Time, Narrative, and Anticolonial Political Thought

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Recent research across political theory, postcolonial studies, and critical geography has identified and contested the temporal frameworks that underlie colonial, capitalist, and racialized forms of domination. These works have elucidated that time matters as a key component of dominant narratives of progress that mediate and naturalize the link between modernity and coloniality. If a certain critique of modernity elucidates coloniality as the imposition of a time that “dismisses the past, turns the future into the teleology of progress and holds the present to be the only site of the real” (Vazquez 2009), one of the key challenges for political theory is how to reconstruct a relationship between past, present and future in a way that simultaneously fights the disavowal of coloniality and opens up the space for political alternatives.

In this context, the scholars gathered in this panel examine how anticolonial thought is shaped by different conceptions of time or how time is politicized in order to contest colonial, capitalist, and racialized forms of domination. Collectively, these four papers also reflect on the link between time, history, and narrative, insofar as each of the thinkers or practices studied entails a strategic choice for narrating the past. Individually, each of the contributions is situated in a different geographic, temporal, and political context. Mayaki Kimba (Columbia) reconstructs Anton de Kom’s efforts to build anticolonial solidarity by offering a historical narrative that critiqued the self-understanding of the colonized, while making a reconstructive effort at forging a nation and attributing a history of resistance to each subordinate group in colonial Suriname. Usdin Martinez (Northwestern) delves into the political thought of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in order to theorize the contradiction between multiple temporalities as a part of the postcolonial condition in Bolivia and throws light on how political struggles are thus embedded in the politicization of time. Kevin Pham (UAmsterdam) reflects on the link between anticolonial narrative and revolution through a study of the Hoa Lo prison in Vietnam (turned into a museum during the 1990s) by paying special attention to the museum’s references to temporality. Finally, David Suell (UMichigan) offers a theory of how Julius Nyerere and Amílcar Cabral sought to enact accounts of historical time that motivated new policies and bonds of national membership in their own contexts. As a result, he argues, they complicate the traditional/modern dichotomy often imposed on interpretations of anticolonial thought and offer a model for a socialist historical time from anti/postcolonial struggle that goes beyond teleology, melancholy, or total rupture.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Narrate to Unite: Anton de Kom on Solidarity and Anticolonial Politics of History - Mayaki Kimba

• Doing Time: Revolution and Temporality in the Hoa Lo Prison - Kevin D Pham, University of Amsterdam

• Untimely Continuities: Nyerere & Cabral on Politicizing History for Socialism - David Suell, University of Michigan

Chair

• Murad Idris University of Michigan

Discussants

• David Temin University of Michigan

• Nazmul S. Sultan University of British Columbia