Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Waiting at the Heart of Colonial Time Regimes
- 2 Projects and Promissory Notes: The Waiting Rooms of V. S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer
- 3 Marooned Time: Disruptive Waiting and Idleness
- 4 Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
- 5 ‘Strategic Waiting’ and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Conflict
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Waiting at the Heart of Colonial Time Regimes
- 2 Projects and Promissory Notes: The Waiting Rooms of V. S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer
- 3 Marooned Time: Disruptive Waiting and Idleness
- 4 Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
- 5 ‘Strategic Waiting’ and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Conflict
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’… This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never’. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied’.
Martin Luther King Jr, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (April 1963)On 6 March 1957 at midnight, Ghana’s national flag was raised, replacing the Union Jack and marking the establishment of the Republic of Ghana and its independence from the United Kingdom. Among the dignitaries in attendance was Martin Luther King Jr, fresh from the success of the Montgomery County bus boycotts in the American South and invited to attend by Kwame Nkrumah. In a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church the following month, King drew parallels between the civil rights movement in America and the push for independence in Ghana, using the story of Exodus as both metaphor and model for freedom struggles. Often linking civil rights and freedom movements across the globe, from Ghana and India to the American South, King was convinced ‘that the black struggle in the Jim Crow South had much to contribute to and learn from movements for independence abroad’. Of the particular events of that midnight ceremony in Ghana, King remembered the crowds teeming with people who ‘had waited for this hour and this moment for years’ –a sight that brought the American civil rights activist to tears. Before ending the sermon, King appealed to the congregation, asking them not to
go out this morning with any illusions … If we wait for it to work itself out, it will never be worked out. Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.
From civil rights movements within countries to anticolonial nationalist movements across the globe, agitation for change has often been linked with refusals to wait. In Why We Can’t Wait, which draws from and expands upon the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ that serves as the epigraph to this Introduction, King argues that the United States ‘had come to count on [the Negro] as a creature who could quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait’. The Revolution gained momentum, King writes, as African Americans were motivated by ‘the decolonization and liberation of nations in Africa and Asia since World War II’.
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- Information
- Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial TimeWaiting for Now, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022