Time and Temporalities: Literatures of imperial and anti-imperial politics
Description
Thirty years ago Stuart Hall asked, “when was the post-colonial?” Hall addressed the problem of multiplicity within the postcolonial and remarked upon how nostalgic yearnings for linear or universal temporalities could not function any longer. Hall proposed that the term referred to a general process of decolonization, and that we pay careful attention to the question of difference within social and racial formations. In reply to Hall, this seminar explores Colonial "Latin America"/Abiayala through the lens of time alongside contemporary questions around (anti-)imperialism, genocide, authoritarianism, and climate collapse, as well as new formations of left resistance, organization, and imagination. From the arrival of Columbus to the movements for independence (and beyond), multiple, co-existing, and unequal temporalities played an integral role in shaping the colonial world. While past studies in Colonial “Latin American”/Abiayalan anthropology and history focused on defining non-European cosmologies or discussed time in the context of the influence of Christianity, scholars in recent decades have addressed temporality as a mechanism of power within settler colonialism's episteme(s). Rifkin (2017) points to multiple "temporal formations" and to the fallacy of presuming a prevailing "unitary flow" of time, even when its "coloniality" is acknowledged. The concepts of futurism(s) and fugitivities have also been used to shed light on temporalities in the colonial context. Ezekiel G. Stear (2025) makes use of the former notion, rooted in Afrofuturism and first applied to indigenous contexts by Grace Dillon (2012), in identifying specific strategies of persuasion through which colonial Nahua historians strove to ensure the well-being and continuity of their communities. Sarah Rachel O'Toole (2023) applies the latter concept, which plays on the tension between escape and refusal, in showing how enslaved people from Senegambia and West Central Africa resisted legal and juridical enclosures and the colonial time-spaces of their enslavers by occupying and creating trading relationships within the purposefully undefined "monte" of northern Peru. At the same time, new conversations on the present crisis build upon layers of successive ‘end times’ – in this century, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis. As Benjamin noted long ago, the emergency has been permanent. So what are the simultaneous times of imperialism and its antipodes? What or who is left? What is the Left to us? We propose focusing on global literatures and theories to reanimate how we might conceive cultural and political questions around linearity and nonlinearity, synchronicities and non-synchronicities, seriality and aporia, and conjunction and disjunction. Néstor Quiroa and Justin Rogers-Cooper have contributed to the development of this seminar.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Justin Rogers-Cooper is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and a faculty member in the Master's in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His scholarship focuses on American cultural and literary studies in the long nineteenth century, and the racial and gender politics of labor cultures. He works on the 1877 general strike and James Baldwin. He is a frequent guest on the podcast Nostalgia Trap.
Speaker Bio
Gayatri Mehra has received her PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Critical
Theory from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on her book, Novel
Cures: Postcolonial Fiction and Mental Health. Her research has been published in Research in
African Literatures and Postmodern Cultures; and her translated work in Indian Literature.
Speaker Bio
Sharanya Dutta is an English PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on contemporary Anglophone South Asian novels—specifically critical postcolonial nostalgia, and the relationship between theory, language, and the novel form. Her work exists at the intersection of postcolonial studies, transnational and world literatures, theories of the global south, and critical race and caste theory.
Speaker Bio
Romy Rajan works as an Assistant Professor at Newberry College. His work examines the evolving role of the nation amid contemporary forms of globalization and as a parallel, the changing role of postcolonial studies. His works have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Ariel, among other journals.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Peter Hitchcock is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Baruch College and at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York City. He is also on the faculty of Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies, and Film Studies at the Graduate Center and in Film Studies at Baruch. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed, Oscillate Wildly, Imaginary States, The Long Space, Labor in Culture, and the forthcoming Seriality and Social Change.
Speaker Bio
Asma Bahadar (she/her) is a PhD student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a teacher at Hunter College. Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, Arab women’s writing, and literature about displacement.
Speaker Bio
Jessica Copley is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Lethbridge. Working within an analytical framework of anti-imperialist theory, her research attends to the relation between militarism and aesthetics, with a particular focus on France, Japan, and the United States.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Molly Borowitz is an assistant professor of Spanish at Georgetown University. She works on interactions between imperial institutions and their individual subjects in the early modern Spanish Empire, focusing in particular on the Viceroyalty of Peru, and on tracing the relationships between 16th- and 17th-century cultural production and 20th- and 21st-century critical and decolonial theory. She teaches classes on early modern Spanish-American, Indigenous, and Iberian literature and culture.
Speaker Bio
Néstor Quiroa, PhD, is an associate professor of Latin American colonial literatures at Wheaton College in Illinois. He teaches courses in Latin American literatures, Latin American/Latino Studies, and highland Guatemalan Indigenous texts. Néstor has written articles on the Popol Wuj and on Indigenous responses to evangelization in other native-authored colonial texts. His recent research focuses on Central American narratives, with particular interest in post-conflict Maya texts
Speaker Bio
Asmaa es una académica y educadora dedicada, especializada en Estudios Hispánicos. Está cursando su doctorado en Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, mientras trabaja como GTA de Elementary Spanish. Obtuvo su maestría en la Universidad de El Cairo. Y amplió su experiencia a través de un programa Erasmus+ en la Universidad de Granada, además del proyecto Xceling impartido por la universidad de Salamanca sobre la innovación en la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera.
Speaker Bio
Leisa Kauffmann is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University. Her work focuses on Nahua - Spanish cultural exchange in early Colonial New Spain, in particular the historical representations of the pre-Hispanic past.