“Unmodern” Subjects: Africa, Fetishism, and European Self-Fashioning

This essay offers a critique of the temporalizing impulse that creates the image of untimely political and cultural persistence in the “Third World.” This temporalizing impulse views certain formations as evidencing the continuing presence of a “backward” past in the present, leading to imaginary encounters with uneven temporalities and temporal multiplicities beyond the centers of economic and intellectual power. In former Spanish and Portuguese America, one such imaginary temporal encounter posits the continuing presence of the Middle Ages in the subcontinent. Instead of merely rejecting the category of “the medieval” as spurious, here, we will closely observe its manifold uses for the creation of untimeliness.