For the Culture, For the Future: Keeping Black Time in Jay-Z’s 4:44

Sean "JAY-Z" Carter's 2017 visual album 4:44 is a family affair that apologizes to the rapper's children for his marital infidelities and offers a series of life lessons for when they come of age. JAY-Z's explicit goal is constructing a black reproductive futurism we can all invest in, but the many temporal gestures in 4:44 seem insistent on deforming the present by accumulating spaces, times, and bodies until dominant temporal structures and the economic markets they sustain are saturated. This article uses the figure of the black child, which expresses the tension between legacies of violence and defiant hope, to address the album's recalcitrant aesthetics. As a result of its complex temporal position, the figure of the black child is a catalyst for radical reorganizations of form that can visualize the disarticulation of black time from the speculative time of contemporary neoliberalism and create space for black futures to begin.