The position makes greater sense when one realizes that the present postmodern age of
globalization draws currency from the age of modernity; it goes without saying that the
evolution of the modern age itself was enhanced through the “abstraction of time-as-
history” (Paul James 2006:175). If cumulative time was thus crucial in its abstraction as
history in the old order, and in the present world order of globalization, it still remains as
germane, even if “empty time” appears to be dominant.^79 James sheds more light on its
contemporary utilization in global relations of power when he says:
In the present then, we can find across the world all forms of temporality..., from the
analogical to the virtual, and from the tribal to the postmodern. Empty time, the dominant
temporality of this period has become filled with the possibilities of other times and other
sensibilities, but dominant it remains a dominant and savagely demanding ontology
that frames objective and subjective relations in the twenty-first century. (172)If time is this crucially implicated in the abstraction of history, James intimates further
that so is “space” implicated in the abstraction of territory (175). What emerges from the
reconstitution of both time and space in the global scheme of things, at least for the
postcolonial world, should then induce caution especially because of the implication of
power play along North-South lines:
The reconstitution of time and space has political consequences, with more abstract
means of connecting time and space giving increased potential for power at a distance.
As the dominant way in which we live time and space has become more abstract, it has
become more open to processes of rationalization, objectification and commodification.
Thus the way that power is generated has itself become both (potentially) more extensive
in its reach and intensive in its depth, as it has become more abstractly constituted.
(James 176)But it must be remarked that the reconstituted abstraction of time and space in the period
of globalization has found concretization in practices of multiculturalism, migrancy,
cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, among other terms that dominate the discourse of
postcolonial theory today and are centrally entrenched within the discourse of diaspora.
Indeed, the instantiation of the unstoppable pull to the centre from the postcolonial world
79
In the categorization of Paul James (2006:169), empty time is the latest mode of temporality, having been
antedated by others forms like the analogical, genealogical, mythological, the tribal and the postmodern.
However, it remains the most contested site of temporality because of the way it, among other things,
encourages unbridled capitalism.