Politics of Time

During the 2006‒2014 mining boom in Marampa Chiefdom, Sierra Leone, local discourse around the performance and responsibilities of iron-ore miner London Mining toward its local environment was strongly informed by narratives of the colonial mining company DELCO. As different mining actors, such as the mining corporation, local community members and local political authorities, referred to the time and effects of DELCO (which operated from 1933 to 1975), a plurality of contrasting pasts involving stories of both lost glory and poor legacy was produced. Crucially, more than being memories of a bygone past, these narratives (produced under the conditions and imaginations of both the present and the future) serve as a political instrument to pursue specific interests: to voice a social commentary on the present, to legitimize certain positions, claims and expectations, and to negotiate for different trajectories of the future. As such, these diverging narratives offer key insights into how the past can be turned into a political instrument to express, legitimize and negotiate claims about the performance and responsibilities of mining corporations in Sierra Leone and beyond.

Across many developing countries, the power sector persistently underperforms despite years of market reform efforts. India, where de facto responsibility for the power sector rests with subnational (state) governments, provides a useful laboratory to examine why. The state of West Bengal provides an example of public sector reform as an alternative to the so-called " World Bank template " for electricity liberalization, and a lens on the political preconditions for reform success. Drawing on 30 elite interviews in 2016 alongside comparative evidence from other Indian states, this article documents the reform design and assesses its success. West Bengal's reforms aimed at internally strengthening the utility against political interference. The study finds that this reform model delivered initial performance among the best of any Indian utility, and that successful reforms in several other states were also more statist than often recognized. However, longer-term sustainability remains challenging. While weak rural lobbies had some effect, the study explains this trajectory as the result of the transition from one-party dominance to intensified party-political competition, a finding that resonates with evidence from other Indian states. In contrast to influential political theories developed in the Global North, this suggests that party-political competition does not make Indian politicians more likely to deliver public services, but rather leads to short-termism and political capture of utilities. Conversely, under some conditions one-party dominance can encourage longer-term reforms. The study thus assesses the promise and limits of public sector reforms as an alternative to liberalization, and suggests how electoral competition can influence development priorities in Indian states.

In this paper I offer a contribution to the recent conceptual debate that has taken place regarding the understanding and use of Ulrich Beck’s theory of individualisation in the sociology of youth. I seek to defend Beck’s position against the vast hostility it has faced from authors working in this field by showing how much of this critique has been premised on very problematic and easily countered interpretations of his perspective. In particular, I argue many have failed to properly grasp the complex and contradictory nature of this approach because they miss the emphasis he places on the way in which individualisation is fundamentally institutionalised under contemporary conditions. In order to illustrate this point, I will discuss several examples in which this trend towards institutionalised individualisation can be observed. By highlighting this aspect of Beck’s work that has thus far been largely unexplored, I hope to help foster an understanding of the individualisation thesis which renders it as productive in youth research as more than simply an object of critique. In order to help clarify and operationalise my argument I draw upon writings from social policy and the life-course approach, since these areas have engaged with the topic of individualisation in a more sophisticated and grounded manner than in youth studies.

In his reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, George Yancy argues that felt invisibility is a form of ontological and epistemological violence that points to the normative constructs of white perception. Yancy’s phenomenological account of the “unseen” Black body problematizes the condition of emergence of racialized bodies in the perceptual field under the white gaze. This book chapter aims to elaborate further on the racialization of the visual field by expanding Yancy’s claims on invisibility beyond black bodies, to consider specifically the invisibility of Asian and Asian American “yellow” bodies.
The first section focuses on Yancy’s notion of “seen absence” to demonstrate how white perception marks the Black body as hypervisible, while rendering it invisible at the same time. The second section expands on Yancy’s notion to examine how “yellow” bodies, despite their hypervisibility, are quickly dismissed or recede into the periphery in the white logic of perception. The perceptual neglect for yellow bodies is, I argue, a manifestation of the white perceptual logic, which situates racialized bodies temporally in a time other than the “now,” and spatially in a place other than “here.” In the last section, I suggest that whiteness be understood as perceptual dysfunction that delimits one’s own cognitive possibilities and ways to engage with the world, rendering certain bodies invisible.

This chapter delves into debates about time and democratic deliberation. Deliberative democrats have developed sequential models but tend to think of time mainly as a background variable. Critics have drawn attention to the inadequacy of deliberation in accelerated society but, in so doing, have conflated arguments about the pace of democratic deliberation with arguments about its durational time. Democratic deliberation may be slow and inconclusive, but one aspect does not necessarily entail the other. It is against this backdrop that I shed lights on a diachronic reading of fallibilism in order to advance a more favourable reading of inconclusiveness.

What stories do ruins tell? What is the legacy of the extractive coal industry? When is extraction complete in a single-industry area? Tied to global capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution on the labour immigrants, the legacy of extraction in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania extends into local notions of heritage, memory, community welfare, and place. Tracking (de)industrial life scenes in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region, this ethnographic work follows traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life. As a particular flashpoint, Coal Region residents processed the demolition of the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker built before 1960 and once the largest coal breaker in the world. Residents rapidly produced and shared digital media of the Breaker with and through a large public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and maintain through an active Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion) of more than 8000 members and a corresponding website (http://anthracitecoalregion.com). Engaging in community dialogue, participatory communication, and offering critical interpretations, residents wrote accounts about the demolition of the Breaker including its historical and mnemonic relevance, the cultural politics surrounding it, and the ethical dimensions of its extraction from the landscape by a mining company engaged in strip-mining on the surrounding land. These connections and dislocations between situated pasts show affective intensities arising suddenly even though dominant or more official narratives may have overwhelmed them. The sanitizing of the landscape of Saint Nicholas Breaker tries to empty the physical place of the material cultural traces of mining people/mined people to re-extract more coal through strip-mining operations, thereby rendering superfluous the underground miners’ labour by removing the last sign of it - the Breaker - from the landscape.

This paper attempts to do a close reading of Benjamin’s idea about history with a focus on his seminal essay “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”. Elaborating on key concepts and idioms in Benjamin like ‘hope’, ‘politics’, ‘theology’, ‘progress’, ‘time’, ‘past’ and ‘present’, this paper tries to critique and understand Benjamin’s take on history. This paper is also, in a way, a tribute to Benjamin’s staunchly anti-Fascist politics, whose study in the current political situation across the world is not only important but also a growing imperative.

This book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology.

Interview: https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/11/25/histories-of-the-postsecular-an-interview-with-maxwell-kennel/

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article has a dual objective. First, through an analysis of historical approaches to the Anthropocene-that exemplifies present-day perceived radical novelty-it attempts to identify the linguistic-conceptual means of temporal domestication through historical time. Second, it raises the question of the politics of historical time today by focusing on the evaluative aspects of temporal domestication in an age when the future increasingly appears a threat. As a brief conclusion, the article calls for broader recognition of what it calls a plurihistoricity of "historical" transitions, the coexistence of multiple kinds of transformation and change over time.

This text responds to Tehching Hsieh’s "One Year Performance 1980–1981: Time Clock Piece" (1980–1981). Through a reading of Dolly Parton’s contemporaneous antiwork anthem "9 to 5" (1980), I reflect on historical shifts in the ways that workers have been and continue to be exploited through techniques and technologies of time.

This article seeks to contribute to the debate about the relationship between time and social identity by studying the recent trend of simultaneous, crowd-sourced visual diaries. The article focuses on the concept of simultaneity and its relation to communal identity. Crowd-sourced visual diaries such as 2010's Life in a Day are often celebrated as a means to relativize time and social homogeneity through individual narrative perspectives. To challenge this view, I show how the notion of simultaneity itself can be appropriated for purposes of legitimation and how Life in a Day's universalist understanding of simultaneity actually undermines the heterogeneity of time that the project was meant to celebrate.

The article focuses on the notion of the ‘politics of time’ from a performative point of view. I aim to show that periodization is a way we act upon time. The first part of the article argues that, during the nineteenth century, ‘contemporaneity’ began to be understood as ‘sharing the present’. I focus mainly on the writings of Taine and Tocqueville. I then show the normative presupposition underlying the ‘contemporaneity/non-contemporaneity issue’. Finally, I explore its consequences for a Western conception of the present.

In this article, I argue that the experimentalist model of democracy can contribute to contemporary disputes about deliberation at the supranational level. The fundamental idea is that, in conditions of disagreement, for a decision to be legitimate, deliberative decision-making processes must be structured so as to allow the inclusion of affected interests before and after voting. I argue that there are three ways for a decision to be illegitimate: exclusion of affected interests from all deliberative phases, Captain Hook politics and garbage-time politics. Captain Hook politics and garbage-time politics illuminate an important variable: in a deliberative process, some interests may enter deliberation too early, other interests too late. However, for a decision to be legitimate, it is not only important that all affected interests can have an influence on collectively binding decisions, but it is also important what moment in time such interests play a part in the deliberative process.

Le rapport entre temps et politique est actuellement l’objet d’un intérêt croissant dans les études historiques et en philosophie politique. On trouvera ici une vue d’ensemble des analyses actuelles de ce problème dans différentes disciplines ainsi qu’une systématisation au niveau conceptuel de ce champ de recherche, à partir d’une distinction de ses quatre principales dimensions.

The relationship between time and politics is an increasingly common topic in historical and philosophical studies. This introduction provides an overview of the current literature on this problem in different disciplines as well as a systematic outline of its four main conceptual dimensions.

The article addresses the various uses of expert knowledge during the controversy over shale gas in France and in Quebec (Canada). Cross-fertilization between policy analysis and science and technology studies demonstrates that political uses of expertise better explained the policymaking process in focusing on two specific utilizations: strategic ignorance and politics of time. Using data from press analysis, interviews, reports and documentation analysis, the article shows that social movements can also use strategic ignorance to support their environmental claims and that mastering the pace of the controversy and the policy debates enabled actors to better support their policy claims. The French case illustrates those two arguments while the Quebec case provides a more tradition account of State/Industry's utilization of knowledge production to delay decision and divert opposition.

Architecture is again at the heart of the question of future on various scales: On the one hand, questions of how to control contingency and to reduce the uncertainy of the future, especially how to encounter future disasters and on the other hand, how to animate development, to generate economic future gains as well as political power. This coincides with the increasing demand towards sovereign power to protect populations against disasterous futures, to anticipate future better by advanced scientific predictions, economic calculations, to prepare and to take measures against natural disasters and economic crisis. Taking architectural measures is not a guaranteed way to ensure the wellbeing and the security of the whole population: Coalitions of the economic elite, professionals and technocrats, decide, in accordance to the so-called laws of the market and by engaging emergency laws, who will live where and how. The distribution of architectural care and vulnerability seem to be uneven and create new forms of speculation. Since architects and planners are one of the many key actors in this process, we need to reflect on our role how we build and dwell together equal and hopeful urban futures. These questions will be discussed through the case of urban transformation projects in Istanbul, a city with 15 million inhabitants under the shadow of an anticipated earthquake and land speculation; a showplace of neoliberal urban politics and urban movements.

During the latest uprising in Tunisia, the agitated crowd almost totally destroyed the autocratic monumental landscape. As the provocative ‘Anti-Clock Project’ by visual artist Nidhal Chamekh shows, the strongest element of this landscape was not destroyed; it still stands in the capital today and illustrates how the imbricated strata of the contemporary monumental landscape can be understood as an inherited palimpsest that reveals hegemonic assumptions about the prevailing politics of time. The monumental translation of the new era promoted by the contested Ben Ali regime paradoxically froze the idea that change would facilitate general progress, innovation, modernization and development and guarantee a better future. In this article, we argue that the Clock Tower and the civilization project it materializes, initiated by colonial occupation and upheld by the consecutive postcolonial regimes, does not necessarily warrant a better future. Rather, it continues to restrain political sensibilities in the present time, dismisses historical pasts and withholds alternative futures.

A disciplina tem por objetivo problematizar o tempo como questão fundamental e desafio para historiografia contemporânea. Em uma palavra, esta disciplina busca problematizar “tempo” como provocação a uma historiografia teoricamente (ou mesmo filosoficamente) orientada para uma análise das historicidades. A suposta  “morte” das modernas filosofias da história (ou filosofias especulativas da história), como sugeriu Odo Marquard, foi um resultado lógico do crescimento da especialização das ciências humanas. A historiografia tornou-se, graças a isso, dona de seu próprio campo, senhora de si e responsável por uma filosofia crítica a respeito de sua produção: muitas vezes a mescla de teoria e epistemologia da história. Isso assegurou, entre muitas outras coisas, sua enorme capacidade de controle e as condições de sua reprodução sob protocolos epistêmicos rigorosos. Mas não se pode mais dizer que todo tipo de informação histórica está hoje sob o controle dos historiadores. Internet, redes sociais, história pública, história digital, web 2.0, boom memorialístico, jornalismo e o chamado “real time journalism”, testemunhos de toda sorte etc. Ademais, o enorme interesse público por passado e memória, por história e identidade, por justiça e reparação ultrapassam enormemente a esfera de controle e atuação da historiografia acadêmica e especializada.
A própria concepção de tempo se multiplica diante de “passados que não passam”, traumas, memórias, testemunhos, entre outros, complexificando nosso entendimento dessa dimensão fundamental da existência humana. Mas se o tempo objetivo (dos homens, das sociedades, etc., o chamado tempo histórico) foi a dimensão que definiu a História enquanto Área de especialidade, o que fazer quando o tempo não é mais o mesmo? Se tempo não é um meio neutro no qual existimos, quantificável, homogêneo e linear, que tipo de problema a historiografia terá de enfrentar diante disso?
Proponho uma disciplina que tem por fito pensar sobre o presente e o futuro da “história dos historiadores”, como dizia Paul Ricoeur, sem com isso encerrar nosso debate numa apologia cega à torre de marfim, à empiria ou a especialização. Também não se trata de proselitismo corporativista. Mas sobre como podemos contribuir para que a historiografia repense a si própria em função das questões éticas e políticas que atravessam este discurso? Como podemos contribuir não apenas para responder questões, mas igualmente ajudar a reformular questões fundamentais, largamente esquecidas ou ignoradas, participando de debates que clamam por nossa participação e responsabilidade? Para tanto, analisaremos debates sobre tempo e modernidade, historiografia e epistemologia, educação, linguagem, narrativa e identidade, filosofias da história, memória e esquecimento, presença e latência, diferença, ética e política, políticas do tempo, entre outras.

The objective of this article is to examine the urban night as an innovative space-time on different scales and in different geographic contexts. In this introduction, I remind the reader that the night has often been approached negatively. I discuss the process of colonization of the night and the pressures and strains experienced by the individuals, communities, organizations and neighborhoods of the “polychronic city”. In the
second part, I focus on the innovations unfolding in cities at night in different fields: economic, social, environmental and cultural. In the last section, I look at the possible contributions of “night studies” to our urban nights, to urban planning and sustainable development.

L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner la nuit urbaine comme un espace-temps d’innovation à différentes échelles et dans différents contextes géographiques. Dans cet article d’introduction, je rappelle que la nuit a été souvent abordée négativement. Nous examinons le phénomène de colonisation de la nuit, les pressions et les tensions sur les individus, les communautés, les organisations et les quartiers de la ville à plusieurs temps. Dans la deuxième partie, nous nous concentrons sur les innovations qui se déploient dans les villes la nuit dans différents domaines : économie, social, environnement et culture. Dans dernière partie, nous nous intéressons aux contributions des « études sur la nuit » pour les nuits de nos villes, l’urbanisme et le développement durable.

This chapter analyses the change in the informal trafficking of standard consumer goods between Israel and the West Bank since summer 2007, when Palestinian Authority’s security forces were redeployed under the supervision of General Dayton. Based on an examination of the trafficking and the strategies developed by the traffickers, the Palestinian Authority’s capacity to territorialise its control in Palestinian enclaves will first be assessed. Changes in the nature of these transactions will then be studied to identify the new forms of regulation that are emerging between the Israeli and Palestinian economies, over and above formal exchanges.

La nuit est désormais à l’agenda de la recherche et des politiques publiques. Un nouveau
champ de recherches, celui des « Night studiesxv » a peu à peu émergé qui réunit des
historiens, des géographes, des urbanistes, des sociologies, des économistes, des
anthropologues, des ethnologues, des philosophes, des biologistes, des spécialistes de la
culture et de la communication, des politologues et des architectesxvi. Partout dans le monde,
les colloques, séminaires, travaux de recherche, thèses et expositions se multiplient xvii. La
recherche naturellement pluridisciplinaire s’ouvre à d’autres espaces que l’Europe ou
l’Amérique du Nord et se spécialise peu à peu sur différents objets et thématiques : lumière,
gouvernance, paysage, géographie, circulation des pratiques, pollution lumineuse,
monographies urbaines, culture, médias, représentation, innovation urbaine, économie de la
nuit, marketing territorial.

«We stop everything and we think» was a slogan sung by the French insurrectionists of  ‘68.  This  episode  was  not  only  an  exercise  in  revolutionary  frenzy  but  also  a  call for the interruption of the daily rhythms of developmental capitalism and a denial of its historical narratives. Starting with an introduction to the phenomenon followed by an analysis of some key films, I will investigate this idea of detention in the imaginary of ‘68, whose echoes resonate throughout the following decade. The films —L’An 01 by Doillon, Resnais and Rouch; Le Gai Savoir by Godard; In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni by Debord and Le fond de l’air est rouge by Marker— illustrate  this  saving  suspension  of  time  and  exemplify  the  virtues  attributed  to  it: the liberation of life from the insane tempo of production, the aspiration to a responsible and theoretically informed gaze or, finally, the political potential that memory can contain.

This contribution is about the ritual touching of soil (French terre, Lingala mabelè) during individual and collective gardening sessions of two spiritual movements in Kinshasa. The practice allows participants to uplift and reconcile with their own ancestors, as well as with those of the Congolese nation. Seen as an alternative form of memory politics, these practices generate a sense of 'attouchment' with the material surroundings of the city. The chapter addresses the question of how to address and access the past, and how to do this properly, from the perspective of Congolese spiritualists. (...)

The Israeli separation policy that has been implemented since the early 1990s has not divided territorially Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, it has reorganized their trajectories and submitted these two populations to distinct time regimes. Through an ethnographic study of spatial practices of Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the West Bank, this article shows to what extent these time regimes have contributed to shape distinct perceptions of space among these groups. Through a process of foliation (feuilletage), these space construct are superposed as many anthropological space/times within a same place or along the same paths. This foliation process underscores that the separation regime does not merely reinforce the gaps between Israelis and Palestinians by creating asymmetrical use and perceptions of space, but that it also strengthen or introduce divisions within these populations. Furthermore, the study of subjectivities reveals the processes by which these actors contribute to construct discontinuity and distinction within their respective spaces while they remain in a highly interconnected context. Finally, this foliation process is significant as it leads to reconsider the conditions within which are constructed representations, discourses and analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through their daily practices, Israelis, Palestinians and internationals elaborate and construct radically different perceptions of the limits, the Other and the conflict as these construct result from specific time/space experiences.

Despite Connerton’s relatively early critique of memory studies’ focus on inscribed (visual, textual, architectural) mnemonic traditions and practices, we are still in need of further conceptual and empirical analysis to explore places memory from an embodied and performative perspective. Among the questions that have been particularly neglected lies the problem of the temporality of so called trauma-spaces. As Lorenz and Bevernage (2013) have noted, some of the recent debates about the 'pastness of the past' and the presentness of the present, as well as about notions of 'distance' and 'trauma' pose serious challenge to those interested in the way the past 'haunts us'. How can we then pay attention to the 'locatedness' of memory spaces together with the semiotic and somatic processes that underpin the experience of such spaces? In other words, how can we look at the way in which people experience and imagine the chronological porosity embedded in places that are associated with violence and suffering?

Drawing upon historical research and ethnographic fieldwork on contemporary Spain, I will look at places of memory as living timespaces (May and Thrift, 2003) that harbour (and sometimes foster) an experience of time that might challenge modern notions of linear time (Trigg, 2009). From this perspective, spaces associated with political violence orchestrated by past regimes might call into question those discourses that aim at drawing a line between the past and the present in order to cast off “ghosts of the past”. Such an approach helps understanding the way in which politics of time (or chronopolitics) shape not just the experience of those places but also inform wider debates about the politics of recognition and reparation.

Countries across the world are facing reconstruction of their war-torn societies. The way of dealing ‘properly’ with the past is one of the burning political issues of our time, and often has a direct impact on today’s society. Recent civil war in Peru and Guatemala has inflicted deep wounds, which have been difficult to heal and come to terms with. So far, the search for truth, reparation and justice (transitional justice) has been mainly examined from a legal and political perspective. However, in post-conflict situations, present, past and future are so much intertwined that historians too can play a prominent role. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Peru and Guatemala, tries to point out that historical wounds can go together with a multitude of memories and potentially conflicting views of the past. Only by acknowledging the plurality of these memories one can pave a way from violent conflict to democracy. In our opinion, a proper understanding of a painful past and the way it is being remembered (or not), is indispensable in the transition to democracy. By demonstrating how historians can contribute to transitional justice, we hope that future research on how to deal with a violent past may transcend the factual truth and create relevant intellectual contexts in today’s society.

(as originally submitted for consideration) In The Problem with Work, feminist Marxist scholar Kathi Weeks asks: " Why do we work so long and so hard? The mystery here is not that we are required to work or that we are required to devote so much time and energy to its pursuit, but rather that there is not more active resistance to this state of affairs. " As the central hegemonic ideology and structure of capitalist society, the meaning of work envelops all of us in American society. In this paper, I argue that the ways in which new music practitioners champion or challenge the hegemonic work ideologies of American capitalism have political impact beyond the world of the arts. My reconstruction of Marxist class analysis privileges a processual temporality of resistance over an apocalyptic teleology of revolution, allowing working people such as artists, who had previously been sidelined from class analysis as inconsequential " dritte Personen, " to be recuperated into a revised class framework as critical classes. Critical classes' work experiences straddle the structures of capitalist work and alternative productivity/ies. Thus, they offer everyday resistance to capitalism by sustaining alternative ideologies and structures of productivity and bringing them into regular negotiation with capitalist hegemonies of work. They serve as long-term sources of the revolutionary imagination that Marxist scholars claim is necessary for real systemic change. Within the critical class of classical musicians, new music practitioners, as the recognizably avant-garde faction of the group, perform a special temporal function in political resistance. By championing entrepreneurship, innovation, " disruption, " and " newness " in the name of the arts, new music practitioners currently enhance capitalist hegemonies of work. Surprisingly to the contrary, the traditional classical music field's combination of entrepreneurship with " oldness " wedges a rift between the neoliberal and neoconservative strands of capitalist ideology, destabilizing capitalist hegemonies.