We are used to thinking of Indigeneity in terms of claims to land, but what about claims on time— not in the sense of reminders of historical atrocities, but in the sense of the relativity of time in ways that recall the earlier discussion surrounding alternative modernities? This is at the heart, for example, of Pheng Cheah's recent book on postcolonial literatures in relation to temporality (2016). As Cheah summarizes: “The mapping of the world by temporal calculations is premised on the conceptualization of the world as spatial category, namely, an object of the greatest possible spatial extension that can be divided into zones of quantitatively measurable time. The unity and permanence of a world are thus premised on the persistence of time” (2).

Cheah references the work of William Kentridge's recent installation The Refusal of Time, where Kentridge (working in collaboration with physicist Peter Galison) meditates on the ways in which the global imposition of Greenwich Mean Time created the possibilities for imperial capitalism: “Kentridge shows how cartographical organization of the capitalist world- system relies on Northern- and Eurocentric regimes of temporal measurement. The subordination of all regions of the globe to Greenwich Mean Time as the point zero for the synchronization of clocks is a synecdoche for European colonial domination of the rest of the world because it enables a mapping that places Europe at the world's center” (1). From a model of telling time by the sun, time was translated into grid units across the globe. Cheah goes on to distinguish between what he terms “teleological time” and “worlding” (a concept derived from Heidegger), where literature plays a more active role in opening up multiple temporalities: “teleological time works in the narrow sense by spiritually and materially shaping the world through the prescription of normative ends. […] Instead, time itself is the force of transcendence that opens a world […] this openness is an unerasable normative resource for disrupting and resisting the calculations of globalization. It opens up new progressive teleological times” (9).