The culture of time and the horizons of futurity

Abstract

The inclusion of cultural differences in global studies has mostly taken the form of agendas that aim at recognition and democratization on the one hand, or a redemptive historicization on the other. What this paper argues is that a geohistorical reclamation of difference is insufficient to account for the possibility of a decolonial trajectory for humanity without a deeper understanding of the obstacles imposed by the present political economy of representations of “futurity”. I explore the mobilization of futurity as a way to challenge what I refer to as necrochronopolitics, which I am defining as a range of mundane practices that facilitate the reproduction of death-worlds through the systematic erasure of bodies from ‘acceptable’ views of the future. By exploring Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism and Queer Futurism, I examine what these aesthetics manifestations reveal about the real and possible, and their disruptive capacities to inspire other time-space realities.