The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time

The first two words of the book are Edward Said. His body of work continues to inspire debate within postcolonial studies almost 50 years after the publication of his 1978 hit, Orientalism. I’m less interested in that specific text than in the misunderstandings or scholarly lacunae it generated. (A focus on Orientalism also obscures his incredible range, which included classical music.) Thinkers such as Hamid Dabashi, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Vivek Chibber, and Wael Hallaq have helped me think through Said’s critical afterlife. 

Beyond postcolonial studies, the book taps into the amazingly rich scholarship on “time” across cultures: I’m thinking of On Barak’s On Time; Vanessa Ogle’s The Global Transformation of Time; Avner Wishnitzer’s Reading Clocks, Alla Turca; Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time; and a modernist classic, Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will. 

More pertinent to the book’s argument, however, is Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other. Fabian advances Said’s more geographic argument about the Orient and Occident in terms of time. For Fabian, anthropology locates its (initially non-European) object of study in a more primitive time. He deems the temporal predicament of non-European cultures “allochronism”—the Greek “allo” denotes their supposedly “other,” belated, or backward location in time. The dialectic of my book’s title points to a journey in which theorists of the postcolonial or non-European world try to find a way out of allochronism, or this supposedly more primitive stage of history. Postcolonial theorists first opted for homochronism, arguing that all cultures occupy the same slice of time, while decolonial theorists subsequently elected for anachronism, a term which evokes the (literally) backward-looking fantasies of the past that surface today and dictate our political landscape. Unconvinced by the solutions of homochronism and anachronism, my book culminates in a defense of cosmopolitanism. This word already has a meaning—world citizenship—but the book reimagines its tagline: coexistence. The coexistence it imagines is one of temporality.   

The project of temporal coexistence sheds light on the spirit of our own times. In the present conjuncture, invented traditions proliferate day by day. The book models a way for these discrepant tempos—antiquity and modernity, universal and local time, qualitative and quantitative—to coexist.