History, Capitalism, and Postcolonial Identities
Notes on Archaeologies of the Future
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.36749Keywords:
capitalism, postcolonial archaeology, science fictionAbstract
In the last four decades there have been critical interventions in archaeology that have engaged the issues of politics, class, and colonialism within the production of the past. A concern in this endeavor has been the role that time has played in the chronological ordering of historical narratives. This article contributes to these debates by assessing narratives of archaeologies of the future, particularly as they have been expressed in Western science-fiction and dystopic texts, focusing in particular on Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation (1981) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004, English translation 2009). It assesses how one accounts for such a pernicious system of exploitation as capitalism to have been historicized into a global paradigm, and the complicit role that archaeology plays in this narrative production.References
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Baldwin, J. 1992 [1963]. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage.
____. 2000 [1978]. Just Above my Head. New York: Delta.
____. 2010 [1964]. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, 65–69. New York: Vintage.
____. 2012 [1955]. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press.
Benavides, O. H. 2004 Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bender, B. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bolaño, R. 2004. 2666. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
____. 2009. 2666. Translated by M. Wimmer. London: Picador.
Butler, J. 1997 The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Castañeda, Q. 1996. In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Childe, V. G. 1948. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts & Co.
Coetzee, J. M. 1987. Foe. New York: Penguin.
Coullie, J. L. and V. Andries. 2014. Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness. Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwala-Zulu Natal Press.
Davis, M. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso.
Dawdy, S. L. 2016. Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226351223.001.0001
Deloria, V. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press.
Diamond, S. 1981. In Search of the Primitive. New York: Transaction Publishers.
Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fanon, F. 1976. Black Skin, White Mask. New York: Grove Press.
Faulkner, W. 1951. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House.
Foucault, M. 1998 [1971]. “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History.” In Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault Volume 2, edited by J. Faubion, 369–392. New York: The New Press.
Freire, P. 2000 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Gnecco, C. 1999 Multivocalidad histórica. Hacia una cartografía postcolonial de la arqueología. Bogotá: Universidad De Los Andes.
____. and D. Lippert, eds. 2015. Ethics and Archaeological Praxis. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1646-7
González-Ruibal, A., ed. 2013 Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203068632
____. 2016. “Archaeology and the Time of Modernity.” Historical Archaeology 50 (3): 144–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03377339
____. and G. Moshenska, eds. 2015. Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence, New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1643-6
Gordon, A. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haber, A. and N. Shepherd, eds. 2015. After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post Disciplinary Worlds. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1689-4
Hall, S. 1997a. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by A. King, 19–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
____. 1997b. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by A. King, 41–68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hamilakis, Y. 2007. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jameson, F. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso.
Kincaid, J. 1987 A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
____. 2001. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Laing, R. D. 1983. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Pantheon.
Leone, M. and J. Knauf, eds. 2015. Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6
Lessing, D. 1975. The Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Lowenthal, D. 1999 [1985]. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucas, G. 2004. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203004920
McGuire, R. and R. Paynter 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality, London: Blackwell.
Miéville, C. 2012. The City and the City. London: Pan Books.
Olivier, L. 2013. “The Business of Archaeology is the Present.” In Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the tropes of Modernity, edited by A. Gonzalez-Ruibal, 11–129. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203068632.ch9
____. 2011. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory, Translated by A. Greenspan. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Priest, C. 1981. The Affirmation. London: Faber and Faber.
Rhys, J. 1982. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton.
Rivera Cusincanqui, S. 2013. Ch’ixinkax Utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. La Paz, Bolivia: Tinta de limón ediciones.
Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674369818
Spivak, G. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thomas, D. 2016. “Time and the Otherwise: Plantations, Garrisons, and Being Human in the Caribbean.” Anthropological Theory 16 (2–3): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616636269
Trouillot, M. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Trigger, B. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ucko, P. 1987. Academic Freedom and Apartheid: The story of the World Archaeological Congress. London: Duckworth.
Verdesio, G. 2001. Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Williams, B. 1992. “Of Straightening Combs, Sodium Hydroxide, and Potassium Hydroxide in Archaeological and Cultural-Anthropological Analyses of Ethnogenesis.” American Antiquity 57 (4): 608–612. https://doi.org/10.2307/280824
Wolf, E. 1992. Europe and The People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wylie, A. 2002. Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Published
2019-06-26
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Benavides, O. H. (2019). History, Capitalism, and Postcolonial Identities: Notes on Archaeologies of the Future. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 6(1), 32-46. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.36749
