We begin with the story of the Drexciyans:

Eshun 03 [Kodwo Eshun, British-Ghanaian writer and theorist , Further Considerations of

Afrofuturism, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2003 pp. 287-302]
In 1997 this aesthetic of estrangement was pursued to its limit-point by Drexciya the group of
enigmatic producers synthesists and designers operating from Detroit. In the liner notes to their CD
The Quest Drexciya (1997) proposed a science-fictional retelling of the Middle Passage. The
"Drexciyans" are water-breathing aquatically mutated descendants of 'pregnant America-bound
African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive
cargo." Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A fetus in its mother's womb is
certainly alive in an aquatic environment. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to
babies that never needed air? Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen a
pre- mature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its
underdeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and Swamp
Monsters in the coastal swamps of the South Eastern United States make the slave trade theory
startlingly feasible. ln treating Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (I993) as a science fiction which is then
developed through four-stage analysis of migration and mutation from Africa to America. Drexciya
have constructed a Black-Atlantean mythology that successfully speculates on the evolutionary
code of black subjectivity. In turn, their project has inspired a series of paintings by the
contemporary African American abstract artist Ellen Gallagher, and responses in the form of essays
by the critics Ruth Mayer and Ben Williams. Drexciya's project has recently extended itself into
space.
The Status quos analysis of the Middle Passage according to the standard
principals of historical exposition is structurally flawed. Focus on the
institution of slavery or a specific historiography prevents us from actually
examining and understanding the damage done by the processes. Any claim to
an accurate transparent representation is unethical
Harries, 5/29 (Patrick Harries, noted African and Oriental history professor, received Ph.D from
London University in 1983, grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, MIDDLE PASSAGES OF THE
SOUTHWEST INDIAN OCEAN: A CENTURY OF FORCED IMMIGRATION FROM AFRICA TO THE CAPE
OF GOOD HOPE 29 May 2014, http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021853714000097, DSD)
This article traces the history of the movement of forced immigrants from tropical Africa to the Cape over a period of almost one hundred years, from
the vibrant interest in the history of slavery at the Cape has not been matched
by a similar concern with the slave trade Propelled by the need to assess the origins of racism in the
region, historians have shown little interest in the provenance of slaves, their long process of
enslavement, or the nature of their transhipment. The absence of a clearly African community of
slave descent has also contributed to this gap in the historical record. For many years, a soft version of the history of
slavery contributed to an orientalist identity that separated Malays from Other coloureds at the Cape. Although historians over the
last thirty years have successfully highlighted the harshness of slavery as an institution at the
Cape, they have continued to focus their work on the history of the community drawn from the northern and eastern fringes of
interest derives in part from the communitys practice of Islam, a religion that set them apart in a colony ruled by Christians; but it also stems from the
visible presence of their descendants who today constitute the Cape Moslem or Malay community. More recently, the sense of identity of this community
has been strengthened by a resurgent Malayism that rests on rediscovered diasporic links, a vibrant cultural heritage, and a history of slavery marked by
the centre of their work on
slavery, they have paid little attention to the early history of coloured identity, a subject focused
overwhelmingly on the mixed-race nature of this community and its political struggles during the
last hundred years This historiography has obscured the way in which slaves and forced
immigrants from Africa arrived at the Cape with their own cultural practices, languages, and
experience of enslavement; and it particularly overlooks the contribution of these Africans
to the emergence of a distinctly coloured community. One of the aims of this article is to correct this perspective by
foregrounding the Middle Passage that brought slaves and other forced immigrants to the Cape from Africa, particularly from Mozambique and Madagascar.
In some quarters of the United States, this emotive topic has become almost a synecdoche for the slave experience. It is often seen as the
incubator of an African-American identity, a painful inheritance that is destructive but important
a major theme in historical fiction and cinema and, despite the remarkable
achievements of new quantitative methodologies, it remains one of the most compelling aspects of
the Middle Passage is understood as the bridging period between
enslavement and arrival. Attention to this period serves both to fill an important gap in the
historiography of the Cape and to underline the extreme violence that accompanied the forced
immigration of a large part of the regions labour force. By examining the history of this forced immigration, the article also
aims to explore the Capes role in what Richard Allen has called the complex web of social, economic and political relations in the Southwest Indian Ocean
during the late eighteent
Transparent language can never truly create an accurate representation of the
Middle Passage- our assumption that it does locks us in static modes of
knowing, the Middle Passage demonstrates this.
Kaisary, 14 (Dr. Phillip Kaisary, Assistant Professor of Literature in the School of Law at the
University of Warwick, The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons,
Conservative Constraints, p195)
Glissant's novel Le quotrime siecle also develops startlingly original aesthetic strategies in order to
represent the trauma and suffering of the Middle Passage. The first two chapters of the novel relate a fictionalized
slave narrative of the Middle Passage in "poetic, delirious free-indirect prose." Through the character of Papa Longoue, a descendent of
maroons, and a quimboiseura healer, seer, and storytellerGlissant finds a language with which to communicate
the horrors of the Middle Passage that does not numb the reader into a state of intellectual or
emotional paralysis: For he would have preferred. oh barge I the barge and he I on my belly the powder I the boat and beating on
my back the current and the water each foot I the rope sliding for and dying the harbor country and so far faraway nothing I nothing
nothing to end falling the water salty salty salty on the back and blood and fish and eating oh country the country" This
disorienting language, Christopher Miller has argued, conveys the message that the trauma of the Middle
Passage "cannot be represented in transparent language. Normal grammar cannot do it
justice."I5 Instead, Le guars-lime sicle's radical recuperation of the Middle Passage finds expression in a
modernist and radical linguistic aesthetic form. The discretion with which the conditions in the hold
are communicated, and the means by which clear impressions of terror, agony, and violence are filtered
through the consciousness of a tormented participant in the inflictions of cruelty, conveys a profoundly
unsettling message without any descent into sensationalism. The critique of Bell's trilogy that follows is thus not a moral
complaint, but an investigation into the limits of language and a question of genre: I argue that Bell's attempt to revitalize the historical
novel in its premodernist form fails to cope with the burdens of a specifically Caribbean modernity which irrupted within and out of
slavery.
The Middle Passage cannot be captured by history, because this WESTERN and
EUROCENTRIC version of history presumes a coherent white straight
cisgender male subject of history a single perspective which colonial
historians present as a view from nowhere.
Dawson, 07 (Ashley Dawson, University of Michigan, Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the
Making of Postcolonial Britain, p62, DSD)
Brathwaite ingeniously suggests that it is the limited epistemological orientation of Eurocentric observers
that explains theories of social death and mimicry such as those of Patterson and Naipaul. Combined with the
highly developed codes of cultural racism, this orientation killed off awareness of the living
tradition of immanent culture that survived among the black masses in the Caribbean 2 Like both James
and Carmichael, in other words, Brathwaite is intent on attacking the cultural assimilation of colonial and
postcolonial elites to Eurocentric values, suggesting that this internalization is an obstacle to the
development of truly autochthonous cultural/political traditions. Yet while Brathwaite's analysis of what he
dubs an African-derived "great tradition" is grounded in a model of colonially inflected class conflict
within the Caribbean, he also acknowledges that European hegemony has forced this tradition
underground for much of the region's history.'3 Submerged in order to survive, the immanent tradition has, according
to Brathwaite, "suffered a slow but steady process of fragmentation and deformation."64 Despite this fragmentation, this immanent
tradition never completely disappears but rather wells up, Brathwaite suggests, like a subterranean
spring during moments of particularly intense social conflict.

This historiography is generally problematic but PARTICULARLY egregious
in the instance of the Middle Passage. The attempt to violently assimilate
imported Africans into European modes of LANGUAGE and KNOWLEDGE was
part and parcel of the Middle Passages genocidal project.
Hall, 2009 (Delroy Hall, University of Birminghams Department of Philosophy, Religion and
Theology, The Middle Passage As Existential Crucifixion, Published 2009,
http://dartmouth.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwVZ07DgIxDERzAUoQJQVt
pCROnHWNWHGAvYA_SUnF_bUGUcANxtJo9IoZOYSre5aYtMTcWWJ14ogLlxyzptm11m5J_wbOP4m
-HsO23rfbI35_AcThnovgINEadxUBceaHNsk8ZoZK0gFdJhAnM4Ri3QhUHUSyFSRUA9B8Cgd-V8afr8-
0zM7hgorkJxgsjBXVtWZZapMxZYwEdQfYwzOa, DSD)
Existential crucifixion occurred as the enslaved were forced to renounce their name, culture and
ultimately, their identity. This act of dehumanization was an attempt to annihilate the self, dis-
torting the "Imago Dei," thereby reinforcing the notion that Black people could never be human
beings. Furthermore, dehumanization was an ideological means of crucifying Africans, but
keeping them sufficiently alive in order that they might become profit-making units for the
development ofBritain. The Good Friday of the Middle Passage was the crucifixion of the innocent
for the benefit of the Industrialization of Britain, which in turn, became the foundation of
capitalism, developing market forces and ultimately globalization. The Good Friday of the Middle Passage
continued as many of the enslaved died en route to the Americas. Those who became sickly through disease, ill
treatment, unsanitary conditions or malnutrition, were thrown overboard. As chattel, and in a
damaged state, such persons would be unprofitable for the slave trader. Therefore, the enslavers
could claim for loss of property and again compensation for those "lost at sea." The brutality that
was exerted on the enslaved was colossal. Olaudah Equiano, a free slave, comments in his publica-tion on the
environment of violence on the slave ships. Violence was inflicted not only to his fellow countrymen but also on the White crew?
However, despite the gore of the Middle Passage there is an alternative reading of this experience. Kaman Braithwaite suggests
that the Middle Passage was misunder-stood and was more than "merely" a traumatic destructive
experience that led to Africans being separated from their homelands, history and
traditions. He recognized the Middle Passage as a channel, or pathway, between the old tradi-tion and what has emerged in the
Caribbean.8 Braithwaite's claim must be exercised with caution. The arrival of Africans in the Caribbean was not for transporting their
culture, skills, wisdom or knowledge. It was originally believed that Africans did not have any culture.
Our story helps to dissolve this reliance on straightforward representation.
Instead of attempting to tell a quote accurate unquote history of the Middle
Passage, we recognize that it can never be forgotten, but can never be
remembered. The unspeakable must be spoken through the fantastic, the
poetic, the liminal.
Tucker 10 (Jeffrey Allen; PhD at Princeton University, studies literature as a context for discussions about postmodernism,
cultural, and identity politics, as well as racial representation; The Necessity of Models, of Alternatives: Samuel R. Delanys Stars in My
Pocket like Grains of Sand; spring 2010; South Atlantic Quarterly 109:2) MJ
The principal elements of Suvin and Freedmans conceptionsestrangement and cognitionare
central to Delanys own famous statement about science fictions tendency to allegorize situations
in the world of its authors and readers: Science fiction is not about the future. Science fiction is in
dialogue with the present, Delany says; the science fiction writer indulge[s] in a significant
distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the readers here and
now.21 It is the readers job to interpret the difference and the distance between the science-
fictional world and his or her own: To understand [science fiction] meaningfully, it requires more
than the willing suspension of disbelief. It requires that we know that these things are not the case,
and that we have at least an intuitive understanding of why.22 Another way to say all this is that
science fiction routinely represents worldsnot just physical planets, but also the social, cultural,
political, and economic structures that sentient life on those planets creates and inhabitsthat are
both similar to and different from the world that we know; this is one way to interpret the meaning
of the opening half-line of Vondramach Okks poem The Alien/The Awkward/The Exotic: the
alien is always constructed out of the familiar (Stars, 130). Science fiction provides models of the
known and the real but in a fashion that allows us to think critically about their history, their
formation, their effects on human lives. Delany refers to this notion in fictional appendices to the
novel Trouble on Triton and the sword-and-sorcery tetralogy Return to Nevron as the modular
calculus, which refers to a rigorous technique of modeling or simulation. Damien Broderick
continues, Modular here is simply the adjective form of model.
Fantasy and Fiction is necessary in the face of assimilation. Science Fiction fills
the historical gap left by the structural deficiency of Eurocentric
historiography.
Mayer 00 (Ruth; chair of American Studies at the University of Hanover; Africa as an Alien Future: The Middle Passage,
Afrofuturism, and Postcolonial Waterworlds; 2000; American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4, Time and the African-American Experience, pp. 555-
566)
The Gullah Islands, once the last illegal resort for slavery in the United States, epitomize a central
predicament of contemporary African-American culture: the fact that black history is both there
and not there, evident in countless traces, scars, and memories, yet largely submerged when it
comes to written accounts and first-person documentations of the past from the viewpoint of the
victims. To come to pass in its own right, the African presence in the United States has to be pried
away from the mainstream culture of which it has become an integral part-not by choice, but by
necessity. As Samuel Delany pointed out: until fairly recently, as a people we were systematically
forbidden any images of our past. . . . Every effort conceivable was made to destroy all vestiges of
what might endure as African social consciousness. When, indeed, we say that this country was
founded on slavery, we must remember that we mean, specifically, that it was founded on the
systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants. That some musical
rhythms endured. That certain religious attitudes and structures seem to have persisted is quite
astonishing when you study the efforts of the white slave-importing machinery to wipe them out."
Weems's series can be seen as an effort to remobilize these remnants and draw them to our
attention, "reassembling traces of the past into new, if only temporary unities"" The same idea
motivated a later project, in which she documented the traces of New World slavery in West Africa.
Both projects evince that in the field of the visual and narrative arts the project of excavating an
African past will invariably deviate from its anthropological and historiographical premises and
venture into the realm of fantasy and myth to compensate for the lack of concrete and indubitable
material. Time and again in the Sea Islands series, the rhetoric of historical fact is replaced with the
vernacular of personal fantasies and sense impressions.

Thus the advocacy, The United States federal government should substantially
increase its exploration of the Earths oceans via an encounter with the
Drexciyans.

Drexciya is a particularly good deconstruction of conventional Middle Passage
historiography
A. Solves failed representation: reconfigures our relationship to the Middle
Passage in a way that neither IGNORES nor attempts to EXPLAIN it which is
the only escape route from the current trap of trauma
Eshun 03 [Kodwo Eshun, British-Ghanaian writer and theorist , Further Considerations of
Afrofuturism, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2003 pp. 287-302]
Afrofuturism uses extraterritoriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the
everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic
subjectivities: from slave to negro to coloured to evolve to black to African to African American.
Extraterritoriality thereby becomes a point of trans valuation through which this variation over
time, understood as forcible mutation, can become a resource for speculation. It should be
understood not so much as escapism, but rather as an identification with the potentiality of space
and distance within the high-pressure zone of perpetual racial hostility. It is not that black
subjectivities are waiting for science-fiction authors to articulate their life worlds. Rather, it is the
reverse. The conventions of science-fiction, marginalized within literature yet central to modern
thought, can function as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects
in the twentieth century. Science fiction, as such, is recast in the light of Afrodiasporic history.

B. Solves linear temporality :
The politics of temporality our orientation to the past - are a PREREQUISITE
to a liberatory discussion. Our pedagogy must reclaim the invisible past
instead of orienting toward a hypothetical futurity that subordinates history.
Vasquez 8/31/09
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/7.html Rolando Vzquez is assistant professor of Sociology
at the Roosevelt Academy of the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. He teaches Latin
American ideas. His research circles around the critique of the modern notion of time and its
relevance for both de-colonial thinking and an extended critique of modernity. Vzquez, Rolando.
"Modernity coloniality and visibility: the politics of time." Sociological Research Online 14.4 (2009):
7.
This paper presents the problem of the mediation between modernity and coloniality; and it
explores the usefulness of the question of time to address this mediation. How can we think the
simulation of modernity together with the oblivion of coloniality? The text brings the critique of
time to the centre of the modernity/ coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological
narratives are at the heart of the modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the
movements of resistance against 'hegemonic globalization' are not only questioning the material
structures of oppression, but also the universality of the modern idea of time. It is an invitation to
think about the politics of time that are at play in modernity/ coloniality. Here, the modernity/
coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is geared towards the
production of specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed from
their past, their memory. The ensuing temporal discrimination makes invisible all that does not
belong to modern temporality. Under this light, it is possible to see how the practices of resistance
to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one that rescues memory
as a site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past. These
practices of resistance are thus seen as fights against temporal discrimination: fights against
invisibility. By addressing the imposition of modern time we can better understand the
widespread injustice and violence of modernity/ coloniality. Furthermore, the question of time
can help us to bridge the gap between the simulacra of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality.
This paper responds to the need of bringing the critique of time to the centre of the modernity/
coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the
modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the movements of resistance against 'hegemonic
globalization' are not only questioning the material structures of oppression, but also the
universality of the modern idea of time. In other words, this paper is an invitation to think about the
politics of time that are at play in the struggles against oppression. 1.2 Here, the modernity/
coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is not only geared towards the
control of historical narratives (Chakrabarty, Fanon, Mignolo), but also towards the production of
specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed from their past, their
memory. It is a politics that promotes modern temporality as a strategy of domination. It imposes
the universal claim that the present is the only site of the real, while dismissing the past as
archaic. The past is represented as a fixed entity with only documentary value. This analysis will
show that the imposition of modern time is coeval to the widespread injustice and violence of
modernity/ coloniality. The question of time is used to address the open question of the mediation
between the illusion of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality. This text exemplifies how the
practices of resistance to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one
that rescues memory as a site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and
rescuing the past. 1.3 In an effort to break with the grammars of argumentation that reproduce the
modern notion of time, the text moves in a fragmented way. It presents a series of quotations in
order to illuminate rather than explain. This method aims to open images of thought instead of
building up a single line of argumentation. Oblivion, invisibility and the politics of time 2.1 'We are
without face, without word, without voice'[1]. A Zapatista said that this is the reason for wearing
the balaclava. The Zapatista balaclava has turned oblivion into a sign of rebellion. Their fight can be
seen as a fight for visibility. With these words we want to enquire how oblivion has been a
constitutive part of modernity's politics of time. 2.2 The forms of oppression that characterize
modernity or more precisely, modernity/ coloniality cannot be sufficiently understood only
through its material process without taking into account oblivion, invisibility. Modern systems of
domination are not just about material exploitation; they are also about a politics of time that
produces the other by rendering it invisible, relegating the other to oblivion. There is an intimate
connection between oblivion and invisibility. The destruction of memory, as a result of the
modern politics of time produces invisibility. In turn, invisibility is tantamount to de-
politicization. In this context it is possible to say that the struggles for social justice are struggles
for visibility. The oppressed can succeed in their fight against invisibility by bringing the claims for
justice into the light of the public, and thus becoming political[2]. 2.3 The use of the term 'visibility'
signals the close relation that there is between the material means of oppression and epistemic
discrimination, violence. I propose to approach the modernity/ coloniality compound and its
social production of oblivion[3] through the question of time. Through the critique of modern time
we see how modernity and hence coloniality means the imposition of a time that dismisses the
past, turns the future into the teleology of progress and holds the present to be the only site of
the real. Under the light of the critique of time, the modernity/coloniality compound shows its
double face. On the one hand we have the hegemony over visibility in the spectacle of modernity,
the phantasmagoria of modernity, and on the other, we have coloniality's strategies of invisibility,
which impose oblivion and silence and erase the past as a site of experience. The condition of
possibility of these strategies over the visible, the monopoly of the sense of the real, is grounded on
the modern notion of time and constitutes under this perspective the politics of time of the
modernity/ coloniality compound. Modernity, coloniality and the question of their mediation 2.4
The growing literature around the modernity/ coloniality research agenda[4] teaches us that we
cannot speak of modernity without speaking of coloniality. We cannot see the ideas of progress,
modernization, universality, and the like, without thinking of exploitation, violence, and
segregation. The scholars of the modernity/ coloniality research program have made large efforts
to re-write the history of modernity so that modernity is only seen in and through its relation with
coloniality. 'The "discovery" of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very
foundations of "modernity' more so than the French and Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they
constitute the darker and hidden face of modernity, 'coloniality'' (Mignolo, 2005, p. xiii). 2.5 There
is still a large effort that is needed to solve the theoretical problem that emerges from the hiatus
that separates the narratives of modernity from those of the postcolonial perspective. In other
words, there is a need to elucidate the mediation between the 'progress of modernity' and the
'violence of coloniality'. 2.6 Coloniality is not a derivative or an unintended side effect of modernity,
it is coeval and thus constitutive of modernity. Coloniality is referred to as the dark-side, the under-
side of modernity. We then can speak of the modernity/ coloniality tandem to address the current
social problems. 'Imperial globality has its underside in what could be called global coloniality,
meaning by this the heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of
subaltern groups' (Escobar, 2004, p. 207). 2.7 Let us stop for a moment and look at how the
modernity/ coloniality tandem appears in two illustrations of Mexico City published in the 1930
edition of the National Geographic in an article called North America's Oldest Metropolis. 'A
tattered old Indian came shuffling up to sell me a tiny terra-cota mask. "Who made it?" I asked. '
La Gente Olvidada' (The Forgotten People)" (Simpich, 1930, p. 81). 2.8 Further down the reporter
presents us with another image: 'On billboards, in street cars, in news papers, and on theatre
curtains the well-known illustrations for American made toothpaste, typewriters, motor cars, and
toilet soaps give gaudy welcome to visiting Yankees, and bring that sense of security which comes
from contact with familiar things in far places' (Simpich, 1930, p. 83). 2.9 For us the coupling of
these images signals the same pressing question, namely that of the mediation between modernity
and coloniality. How can we mediate between the 'forgotten people' and the 'billboards' full with
'American' brands? How can we make sense of the invisibility of the people and the visibility of the
commodity? Is this not an essential question that arises in the midst of the modernity/ coloniality
tandem? 2.10 Is it not that the phantasmagoria of modernity, unveiled by critical thinkers such as
Walter Benjamin (1999), Guy Debord (1994), Jean Baudrillard (1983) among others, is part and
parcel of the economy of oblivion that hides the 'colonial wound', that assures the continued
silencing of oppression[5]? 2.11 If from the perspective of the critique of time, modernity is seen as
the age that is geared towards an unattainable future, we could venture to say that coloniality
signals the movement of the rejection of the past as a site of experience. 2.12 A useful mediation
between modernity and coloniality can be found in the notion of a modern politics of times that
expresses itself in a threefold hegemony: a) the rejection of the past, b) the future-oriented
mentality and c) the objectivity of the present. a) Coloniality comes to view as a set of practices
and technologies of oblivion, of temporal discrimination that have contributed to making 'the
other' invisible. b) Modernity is seen as a race towards an unattainable future, the race of the
'phantasmagoria of modernity'. c) The objectivity of modernity affirms the history of western
metaphysics, the ontology of presence, it affirms the present as the only site of the real. The
critique of time 2.13 The critique of modern time shows that modernity is the time that rejects the
past, affirms the present as the site of the real, and construes the future in the semblance of a
teleology. Core ideas of modernity, such as progress, history, universality, individuality they all
correspond to this conception of time. 2.14 In modernity, the present is affirmed as the site of the
real, it is the site of objectivity, it designates the space of power. Michel de Certeau (1988) shows
how modern domination is exercised through appropriating and defining its 'proper place', thus
the enterprises of discovery, of map making, the scriptural economy of science, the modern city can
all be read as strategies to define and appropriate space. Modernity can hence be characterized as
the age that designates space as reality, and space is the site of power. What is important for our
analysis is to realize that in modernity space coincides with presence, it is the expression of the
present. The present and presence come together in the modern notion of time to constitute
the site of the real[6]. 2.15 Benjamin's thinking of the 'empty present' of modernity helps us bring
further this reflection as it shows that the affirmation of the present as the site of the real cannot
be separated from the cult of the new and the illusion of the commodity. Modernity, Benjamin
says, is the time haunted by its phantasmagorias. The modern objectivity of the present is
wedded with the simulation of the future. The modern hegemony over visibility is a hegemony
over the illusions of an objective present and a utopian future. 2.16 On the other hand,
coloniality comes to light, as the movement of oblivion, of the rejection of the past. It is the
expression of a time that praises the present as the site of the real and the future as the
horizon of expectation and the ultimate source of meaning. This notion of the future corresponds
to the one-dimensional mind and its rational utopias. The violence of modernity and coloniality
has constantly been justified in the name of these rational utopias. The chronology of
historical necessity underlies the ideologies from right and left that flourished in the twentieth
century and that systematically suppress the other, fostering the devaluation of political
alternatives, and of alternative narratives. 'Historical determinism has been a costly and
bloodstained fantasy' [7](Paz, 1991, p. 28). Practices of oblivion and temporal discrimination 2.17
It is precisely because the suffering belongs to the past that it is rejected as non-objective, non-
valuable. The suffering of the oppressed is erased. Memory is historicized, the age of museums is
the age of institutions that have reduced the past into a proper place, the past has been confined /
objectified within the grips of history as institution, as a discipline. The past is confined to the
objectivity of the present. History ceases to be a relation to the past, to acquire the semblance of a
museum. 'From the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, the histories and languages of
Indian communities "become historical" at the point where they lost their own history' (Mignolo,
2005, p. 26). The making of the past into an object of knowledge, 'the proper place' of history as a
discipline, means negation of the past as an open realm of experience. This corresponds to the
temporal hierarchy imposed by the modern notion of time and the hegemonic notion of history.
'[F]or nineteenth-century intellectuals, statesmen, and politicians, "modernity" was cast in terms of
civilization and progress' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 70). And '[t]he present was described as modern and
civilized; the past as traditional and barbarian' (Mignolo, 2005). The terms barbarian and then
primitive, traditional, backward become key words in the vocabulary of discrimination and the
production of otherness. Societies were placed 'in an imaginary chronological line going from
nature to culture, from barbarism to civilization following a progressive destination toward some
point of arrival' (Mignolo, 2005). Modern Europe was established as the present, the past was the
other (Mignolo, 2005). This type of temporal discrimination is clearly shown in the Zapatistas'
claims. 'We are not your past, but your contemporaries' this is what a group of Zapatista women
said to a group of European feminists that came to help them 'liberate'[8] themselves. The analysis
of Walter Mignolo shows how modernity/ coloniality came with the instauration of temporal
discrimination. 'By the eighteenth century, when "time" came into the picture and the colonial
difference was redefined, "barbarians" were translated into "primitives" and located in time rather
than in space. "Primitives" were in the lower scale of a chronological order driving toward
"civilization"' (Mignolo, 2005, pXX). 2.18 Next to the reduction of the past by the 'scriptural
machine' (de Certeau 1988) of the historian and the social scientist, and the forms of temporal
discrimination prevailing in modern narratives, there have been other practices, politics of time,
oriented to sever the past from the realm of experience, strategies of erasure. Enormous resources
and political capital have been invested in the destruction of the links with the past. In the Mexican
Codex of Tlaxcala there is an image of Franciscan monks burning the cloths, the manuscripts,
burning the gods (Figure 1). This pictorial example is just a token of the endless history of a
politics of time oriented towards the destruction of memory. 2.19 In 1894 during the attack of
the Dutch in Indonesia, 'When the colonial soldiers conquered the Lombok kingdom a lot of cultural
artefacts were ransacked .... when soldiers need[ed] something to warm-up their bodies .... a shelf of
"old" books from [the] king's library [were] burnt' (Subangun, 2008, p. 2) .... During the British
colony in India the colonial rulers organized bonfires to burn the traditional cloths[9]. In 1614 The
Archbishop of Lima ordered the burning of the quenas and all other musical instrument from the
indigenous people. ... In 1562 Fray Diego de Landa burnt all the Maya books, burning eight centuries
of knowledge. In 1888 in Rio de Janeiro, the emperor Pedro II burnt the documents narrating three
hundred Years of slavery in Brazil (Galeano, 2009, pp. 76-77)[10]. 2.20 "Colonialism is not simply
content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. By a kind of
perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it"
(Fanon in Mignolo, 2005, p. 84)[11]. These practices distinguish coloniality by a politics of time,
driven to erasure. The objects, the instruments, the written knowledge were systematically turned
into ashes. This shows an economy of destruction that is not reducible to be a side effect or a
necessity of economic exploitation. What distinguishes these acts of destruction of the past from
pre-modern acts of cultural destruction is that these acts came together with the imposition of
modern temporality. Memory as resistance 2.21 However the memory of suffering cannot be
burnt down, it cannot be totally erased by these practices. This highlights the value of the oral
tradition as a strategy of resistance in many rebellious movements. The suffering of the past
remains. '[N]othing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history' (Benjamin, 2003,
p. 390). 2.22 The consciousness of the suffering of the previous generations is the source of
strength for a politics of time of liberation. The liberation from the modern politics of time is
a fight for 'a memory that looks for the future against western oblivion'[12]. The rescue of
memory is not a conservative move, the possibility to experience the past is not essentialist, but
rebellious. 'I am sorry, I object the term "nostalgia". Nostalgia is the waltdisneyization of the past. It
is very different from the memory that doesn't idealize nor disguise' (Pacheco, 2009)[13]. The
Mexican poet's warning shows that we should not turn memory into a utopia; if we turn memory
into utopia it is not memory anymore. Memory is the past as a site of experience it is a rebellion
against the future oriented reason of modernity, against the reason that idealizes and disguises.
Memory stands up against the rational utopias that have brought oblivion and violence. 2.23
As Walter Benjamin says the strength of rebellion, the spirit of sacrifice is nourished 'by the
image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren' (Benjamin,
2003, p. 394). 2.24 The coming into visibility of the movements of resistance speaks of their
capacity to break with the continuity of the processes of oppression, a continuity where chronology
is synonymous of oblivion. They break away from the modern empty time that has been
imposed upon them. 'The Mexican revolution of 1910, says Octavio Paz, was a popular upheaval
that brought to light what was hidden. That is why it is not just a revolution but a revelation' (Paz,
1991, p. 54)[14]. The event clashes with the linear history of modernity and brings to visibility
what was up until then marginalized out of the light of the public. Orfeo 'goes to rescue, not to
conquer: he has to receive, not to posses' (Mujica, 2004, p. 25)[15]. 2.25 The postcolonial critique of
modern time, seeks to transform our relation to time. The critical thinker of time does not want
to conquer time, but rather she seeks to rescue, to salvage our relation to time, to the past, to
memory, to history; she must receive, not possess. The manner of appropriation of the historian is
replaced by a more humble reception, by listening, by experiencing time. We can then realize that
the linear history of modernity, its universal chronology is continually being called into
question by a history based on difference, where the present is constantly interspersed by the
past. 'The silences and absences of history are speaking their presence' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 157).
Conclusion 3.1 Let us note that the critique of time, by recognizing the violence of the simulation
of modernity next to the violence of oblivion, is able to thematize the problem of those that are in
the abyss, in-between the paradigms of the subaltern subject and the modern subject. By revealing
the connection between modernity and coloniality, the critique of time brings to light all those who
live in modernity's spaces of exclusion, no longer with an indigenous language, name or identity,
those who live in the lost 'cities of modernity' and which remain largely unseen by the literature
that presents modernity/coloniality as an unmediated dichotomy. 3.2 So far we know that
modernity cannot be thought without coloniality, that the spread of the ideas of progress and
universality cannot be sundered from the spread of marginality and violence. Let this text
serve as an initial provocation to explore the hiatus that divides modernity and coloniality by
raising the question of their mediation. How can we think a modernity of simulacra that holds
hegemony over the visible next to a coloniality of violence, oblivion and invisibility? How can we
think together simulation and oblivion? Our proposal is to explore this mediation through the
question of time, by taking seriously the politics of time that are at play next to the economic
and political systems of exploitation. We suggest, for instance, looking at the illusion of the
future in the practices of commodity consumption, at the notion of the present as being the site
of the real in the institutional practices of power over places and knowledges and at the oblivion
of the past in the practices of destruction of memory. Simulation and oblivion can be thought
together when we see the politics of time that is at play in modernity/ coloniality.