Join AK Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics to celebrate the launch of artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips’s expansive new book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press 2025).

Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to nature, argues Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations. Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s art and law practice on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

This collaborative event doubles as the soft launch of As for Protocols—a book by the Vera List Center and Amherst College Press in which an essay by Phillips elaborates on her 2020–2022 VLC Fellowship project, Time Zone Protocols, and maps out her ongoing practice as a member of Black Quantum Futurism to examine the political agendas that uphold Westernized time constructs. Phillips is joined in conversation by writer and VLC Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives Re’al Christian, co-editor of As for Protocols.