The Untimely

The untimely is Bayo Akomolafe’s central concept in Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely. It names the excess, residue, surplus, and misbehavior produced inside time’s story rather than a clean alternative outside Modern Time Discipline.

The concept matters because it changes the political question. If modern time produces its own cracks, then liberation is not only a project of designing better schedules, longer horizons, or purer alternatives. It also requires noticing where bodies, grief, disability, music, ancestry, attention, and fugitive spaces are already doing work that modernity cannot fully name.

Key Claims

• The untimely is not a blueprint, foundation, project, or personal practice.
• It is closer to being enlisted by unknown tasks than to commanding the future.
• It appears through Yoruba Twin Cosmology, Idowu, Eshu, Autistic Time, Ancestrality, and Fugitive Temporality.

Connections

• Bayo Akomolafe - speaker developing the concept.
• Modern Time Discipline - temporal order the concept exceeds from within.
• Colonial Temporal Discipline and Fugitive Temporality - political-historical sites where the untimely appears.
• Long Now - host context the concept complicates.