In “Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity”, Sharma (2013) uses Occupy Durham as an example in reminding us that precarity is not just experienced as an economic reality and as it has been argued, women and other social groups have long been precarious without recognition. Sharma considers “temporal insurgency” as the possibility of a new political strategy. In recognising the interplay between differential lived time and political struggle, one can then re-think precarity and re-strategise social movements so as to avoid reproducing patriarchal temporality.
In acknowledging that the night is experienced differentially and by contrasting the Occupy Durham case with the Occupy Wall Street case, Sharma calls for the need to strengthen the link between shared precarity to the night and political struggle. Reflecting on Sharma’s accounts where different social groups are put to the foreground, I would like to propose another add-on layer to how the night is experienced differentially. I propose that darkness and its associated precarity is also being experienced differentially based on the hours [of the darkness-ness].
What I mean here is that different hours in the darkness may evoke differential experiences on precarity. For example, based on my own reflections and experiences, I found New York city subway more precarious at 22h than at say 24h or 1h or even 2h. My observation was that at 22h, the off-work-going-straight-home crowd was gone (at home already) while the hanging-out-after-work crowd was still scattering at different places in the city hence the subway felt emptier and this emptiness evoked precarity. Once the hanging out crowd starts their way home at around mid-night, the subway is again filled with people.
Another example is my experience with campus in darkness. Being a student in the city of Philadelphia, I had heard numerous horror stories associated with nights and especially women alone in the night. Walking back from the 24/7 library to my place in the darkness, I noticed how different hours in the dark produce differing levels of precarity. At 4h or 5h while the campus was still in darkness, the space felt rather calm and quiet whereas at 1h to 3h one would encounter all sorts of people and at times some unexpected events. Based on my personal accounts and observations, I would like to posit that adding a lens focusing on the darkness’ hourly differentials when studying night-time spaces could be potentially interesting.
Figure 1. A subway station in Harlem, NYC in the early hours of Monday. Image credit: Karsten Moran for The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/nyregion/nyc-subway-full-service-24-hours.html. Retrieved on November 14th, 2021.