theory of “white time” as a possessive, acquisitive, colonizing force.

  PublisherDOI

• Killing Time

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter engages the temporal, as opposed to merely spatial, borders of Latinx immigration and detention, as well as evolving forms of punishment, attrition, and modes of longer-term wasting—such as the indefinite exploitation of temporary labor. Treating Foucauldian discipline and biopolitics as synchronic, rather than diachronic, the chapter disturbs the temporal stages he assigns to each while also illuminating nonlinear, dynamic race-making processes that go missing when migration is addressed with respect to territoriality alone. This, in turn, allows us to see how discipline and biopolitics function simultaneously for racialized ends. The strategy of casting racial/ethnic others as a viral epidemic to be documented, quarantined, and even exterminated—and to justify present-day states of emergency—resonates with what Foucault referred to as the “plague dream.” At the same time, the foreshortened life-spans of Latinx immigrants are also employed to shore up endemic contingencies and random events for the benefit of white time. The immunity paradigm provides interpretive insight into the simultaneity of disciplinary and biopolitical powers, while also illuminating the apparent contradiction in American politics whereby immigrants are alternately regarded as both a cure and a disease over time. The chapter closes by drawing sustenance from Latinx resistance, which is figured in temporal terms by dramatizing the role of immigrant presence in the prevailing temporal order.

  PublisherDOI

• White Time

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter advances a provisional theory of white time as a temporal force field that exerts regulative, normalizing powers that shape the racial order of things as well as subjective experiences of time, or temporalities. The chapter surveys the philosophical and historical roots of contemporary modes of understanding and inhabiting time. It then analyzes Euro-colonial temporal ordering as a colonizing force where the conquest of space is tied to domination of time. Specifically, it examines the racial subjectivity required to apprehend time and space as available to be possessed as productive of segregated time generally and white temporality specifically. It introduces a theory of white time abetted by law and policed by the historically entrenched norms of white supremacy. Drawing from critical race theorist Cheryl I. Harris’s influential concept of whiteness as property and Aboriginal anthropologist Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, the chapter consider white temporality as a mode of apprehension, in the multiple senses connoting perception, objectification, arrest, and anxiety. In short, the time of whiteness is a possessive tense—and a highly imperfect one at that.

  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The epilogue engages the question of whether the appropriate response to segregated time is a politics and theory oriented toward an integrated time. In view of the trappings of white time as defining what it means to be co-eval and co-present in the first place, I am skeptical of temporal integration as a panacea. Relatedly, scholarly affirmations of temporal sovereignty as a mode of contesting dominant temporal orders also strike me as misguided. It would be a mistake to map the ownership of control of space associated with territorial sovereignty onto time. The epilogue explores these shortcomings in order to make time for orienting ourselves toward times we do not have, and relational modes of inhabiting time otherwise.

  PublisherDOI

• Interlude 1: The Part That Has No Time

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract For political theorists whose vocation calls them to "travel in order to see," what does it mean to hear "Black noise"? The dissonance of Black noise and the deafening power of white noise discussed in the preceding chapter call into question the visual imagery of the sighted traveler frequently invoked in political theory. It raises the need to productively embolden our lexicon with an idiom and sensibility better equipped to register temporality. Optical metaphors add spatial depth to our conceptions of politics, but the static nature of spatial representations of time ultimately fails to capture the very dynamism and flow that characterize human experiences of temporality. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, "The reality of time is not reducible to the reality of space and of objects, though it can only be seen in its effects on them. It is most directly understood and experienced outside of images, models and representations as a force, an impulse forward."1Close Spatial representations that miss the fluidity of temporal forces risk perpetuating a brand of theory anesthetized to time as a vector of power. Still worse is the risk of employing modes of theory that inadvertently reproduce discursive maneuvers complicit in using time as a means of perpetuating spatial distance. Congruent with the last chapter's discussion of policing time, Jacques Rancière has written insightfully about the legacy of politics as policing. A brief encounter with the space-time relays in his work will help bring the political and theoretical correspondence into sharper focus.2Close

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The introduction defines the concept of segregated time and establishes the theoretical and political relevance of the work. By focusing on segregated time, this study convenes a broader discourse that discloses the racial components of prevailing temporalities. To gain clarity on these issues and their implications, the introduction foregrounds the subsequent study of how time functions as a vector of political power, affect, and resistance. Beginning with Martin Luther King’s contestation of racial inequalities experienced as impositions on human time, the introduction connects the racial amnesia of segregated memory with the weaponization of segregated time. Simply put, the introduction makes the case for why the book is worth the reader’s time.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Roxanne L. Euben

  University of Oxford

  2 shared

• Joel Alden Schlosser

  1 shared

• Arlene W. Saxonhouse

  1 shared

• Jill Frank

  1 shared

• Karen Bassi

  1 shared

• Nathan Widder

  Royal Holloway University of London

  1 shared

• Tracy B. Strong

  University of Southampton

  1 shared

• Jason Frank

  Cornell University

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  Duke University

  2005

Awards & honors

• Three teaching awards
• Co-Director of the Racism, Immigration and Citizenship Progr…