Patriots All Around: Inter/national Timing, Round Numbers, and the Politics of Commemorative Critique

Abstract

Rather than focusing on a particular commemoration, this article draws attention to the issue of when we say what we say. It argues that when scholars take “big” anniversaries of major international political events as the occasion for critique, they concede important conceptual and practical ground to an overlooked yet hegemonic symbolic order that constrains political possibility. Regardless of content, timing such discussions to round numbers accumulating from “given” and “historical” dates like 1917 or 9/11 reaffirms a statist and state‐systemic — an inter/national — politics of commemoration. After briefly introducing a way to analyze temporal phenomena using the concept of timing in the first section, the rest of the article elaborates the functional and political implications of discussions organized around inter/national calendars. The second section summarizes links between hegemonic timing and the modern inter/national imaginary. The third explicates the cosmopolitical importance of calendars and anniversaries, showing how modern dating systems privilege particular historical legacies, constitute political identities, and hypertrophy the importance of round numbers. The fourth section examines the ontopolitics of these timing practices and identifies five consequences of inter/nationally–timed critique. The article concludes by suggesting alternative calendars supportive of a more thoroughgoing temporal challenge to our hegemonic politics of commemoration.