Reconsidering nineteenth-century Cuban history from the perspective of African-identified people requires that we read Cuban history as tragedy. While there were several important socio-political transitions during Cuba’s long nineteenth century, including slave emancipation in 1886, de-Africanization, or the processes by which colonialists and their successors endeavored to corral, contain, control, co-opt, and eliminate African influences in Cuba persisted well into the twentieth century. Even though these repressive efforts were never fully successful, centering traditional forms of resistance alone leads us to ignore alternative paths/ideas/options that surfaced in response to White supremacy. Simply put, these alternatives garner less attention because they do not fit our narrative constructs and are hard for us to “think.” Centering de-Africanization as process offers a helpful corrective to progressivist and romantic narratives. This essay situates one historical case study in a differently conceived nineteenth-century Cuba to explore forms of resistance that were effectively silenced at the time of their enunciation. In exploring the methodological approaches to understanding this specific case, the essay contributes to a rising trend in Latin American and Latinx studies that centers the importance of Afro-diasporic peoples’ roles in shaping the histories of Latin America and of Latinx experiences in the United States.

O’Casey’s three most famous plays, those of his ‘Dublin Trilogy’, were subtitled as tragedies, yet the playwright had little time for academic theorizing and at one stage declared Aristotle was ‘all balls’. Early critics tended to set aside O’Casey’s definitions of his three famous plays as tragedy, preferring terms such as ‘tragi-comedy’, and, aside from Rónán McDonald, most later critics have ignored the issue. This chapter does not start from a specific formal model of tragedy, but instead examines The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars to see how the audience or reader’s experience of these plays might relate to tragedy.

The history of management (and its science) could be seen as a long attempt to master or dominate time. Whether it is objective, subjective, social, or processual, time is conceptualized by management as a resource or as a place of creativity. Management sciences focus on individuals’ temporal agency over the agency of time itself. However, managers’ daily experience, the literature in social sciences (Rosa, 2003), or some authors in management science (Johnsen, Toyoki, 2019; Holt, Johnsen, 2019) show that individuals are not masters of time, and even may suffer from it. In this work we want to take seriously the agency of time itself, and build a new managerial posture where managers no longer dominate time but learn to “deal with it”. Our desire here is to build a theoretical framework that takes seriously the domination of time over us. From this negative conception of time, we want to redefine the process of temporal structuring as a way for individuals to inhabit it. The aim of this process is not to dominate time but to “deal with it”. This theoretical framework must be able to restore a balance between individuals’ temporal agency and the agency of time.