Donna Haraway:
Statements on “Decolonizing Time”
Excepts from a video interview with Berno Odo Polzer
I think for me one of the key meanings of “decolonizing time” is a coming to inhabit multiple temporalities, coming to inhabit enfolded and entangled times that are ontologically complex – a kind of being slow to come to ontological conclusions, a kind of slowing down of category work, so as to open up the contact zones of thinking. Marilyn Strathern taught me that it matters which thoughts think thoughts, that it matters which categories categorize categories. A kind of opening up the dangerous contact zones of ways of thinking and being that truly come from different kinds of experiences of living and dying. The contact zones that come from taking responsibility for and with each other, inheriting the trouble of colonial histories, inheriting the troubles of exterminations and extractions, but also inheriting the inventions of precious things – for example many of the things in the Enlightenment must never be lost from our planet again – inheriting the precious as well as the terrible and opening up categories. Learning to listen.
“Decolonizing time” involves the cultivation of the capacity to be still, to listen and not to be self-certain. It is to understand that colonial time might be defined as Plantationocene time, as the time of simplification for the extraction of value, for its distribution in hierarchical ways, coupled with massive genocides of both people and other creatures – the kinds of massive simplifications and displacements that go along with disappearing.
I think colonial time goes along with both, the disappearing of many kinds of creatures that are in the way – plants, animals, people, microbes, lands, ways of life – but also enhancing the growth and multiplication of those kinds of beings that are necessary for forced life, if you will, for the production of value. So the colonial time is full of both, the disappeared and what I’m calling the “born ones”, the forced reproductions of Plantationocene and Capitaloscene. […]
And “decolonizing time” I think means learning to inhabit these times of urgent trouble with a memory that this is not and has never been all of time, including all of now – that we do not live in a time only of domination; we also live in times of tremendous flourishing and generativity and capacities to connect with each other. […]
I think “decolonizing time” requires paying attention to our species as travelers, both free and forced – that we belong to a species of travelers. I use that term to deliberately align myself with the gypsy. In a time of mass migrations – both free and forced, but overwhelmingly forced – “decolonizing time” means aligning with the temporalities of the displaced, with the time in the camps, with the time trying to get visas, with the time of expulsion, and aligning with what people are already doing with and for each other. It is an attempt not to form some kind of new fantasy of a vanguard party, but a speculative fabulation of kinds of systemic unity that make us supple and flexible and able to respond.
I’m currently part of sanctuary movements around immigration in the United States and in California. We’re forming rapid response networks, we’re building networks of immigration lawyers and we’re aligning ourselves with both the visible and invisible immigrant populations. As my friend Chris Connery says about doing politics, or “decolonizing time”: it really means showing up. There is no formula, no imagination of one movement. We have in fact many good ideas and many good policies underway in these urgent times; it’s not that we lack well-reasoned articulate programs. But the real key to politics is showing up, you know, not disappearing from co-presence with each other in urgent times. I think that is an active decolonization.
And then, of course, clearly part of decolonizing is, get it, for people like me, that – like it or not – I am an inheritor of white settler colonialism and those practices are not finished, they’re still going on. It is a matter of learning to be in alliance with native and indigenous peoples as opposed to always thinking that one can take the lead. I think decolonizing requires a kind of radical not-knowing, emptying-out, a kind of truly not-knowing, so as to somehow be less stupid. All of that seems to me part of “decolonizing time” in very practical ways.