It’s about time: some notes on quantum history

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 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.