This presentation takes a comparative approach to affective temporalities, by which I mean the ways time is experienced, sensed, and felt within different social contexts. On the one hand, I offer an archival and ethnographic reading of the linear and progressive temporality of the Penn Museum of anthropology, and the ways it is experienced as maddening, gaslighting, and mind-numbing by those directly impacted by its possession and handling of human remains. On the other, I offer a reading of the musician Sun Ra’s performative interventions at the Penn Museum in 1980 and his temporal notions of “mystic everness eternal beingness,” the “spiral way,” and the “omniverse,” which I argue act as affective resources for those demanding repatriation, reparations, and redress for the museum’s unethical and colonial possession of human remains. I argue that both Ra and the Penn Museum engage in “timecraft,” which is both the manipulation of time through material and creative practices and the creation of vessels which offer transport to other temporal dimensions. In comparing Ra and the museum’s “timecraft,” I reframe public discourse around reparations and repatriation through the lens of temporality, and suggest that affective orientations to time are a critical site of decolonial struggle. I conclude by ethnographically situating Ra’s ideas of “the spiral way,” and the “omniverse” in current social movements organizing around the abolition of the museum’s collections. These movements refuse the affective temporalities of the museum while cultivating an “omniverse” of affective temporalities and political possibilities in which museum abolition is not just imagined but manifest and brought to bear.
Jake Nussbaum is a musician, organizer, and PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the connections between experimental performance practices in music and dance and abolitionist organizing in Philadelphia.