Odd Temporalities

At one level, power is about the control of time. This is not so much a question of “what happens when?” but, rather, of deciding “when do things happen?” While this is a strategy of direct control, other subtler forms of governing time pertain to the rhythm of things. Establishing the tempo, whether it is the enforcement of imperial history as the official and neutral chronicle of modernity, the imposition of a totalizing global synchronicity by capitalist globalization, or the prescription of how we should conduct our personal lives, to name a few salient manifestations, is proof that timing can be a major force of correction and coercion.

From linear notions of progress to tautological conceptions of power, normative forms of temporality have proven pervasive in hegemonic forms of regulation and management. For Karl Marx, the capitalist mode of production and its self-perpetuation depend on the manipulation of time, yet his critique demonstrates that the past of this system is marked by contingency and violence while its promised future is in fact futureless to the people subjugated and exploited by processes of extraction and expropriation. More recently, a range of theorists have challenged notions of temporality that depend on the fundamental exclusion of different parts of the population, including Black (Saidiya Hartman), queer (Lee Edelman), Indigenous (Glen Coulthard), and immigrant subjects (Dylan Rodríguez). With the current realities of ecocide, scholars have also increasingly reckoned with conceptions of the past, present, and future that perpetuate anthropocentric fantasies.

As such critiques emphasize, these temporal pressures are indeed real, yet the world continues to resist homogenization on a variety of fronts. Taking a global approach, this seminar seeks to explore the aesthetic valences of a variety of odd temporalities that, in reclaiming a contingency mustered against the grain of normalized time, seek to continuously redefine our current historical moment. Such approaches ask how odd temporalities potentially sever, disrupt, or knot homogenized time in generative ways. We therefore aim to consider the aesthetic and political implications of non-normative temporalities that refuse to be ordered.

Papers may approach the following topics:

Asynchronicity
Stoppage
Afrofuturism
Arrhythmic convulsion
Queer time
Disconnection
Automation and Disruption
Disability
Crisis
Obsolescence
Long and short durées
Weird times
International law
Non-western temporalities
Uncertainty and insecurity
Systemic whiplash
Ahistoricism
Center-Periphery tensions
Utopia/Dystopia
Sequential disorder
History from below
Ecology and extinction
Anachronism
Chronotope

Any questions should be addressed to Juan Meneses ([email protected]) and Matthew Scully ([email protected]). Abstracts should be submitted via the ACLA portal.