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Waiting For Now: Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time, Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement.
In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. …