(Post)colonial Chronopolitics and Mapping the Depth of Local Time(s) in Global Literary Studies: an Itinerary to Guinea-Bissau

Jagiellonian University Of Krakow ,Ewa Lukaszyk

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2021.12.04

Jagiellonian University Of Krakow , Ewa Lukaszyk

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This article is an attempt at deconstructing the chronopolitics inherent to the (post)colonial way of thinking about the world. As it is argued, what should replace it is a vision of multiple, overlying temporalities and forms of time awareness, reaching deeper than a literary history reduced to the cycle of colonisation – decolonisation – postcolonial becoming, originating from just a single maritime event: the European exploration and conquest of the world. The essay brings forth a choice of interwoven examples illustrating the variability of local time depths, associated with a plurality of origins, narrations, forms of awareness and cultivation of cultural belonging. It shows the lack of coincidence between the dominant and non-dominant perceptions of the past in such places as the archipelagos of São Tomé and Príncipe, Maldives, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Their ways of living the global time, as well as embodying significant texts (rather than simply preserving them) stretch far beyond the frameworks created by competing colonial empires, such as the Portuguese or the British one.

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Deconstructing the presuppositions of colonised time The chronology of global literary studies is still dominated by the supposedly crucial (POST)COLONIAL CHRONOPOLITICS AND MAPPING THE DEPTH OF LOCAL TIME(S)
Just to give an example of how the chronopolitical locus communis is widespread and taken for granted, one might quote a sentence from the work of Virginie Soula on New Caledonia, who writes just on the first page of her otherwise pertinent and ground-breaking study: “Certainly, the temporary depth of Caledonian writing has nothing comparable with that of European countries, of the Maghreb or even of the Caribbean, for the histories cannot be confounded
The presupposition lying in the background of Soula's statement is that before the beginning of the colonial era, global time was split into various uncommunicated dimensions, and temporal depth was unstructured, filled with the magma of “ancestral orality”, alien to any articulate time awareness

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Deconstructing the presuppositions of colonised time The chronology of global literary studies is still dominated by the supposedly crucial (POST)COLONIAL CHRONOPOLITICS AND MAPPING THE DEPTH OF LOCAL TIME(S). Exploring the depth of local time awareness The shallow time scale imposed on global literary history, understood as the study of various forms of postcolonial writing across the world, may be summarised as a chronology of decolonisation, indicating just a few historical decades that encapsulate the whole process in several crudely defined steps: 1945 – 1955 – 1965 and, 1975, the date corresponding to the disintegration of the Portuguese colonial empire.

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