A Global History of The New School: Circular Temporality and the Historical Present – Ashinique Kelly Spivey
Abstract
History is viewed and interpreted differently by every single one of us; our life stories are unique, with the present being very much tied to the past. In my thesis, I apply and develop a concept I call, circular temporality. Not only is it present in my sentence structure, which acknowledges both past and present simultaneously via tense, but is a concept that one can also apply to their work in order to explicitly tie together different historical moments of the past in order to understand and make sense of the present. In the case of this work, I am using circular temporality as a framework for exploring the ways in which The New School (including its founding and moments thereafter) has been affected by other key historical moments such as the institution of slavery, WWI, The Great Migration, and the Jim Crow Era. I will also explore this framework using the lens of Global History, Critical Race Theory, and use supporting works by Slyvia Wynter, Franz Fanon, Ibram X. Kendi , and Sebastian Conrad, just to name a few, in order to explore these connections and ideas. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of racial identity and show how it intersects across time and space. If we wish to be an institution truly aimed at being progressive, we must explicitly explore the past.
An image of Martin Luther King Jr. | The New School Archives