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#temporality
funeral · 7 months
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T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" in Four Quartets
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fatehbaz · 8 months
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Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:
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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Reclaiming agency by operating on Indigenous/alternative time schedules. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time. Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".
Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.
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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".
Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.
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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". Indigenous "ontologies of cyclical temporality or inhabitation of heterogenous time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".
Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.
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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.
Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.
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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.
Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.
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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.
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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)
See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.
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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.
Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.
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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:
Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.
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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".
Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S.  Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.
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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.
Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.
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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.
William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.
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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.
Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.
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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.
Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.
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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".
Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.
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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.
James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.
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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.
Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.
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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.
Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and  Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.
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The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.
Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.
Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."
Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.
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"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".
Elaine  Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.
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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)
Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)
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ragpicker-and-poet · 1 year
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The more things change . . .
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eternal-gardens · 6 months
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loneberry · 11 months
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What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
—Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
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luncheon-aspic · 4 months
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"The modern world represents a future that once existed, is now realized, and is perpetually in danger of outrunning the power of its inhabitants to control its course."
-Keith Tribe, from the introduction to Reinhart Koselleck's Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
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mysticqueerdragon · 1 year
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Clocking Colonialism
Step 1) see “reality”
They see us as still waters,
Stagnant
A breeding ground for infestation,
Unmoving
An incubator for death and disease
Unchanging
“No vitality here” they say
“No value to be found”
Step 2) see “future”
They see us as savages and monsters
stuck
in the shadows they cast
with ultramodern towers
stretched
touching the sky
Built with flesh
stacked bodies
hidden behind
concrete/ideology
Step ∞) see indigenous time
they told us we couldn’t grow here
but our true nature is growth
We are, life force flowing
In a circle it moves
Life and tradition and laughter
Energy and ceremony and triumph
our ancestors are in our being
We honor our dead
They live through us
New faces, same heart,
We adapt, we grow,
our survival is an energy
Connecting us through time and space
accumulation of revolution
We are ever moving,
In circle
New faces, same spirit
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thinkingimages · 11 months
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In “A Berlin Chronicle” the memory-plate is already associated with the figure of lighting. Benjamin writes of a flaring light (aufschieBende Licht) and of “moments of sudden lighting” (Augenblicke plötzlicher Beleuchtung) that are “at the same time moments when we are separated from ourselves [AuBurUns-Seins]”: “While our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is a little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its indelible images.” 
– The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History. Author(s): Sigrid Weigel, Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith and Christine Kutschbach
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"Friendship and Responsiveness"
T.X. Watson. Diptych, pixels on screen. 2022
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sayitaliano · 2 years
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About time :) (some sayings/slang)
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Chi ha tempo non aspetti tempo = Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today (literal translation: S/he who has time, should not wait (more time))
Il tempo è denaro = Time is money (literal translation)
Lottare contro il tempo = To fight/struggle against time (literal translation)
Una corsa contro il tempo = Racing/A race against time (literal translation)
Nel minor/più breve tempo possibile = As soon as possible (literal translation: In the shortest (span of) time possible)
A pagare e a morire c'è sempre tempo = There's always time to pay and die (literal translation)
Ogni cosa ha il suo tempo = Everything has its time (literal translation)
Il tempo mitiga ogni piaga / cura ogni dolore = Time eases every pain (literal translation)
A lasciar c'è sempre tempo = You are always in time to leave (literal translation: There's always time to leave)
Lasciare il tempo che trova = (Sth) unimportant (literal translation: it leaves the time that finds)
Dare tempo al tempo = Let time run its course (literal translation: To give time to time)
Arco/Intervallo di tempo = Arc/interval of time (literal translation), time frame
Avere il tempo contato = To have a little time (literal translation: To have a counted time)
Battere/Bruciare sul tempo = To beat to the punch (literal translation: to beat/burn on time)
Guadagnare tempo = Save time (literal translation)
Concedere tempo = To give (your personal) time (literal translation)
In breve tempo = Shortly (literal translation)
In un primo tempo = At first (literal translation: In a first time)
Aver fatto il proprio tempo = To be outdated (literal translation)
Ce ne hai messo di tempo! = You certainly took your time (literal translation: you took quite some time!)
Come passa il tempo! = How time flies! (literal translation: how (fast) time passes!)
Da quanto tempo (Non ci sentiamo)! = It's been so long! (Long time no speak!)
Anzi tempo = Early (literal translation: Before time)
Ammazzare il tempo = To kill time (literal translation)
Andare a tempo, Andare fuori tempo = To follow the beat, To not follow the beat (literal translation: To go at time, To go out of time)
Allo stesso tempo = At the same time (literal translation)
Al tempo che Berta filava, Quando Berta filava = Long time ago (literal translation: at the time in which Berta was forming a string, When Berta was forming a string)
A quel tempo = At that time (literal translation)
A tempo debito = In due time (literal translation)
A tempo di record = In record time (literal translation)
A tempo perso = As a pasttime (literally: at time lost)
-- BONUS:
Fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo = Set the terms (literal translation: To make the good and bad weather -- tempo = time and weather in Italian)
Brutto tempo = Bad weather (literal translation)
Rosso di sera bel tempo si spera, rosso di mattina la pioggia s'avvicina = Red sky at night, shepherd's/sailor's delight (literal translation: red (sky) at evening good weather we hope, red (sky) in the morning rain is approaching)
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funeral · 7 months
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Frank Schawlow, "Temporality Revisited: Kierkegaard and the Transitive Character of Time"
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fatehbaz · 2 years
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Storytelling against extinction and ecological apocalypse; the seizing of narration; the power to tell and retell, write and rewrite; language becomes a projectile; new ways of being and becoming; creating better worlds.
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Imaginaries are explicitly crafted visions that shape how societies plan for the future, understand their present, and rewrite their history. An imaginary is a form of world-creation, the construction of a world-view encompassing narratives [...]. Whilst many sink without trace, the most powerful and influential can restructure dominant ways of narrating the world in the present [...]. Contemporary climate imaginaries are largely dominated by Eurocentric perspectives. The failure of global governance to adequately address ecological and climatic challenges highlights the need to “diversify the Anthropocene imagination” [...].
Okorafor’s “postcolonial, post-apocalyptic Africa is a messy, often ambiguous place” [...] and her lifeworlds are neither “traditional” nor “modern”, but are rather intrinsically embedded in what Mbembe (2019:93) terms “planetary entanglements”. [...] The particular contributions of Okorafor’s work [...] are her imaginative developments of new forms of being and becoming, of new “genres of the human” [...]. Achille Mbembe’s (2019:7) diagnosis of the present is that “[n]early everywhere the political order is reconstituting itself as a form of organisation for death”. [...] War, racial hatred, the strengthening of borders and expulsion of enemies, the extreme inequality of contemporary capitalism, and the accelerating violence of runaway climate change produce what he terms an era of necropolitics [...]. He uses the term necropolitics to account for the various ways in which diverse weapons are deployed in the interest of destroying life, and suggests that, “for a large share of humanity, the end of the world has already occurred” [...]. This predominance of a particular conception of human existence, and its constitutive role in carboniferous capitalism, racialised colonialism, patriarchy, and necropower, is why it is necessary to “go about thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to usher in different genres of the human” [...].
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For theorists like Mbembe, Wynter, Weheliye, Jackson, and others, art and the imagination have a crucial role to play. As Wynter argues, humans are a storytelling species: “the human is homo narrans” [...].
This critical, utopian function of science fiction is strongly asserted by Okorafor. She argues that “Science fiction is one of the greatest and most effective forms of political writing [...]”. [T]wo potential contributions of some Africanfuturist socio-climatic imaginaries [include] heterotemporality and posthumanism [...]. Okorafor’s wild necropolitics insists that the question of who must live and who must die, the questions of violence, are not to be side-stepped.
Who are the racialised Others of the climate apocalypse, and how can these exclusions be overcome? How does life become governable, and what new populations are brought into being? [...]
The most pressing question then becomes: “How can the world be re-created in the wake of the world’s destruction?” [...]
Ultimately, this is brought together in terms of Okorafor’s emphasis on the power of those who tell and retell, write and rewrite stories. The seizing of narration, the fourth key motif of the novel, is also a way of exercising agency within the necropolitics of climate change. A concern with the power of words and symbols, writing and song, runs through much of Okorafor’s fiction [...]. The power to rewrite history, it will turn out, is the power to reshape the present and the future. [...]
In the context of the histories and counter-histories of slavery and genocide, colonialism and racial capitalism, the question of who is able and permitted to write and tell these stories is a crucial one [...]. The power to rewrite the story, Okorafor tells us, is a vital, primary attribute of the new humans we must become. [...]
Whilst the violence and pain of life and death are inescapable, Okorafor does insist that the wider socio-political context can be otherwise. There are multiple worlds, space-times, and ways of being. Likewise, Mbembe (2019:3) asks whether we can “found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude?”. Inspired by Fanon, Mbembe (2019:5) suggests this relation can be sought through therapy, through “a colossal working on oneself, with new experiences of the body, of movement, of being-together”, and through “language and perception”. It is clear that words and stories have power; as Fanon (2008:9) noted, “[m]astery of language affords remarkable power”. One of Okorafor’s characters tells us that “[w]ords are powerful when chosen well and hurled with precision” (Okorafor 2015:201), and this is echoed by Mbembe: “In the era of the Earth, we will effectively require a language that constantly bores, perforates, and digs like a gimlet, that knows how to become a projectile, a sort of full absolute, of will that ceaselessly gnaws at the real. Its function will not only be to force the locks but also to save life from the disaster lying in wait” (2019:189, emphasis added). Reading and writing different stories about alternative climate futures is an essential element of the political challenge of finding new ways of being and becoming human in the context of climate change.
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Text published by: Carl Death. “Africanfuturist Socio-Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics.” Antipode. First published July 2021. [Italicized first paragraph/heading added by me.]
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It occurs to me, as a passing thought just now, that perhaps the urge to manage, master, or control as much of our experience as possible, and the unwelcome attendant consequences of such efforts, such as anxiety, fear, frustration, exhaustion—perhaps that urge arises in us because we have been insulated from the rhythms, phases, and changes of the non-human world. What I mean is this: to sit and observe the patterns of the non-human world—day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year—is to be reminded of how little depends on us, how much goes on without us, and how the world will carry on after us.⁴ Perhaps the anxiety of control emerges in us to the same degree that we blind ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of the non-human world, the same world, of course, to which we all belong.
LM Sacacas, from “Whose Time? Whose Temporality”
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zurich-snows · 1 year
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For Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (2007), Dean constructs a whispered meditation on impermanence and nostalgia, casting the celebrated choreographer as performer of his 50-year partner and collaborator John Cage's avant-garde composition, 4'33” (first performed 1952).
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/24254
As cited in:
The Past is the Present; It's the Future Too. The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art Christine Ross (Author)
The term 'temporality' often refers to the traditional mode of the way time is: a linear procession of past, present and future. As philosophers will note, this is not always the case. Christine Ross builds on current philosophical and theoretical examinations of time and applies them to the field of contemporary art: films, video installations, sculpture and performance works.
Ross first provides an interdisciplinary overview of contemporary studies on time, focusing on findings in philosophy, psychology, sociology, communications, history, postcolonial studies, and ecology. She then illustrates how contemporary artistic practices play around with what we consider linear time. Engaging the work of artists such as Guido van der Werve, Melik Ohanian, Harun Farocki, and Stan Douglas, allows investigation though the art, as opposed to having art taking an ancillary role. The Past is the Present; It's the Future Too forces the reader to understand the complexities of the significance of temporal development in new artistic practices.
READ AN EXTRACT
Table of Contents 
Introduction Chapter 1: The Contemporaneity of Temporal Investigations Chapter 2: Unproductive Time Chapter 3: The Recent Past as a Quasi-Remnant Chapter 4: The Age Value of the Work of Art Chapter 5: Simultaneity I Chapter 6: Simultaneity II Chapter 7: The Historical Sublime, or Longue durée Revisited
Bibliography Index
Note: see ‘Contingency, Nonintentionality and Indeterminancy
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bravesecrets · 2 years
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Kinda scary how temporary everything is.
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librarycards · 2 years
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Lineal views of both time and space are important when examining Western ideas about history. Here, the Enlightenment is a crucial point in time. Prior to this period of Western development was an era likened to a period of 'darkness' (the 'Age of Darkness') which 'coincided' with the rise of power to the east. This era was followed by reformation within the Church of Rome. During these periods of time, which are social 'constructions' of time, society was said to be feudal, belief systems were based on dogma, monarchs ruled by divine authority, and literacy was confined to the very few. People lived according to myths and stories which hid the 'truth' or were simply not truths. These stories were kept alive by memory. The Enlightenment has also been referred to as the 'Age of Reason'. During this period history came to be viewed as a more reasoned or scientific understanding of the past. History could be recorded systematically and then retrieved through recourse to written texts. It was based on a lineal view of time and was linked closely to notions of progress. Progress could be 'measured' in terms of techno­logical advancement and spiritual salvation. Progress is evolutionary and teleological and is present in both liberal and Marxist ideas about history.
Different orientations towards time and space, different positioning within time and space, and different systems of language for making space and time 'real' underpin notions of past and present, of place and of relationships to the land. Ideas about progress are grounded within ideas and orientations towards time and space. What has come to count as history in contemporary society is a contentious issue for many indigenous communities because it is not only the story of domination; it is also a story which assumes that there was a 'point in time' which was 'prehistoric'. The point at which society moves from prehistoric to historic is also the point at which tradition breaks with modernism. Traditional indigenous knowledge ceased, in this view, when it came into contact with 'modern' societies, that is the West. What occurred at this point of culture contact was the beginning of the end for 'primitive' societies. Deeply embedded in these constructs are systems of classi­fication and representation which lend themselves easily to binary oppositions, dualisms, and hierarchical understandings of the world.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
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