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Temporality in the Contemporary Global South Novel

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New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

Abstract

This chapter reads two novels from the Global South, Guyanan Wilson Harris’ The Dark Jester (2001) and Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2013) for the ways in which they mobilise a set of alternative temporal models roughly aligned with what Harris calls a quantum poetics. The chapter suggests that such Global South fictions provide models of temporal ‘elasticity,’ ‘complementarity,’ ‘bridging,’ ‘connectivity,’ and ‘generativity’ that implicitly go against the grain of segmenting, commodifying, linear Euro-American time that has been an essential element in the imperial conquest of the globe, the colonial exploitation of many of its populations, and the increasingly evident destruction of the planetary environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here I wish to record my intellectual debt to many discussions on the topic of postcolonial/Global South trauma theory with Tatjana Pavlov-West.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Russell West-Pavlov

  2. Department of English, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Russell West-Pavlov

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  1. Russell West-Pavlov
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Correspondence to Russell West-Pavlov .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Literatures and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Sibylle Baumbach

  2. Anglophone Literatures, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Birgit Neumann

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West-Pavlov, R. (2019). Temporality in the Contemporary Global South Novel. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_14

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