"'The world is spoilt in the white man's time': Imagining Postcolonial Temporalities" In Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture. Ed. Michael Griffiths. Burlington: Ashgate, 2016, pp. 103-119. Co-authored with Asha Varadharajan (original) (raw)

Our essay takes its cue from Michael Griffiths's call for "attentiveness to imaginations of aftermath" 1 that might contribute to a more meaningful account of the experience and embodiment of decolonization. We conceive of what follows as an elaboration of the question of what comes "after" that forms a chief concern of the collection, one that emphasizes its duration rather than its regulation, disposition, progress, or regress, and that meditates on forms of life that refused to be "compelled to pass away" 2 or "oblige[d] … to come into being." 3 Reading Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's "Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience" (2008) inspired us to engage this conception of a refusal of colonial governmentality and biopolitics. 4 His chiastic exploration of "the concept of time from the point of view of experiences usually characterized as postcolonial" while "think[ing] through what the expression 'postcolonial' could mean from the perspective of a general concept of time" seems crucial in the context of a collection of essays devoted to the bio-and necropolitics of governmentality, to the consideration of life, death, and death-in-life. 5 all these are resolutely temporal categories and predicaments but with radically different import in imperial/neocolonial and (post)colonial worlds. We were also attracted, predictably enough, to Eze's conviction that "both the times and the experiences of postcolonialism" could be "most insightfully traced" in literature. 6 He, like us, is predominantly concerned with african literatures. We have included Michelle cliff in order to articulate the difference between the caribbean and african experiences, where one relies on generation and the other on reclamation. Moreover, Eze's essay is the first we have read that attempts to put philosophical or theoretical definitions of temporality and modernity into conversation with modern, postcolonial literary 1 Michael Griffiths, introduction to this volume, 2. 2 Ibid., 5.