World Enough, and Time: Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story with Marcuse, Benjamin, and Chakrabarty

Abstract

This article contributes to recent discussions of temporality in relation to the concept of “world,” and especially, to how thinking “world” with “time” can rejuvenate postcolonial figurations of futurity. The theoretical texts I discuss include Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I retrieve the distinction in these works between the structural dislocations that “found” human being and decompose linear time, and more properly historical decenterings in which the heterotemporal is an effect of social processes of exploitation and (colonial-capitalist) domination. To honor this distinction, I place recent thinkers into dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that a post-poststructuralist reclamation of the latter is particularly overdue. The article culminates in an explication of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story—a work that asks us to live through its form that postcolonial mode of the nonsynchronous with which my argument is concerned.