Imagining Freedom in Slavery’s Future: Iron City’s Fugitive Othertime in the US Carceral Empire-State

Abstract:This essay examines Black political activism during the Korean War in publications that defined their present moment as slavery’s future and characterized slavery and antiblack racism as part of an ongoing war against Black people, connected to US empire’s wars abroad. In particular, it reads Lloyd Brown’s novel Iron City (1951), about four Black men incarcerated on trumped-up charges, alongside Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper (1950–55) and William Patterson’s We Charge Genocide (1951). Centering on four Black men serving time, the novel demonstrates that one tactic in the war against Black freedom is through the control of time and shows a connection between incarceration and slavery by revealing the disciplinary mechanism of time in service of US empire. Rather than acquiesce to the omnipotence of empire’s time and endless wars, however, Iron City, exemplifying the Black radical thought of the 1950s, imagines a different future, which I term fugitive othertime. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of a “fugitive elsewhere,” “an imagined place [that] might afford you a vision of freedom,” I argue for reading Iron City for its dream of a fugitive othertime, as an imagined temporality in which that elsewhere might exist.