Learning to Tell Time Again
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Abstract
In this seminar, I ask how Pākehā might collaborate with indigenous socio-political projects in ways that disrupt the(ir) colonial tendency to control. Encouraging me is the idea, from Mark Fisher and Nina Power, of a hope that ‘haunts’ rather than ‘promises’. To understand the prospects for a hope of this kind, I explore a set of reflections by Pākehā who were involved in a 14-year collaboration between Otago University scientists and the people of Rakiura on the sustainability of the mutton-bird (sooty shearwater). These reflections suggest that Pākehā find themselves haunted by an ‘empty time’ (Deleuze) that irrupts between the linear and retroactive (circular/spiralling) temporalities used within university discourse to map causal relationships. The persistence of time of this kind appears in the reflections as an unruly surplus, persistently interrupting attempts to either systematise the relations between linear (= scientific) and retroactive (= indigenous) time or to impose upon them a hierarchy of analytical importance. The seminar seeks to understand how a haunting of Pākehā by such profusion and excess might enable, in the spaces of collaboration; ways of contributing that avert the colonial proclivity to control.
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colonialism; cross-cultural knowledge production; temporality; haunting; hope.