Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era

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Lachenicht, Susanne:
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era.
Institute of African Studies; Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies
Bayreuth, Germany , 2022 . - VI, 11 S. - (University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers ; 31 ) (Academy reflects; 7)

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Abstract

This paper critically assesses the making of the modern timescape “the future” from an early modern historian’s and a postcolonial perspective. As a western invention, it was imposed on many societies in the historical contexts of colonialism and imperialism. “The future” is thus loaded with semantics such as ‘civilization versus primitive forms of life’, ‘progress versus backwardness’, ‘development versus regression’ and other similar dichotomies. This article looks into timescapes prevalent in the early modern period, using the latter as a background against which we can reflect on the historical making and baggage of linear timescapes such as the “past, present and future”, about the diversity, or multiplicity, of timescapes in the past and today, how this could inform our understanding of constructions of cultural difference and how much we would need a transperiodical and transregional anthropology of time.