time travel: science vs. symbolism

23 Aug 2010 news 0 Comments

I never took physics in high school, so the scientific possibility of time travel doesn’t really interest me.  I recently wrote a guest post in which I tried to explain just why shifting time matters to a writer like me:

…the time-travel device enables me to recreate the jarring experience of dislocation that my ancestors endured.  Torn from their families and cultures, stripped of their languages and religions, and thrust into a violent, unjust, and confusing country, these survivors quite literally moved between worlds.  When I snatch a teenage girl from contemporary Brooklyn and send her back to the Civil War era, I force her into the same hybrid existence faced by her African American forebears.

Unfortunately, this guest post is all I’ve written lately, but listening to PRI today got me thinking b/c they re-aired a segment on time travel—with Janelle Monae featured at the end.  You can listen to the one-hour show here, and below is Monae’s filmed radio performance before an audience that clearly doesn’t appreciate her genius…