Writing Sound, Hearing Race, Singing Time: Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing

Abstract

This essay addresses forms of time and temporalizations used in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing. The novel depicts the fictional story of the mixed-race family Daley-Strom. While The Time of Our Singing embeds its characters in historical events that pertain to the history of “race” and racism in the United States, it underscores that being-in-one’s-time and being-in-time are at odds with each other. While the history of “race” is seemingly unchanging and repetitive, an ontology of time, understood as a dynamic exchange between the past, present, and future, can give rise to a vision in which “race” loses its interpretative grip on history. This essay shows how The Time of Our Singing establishes an aural semiotic model in which the murderous, cruel, and exploitative history of “race” can make itself heard, without canceling out voices that stand in for solidarity and hope for those that are racialized.