Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity

Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference

Bibliographic Data

ID2371048
AuthorsZahir Kolia (0000-0002-4561-0465, Toronto Metropolitan University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume50
Issue2
Pages275-296
Publication date2024-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0896-9205 • E-ISSN: 1569-1632
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/08969205231181111
OpenAlexW4381884479
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited94

The Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its uneven incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that despite colonial capitalism seeking to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process. In effect, while colonial capitalism wields various techniques to incorporate Indigenous and African life worlds, there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not reproduce the logic of capital. Highlighting two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx's notion of subsumption, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, however, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary political projects

Archaeology · Biology · Capitalism · Colonialism · Dialectic · Epistemology · Indigenous · Marxist philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Temporalities · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Ecology

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