Undoing Colonial Temporalities

Presentism and the Future of the Post/Past

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the notion of presentism as a way of looking at the fraught temporalities of the post-/de- ‘pre-fixing frontier’ in colonialism studies. Drawing on various interpretations of the concept, presentism can be said to manifest when societies become unable to imagine a future or a past, because of structured powers keen on preserving the status quo. Using a combination of data from media ethnography and literary criticism, we intend to assess the productivity of an updated notion of presentism for the ongoing debates on the coloniality of power. Instances of arrested and recursive temporalities exemplified in recent Anglophone African novels as well as in Swedish media discourses on migration will serve as case studies. Issues of memory and denial, as well as the ideological claim that enduring phenomena such as immigration should be considered symptoms of a contemporary migratory crisis, will be at the centre of our investigation.