While the Neo-Victorian genre of steampunk and its techno-fantasy aesthetic, may seem an unlikely arena for social renewal, steampunk offers writers the opportunity to "trouble time" because of the way it uses anachronism, mashes up eras and moments, and resists chronology. That said, while very few writers are using steampunk to write about issues of race, American novelist Cherie Priest, in her steampunk "Clockwork Century" series (2009-2015), which consists of seven books, confronts America's racist past, and offers an alternative realm in which to address the afterlives of slavery through this "troubling" of time.My project explores steampunk generally, and Priest's Clockwork Century series, particularly, as ethical interventions that reconfigure clock and calendar time (the linear progression of seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc.) in order to expose and redress ongoing racial violence. In doing so, we acknowledge and take responsibility for often elided violences and thereby alter our conception of the past and open up new possibilities for the future. When Saidiya Hartman asks, "to what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?" (1), we begin to understand how imaginatively creating alternate worlds may allow for the emergence of alternate realities, realities where the current and past traumas of race relations can be re-examined with the hope of transforming the present and future. Priest engages steampunk to conjure the ghosts of nineteenth-century America and suggest that they indeed still haunt our present.