It’s about time: some notes on quantum history
2023; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13688790.2023.2267773
ISSN1466-1888
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
ResumoABSTRACTThe insistence on anachronism, where contemporary migrants forge the unauthorised routes of a present-day underground railroad, not only provides us with another means to map the present. It also reopens a past considered dead, gone, forgotten, and buried. Then, to think of migrants as travellers, is to underline the arbitrary imposition of ‘illegality’ and returns us to the violence that suffocates mobility despite its structural centrality to the making of the modern world over the last five hundred years. If we were to shift the axis of chronological time 180°, we could then move into the depths to sift its sediments and register the stratifications of the past in the continuing constitution of the present. Time is no longer assumed as a linear flow into the future or place merely a material given. Both are socially produced and culturally configured. This means they can be reconfigured and respond to other coordinates and concerns. In considering the modern migrant as the seeming epitome of the historical present, we encounter all the shifting dynamics and subaltern complexities of time and space as it is suspended, stretched, and twisted by institutional controls and documentation and further deepened by resistance and clandestine movement.KEYWORDS: Migrationspacetimequantum historypostcolonial theory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Luca Queirola Palmas and Federico Rahola, Underground Europe. Lungo le Rotte Migranti, Milan: Meltemi, 2020, p 7.2 Shahram Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller. An Auto-Ethnography of Borders, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.3 Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.4 Gennaro Ascione, Science and the Decolonisation of Social Theory. Unthinking Modernity, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.5 AAVAA’s ‘The Living Archive Papers’, Third Text, 54, Spring 2001.6 https://iniva.org/shop/publications/keith-piper-relocating-the-remains/7 David Baumeister, ‘Black Animality from Kant to Fanon’, Theory & Event, 24(4), 2021.8 Karen Barad, ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable’, New Formations, 92, 2017, p 56. Also Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017.9 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire. Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.10 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.11 Barad, ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable’, p 86.12 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p 15.13 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, London: Penguin, 2019, p 15.14 Derek Walcott, ‘The Schooner «Flight»’ in Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984, London: Faber and Faber, 1992.15 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.16 Jacob Adeline, Davide Filippi and Luca Giliberti (eds), Borderland Italia. Regime di frontiera e autonomia delle migrazioni, Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2022.17 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake. On Blackness and Being. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016.18 Georges Didi-Hibermaan, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’arte e anachronisme des images, Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 2000, p 41.19 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015.20 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Penguin, 2021. It has recently been researched that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, Caterina, was a slave, probably captured by Mongols in the Caucasus and sold to Venetian merchants; see Carlo Vecce, Il sorriso di Caterina. La madre di Leonardo, Florence: Giunti, 2023.21 For an insightful presentation of Wilson Harris’s writing and philosophy in the context of Caribbean poetics and politics, see Louis Chude-Sokei, ‘Wilson Harris: An Ontological Promiscuity’ in The Black Scholar, August 20, 2018; see also, Andrew Jefferson-Miles, ‘Quantum Value in Wilson Harris’s “Architecture of the tides”’, in Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent (eds), Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, Amsterdam: Rudopi, 2002. Aubrey Williams’s quote comes from the documentary Mark of the Hand Aubrey Williams: https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-mark-of-the-hand-aubrey-williams-1987-online22 Derek Walcott, ‘Ruins of A Great House’, in Derek Walcott. Collected Poems 1948–1984, p 19.23 Rovelli, The Order of Time, p 74.24 Léopold Lambert, ‘They Have Clocks, We Have Time: Introduction’, The Funambulist, n.36, July–August 2021.25 Gennaro Ascione, Science and the Decolonisation of Social Theory. Unthinking Modernity, Palgrave Macmillan, London: pp 3–6.26 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p 93.27 I have borrowed this quote from Isaac Julien’s striking multi-screen installation: Lina Bo Bardi A Marvellous Entanglement (2019).28 Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel. La Donna Clitoride e la Donna Vaginale, Milan: Rivolta Femminile, 1974, p 54.29 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs, 7(1), Autumn 1981.30 Emily Apter, ‘“Women’s Time” in Theory’, Differences, 21(1), 2010.31 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, London: Sternberg Press, 2022, p 49.32 da Silva, Unpayable Debt, p 78.33 All quotes from the film Sun Ra. Space is the Place (1974).34 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1984, p 10.35 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London: Verso, 1985, p 41.36 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p 25.37 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1974.38 This is a different argument and a step beyond the well-rehearsed historian’s exercise that Carlo Ginsburg operates against the late Hayden White, accused of reducing history to the truth claims of literary narrative, in a recent interview in Les mondes des livres, 3 October 2022 and republished in English on Verso blog 25 January 2023: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs39 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969.40 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, p 10.41 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, p 12.42 Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History. Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp 25–30; Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.43 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.44 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1996.45 Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, p 151.46 Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, p 148.47 In Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Dalaeja Foreman, Shellyne Rodriguez and Nitasha Dhillon, ‘Modernity Is an Imperial Crime. A Conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Dalaeja Foreman and Shellyne Rodriguez, facilitated by Nitasha Dhillon’, Interfere, vol.2, November 2021, p 188.48 Louis Chude-Sokei, ‘Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process’, Popular Inquiry, 1, 2018.49 Sanjay Seth, Beyond Reason. Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.50 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (ed), The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations, Melbourne: Discipline/Third Text Publications, 2016.51 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/25/study-1948-israeli-massacre-tantura-palestinian-village-mass-graves-car-park?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0Yyz-85L8FsIg1tiJzEYAE6HDudpia7zzt_fhDZzYV0gVlP-goL4wiW3s52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rteB5T4hwVY&t=12s53 The quotes are from Peter Wollen’s script in Oliver Fuke, The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation, London: Bloomsbury, 2023, Kindle location 5008.54 Fuke, The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation, Kindle location 5199–5200.55 Abdullah al-Udhari (ed), Victims of a Map. A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, London: Saqi Books, 2005.56 Fuke, The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation, Kindle location 5424.57 Fuke, The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation, Kindle location 5641–5642.58 Ranjana Khanna, ‘Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto: Baya, Breton and reading for the future’, Art History, vol.26, n.2, April 2003, p 253.59 The English Wikipedia entry says: ‘critics have classified her paintings as being surrealist, primitive, naïve, and modern’.60 Dalila Morsly, ‘Je ne sais pais, je sens … Entertain realise a Blida en 1993’, in Baya, Femmes en leur jardin, catalogue for the exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe (8/11/2022 – 26/03/2023) and the Centre de la Vielle Charité in Marseille (11/05/2023 – 24/09/2023), p 53.61 ‘Je ne sais pais, je sens … Entertain realise a Blida en 1993’, p 54.62 Assia Djebar, ‘Baya, Le Regard Fleur’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 January 1985; Anissa Bouayed, ‘Baya. Vie et Oeuvre’, in Baya, Femmes en leur jardin, p63 Amirah Silmi, ‘Voice and Silence in Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli’, Critical Times, 6(1), April 2023, p 59.64 Amirah Silmi, ‘Voice and Silence in Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli’, p 74.65 Khanna, ‘Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto: Baya, Breton and reading for the future’, p 253.66 Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts. Women & Representation.1830 to the Present, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp 147–149.67 Patricia Ticento Clough, Autoaffection, Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.68 Couz Venn, The Postcolonial Challenge. Towards Alternative Worlds, London: Sage, 2006, p 116.69 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time-image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. New York: Continuum, 2005, p. 84.70 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990.71 On this and more, see the two volumes by Mark LeVine: Heavy Metal Islam. Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2022; and We’ll Play till We Die: Journeys across a decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2022.Additional informationNotes on contributorsIain ChambersIain Chambers has for many years taught Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Mediterranean at the Oriental University in Naples, Italy. Amongst his recent publications is the co-authored volume (with Marta Cariello) La questione mediterranea (2019), which is undergoing translation into English.
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