PhD Programme "Entangled Temporalities in the Global South"

Thematic Focus

The PhD programme "Entangled Temporalities in the Global South" focuses upon temporality as one of the central categories upon which social and cultural difference is constructed. Within the context of a trans-regional approach of Global South studies, the PhD programme explores the way temporal relations are marked via complex entanglements between temporal politics, practices and imaginaries arising from a range of contexts—the homogenizing impact of globalized time, the longue durée of coloniality and the persistence of Indigenous temporal cultures. Temporality is meant here neither as an objective fact nor a category of human consciousness. Rather, it is a product of multifarious social and cultural practices and constraints that will be studied from a subject-centred perspective.

PhD students will carry out research on selected case studies from the disciplinary areas of literary, cultural and media studies, and anthropology, within the framework of three thematic clusters: “Subject and Community”, “Mediality and Performativity”, and “Historicity and Futurity”.

The PhD programme launches a critical interrogation of the discourses of modernity and development, whose categories of societal, technological, scientific and economic progress produce notions of the putative “belatedness” and “underdevelopment” of the South. This interrogation is carried out with the aid of critical temporal theories from the Global South such as the “non-syncronicity of the synchronous” (C. Rincón, reversing E. Bloch’s famous wording), “multi-temporal heterogeniteity” (N. García Canclini), “temporal entanglement” (A. Mbembe), “multiplex temporalities” (A. Simone), “folded temporalities” (D. Hook) or “counter-temporality” (O. Barak).