Woman,time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Abstract

Central to the functioning of colonialism and coloniality is a specific construction of time, in terms of which the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that there is a specific rhetorical device at work here, namely the ‘denial of coevalness’, which is a colonial distancing strategy through which other worlds are robbed of validity on account of not existing within the same time as the West. In this article, I aim to add to analyses of scholars like Fabian, Chakrabarty and Mignolo by arguing that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. As a point of departure I use Walter Mignolo’s idea that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. I argue that the discursive construction of nature (as opposed to culture) and tradition (as opposed to modernity) centres on gendered assumptions and an obsession with control over women’s bodies. In the course of making this argument, I also point out the overlaps, as well as key differences, between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal distancing of the colonised, on the other. In particular, I show how Western linear chronology positions Western women and previously colonised women in vastly different ways. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the key erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project.

Keywords

Africa decolonisation Mignolo nature Oyewumi temporality

Introduction

In his speech directed to the young African elite at the University of Dakar in July 2007, the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy asserted a link between Africa’s current condition and its relation to history: ‘[t]he tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, in rhythm with the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words’ (Ba, 2007). Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2007) remarked later that this is nothing less (or more) than Hegel, that Sarkozy’s speech is directly lifted from Hegel’s philosophical understanding of history (1857) Please correct throughout the article as necessary] in terms of which he depicts Africans as children in the forest, unaffected by the movement of history. Sarkozy is ventriloquising a logic that thoroughly permeates the canon of modern Western thought and science, and which has been foundational to the colonial enterprise, namely that the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering, in so far as different peoples occupy different places in a linear chronology, or the progressive timeline of history. Travelling from Europe to Africa (or other ‘non-Western’ worlds) is not only a movement in space, but also a movement back in time, through which the European can explore an anterior stage of human life.

Perhaps the most famous exposition of this colonial deployment of Western linear time is Johannes Fabian’s ground-breaking anthropological work Time and the Other (1993) in which he explores how anthropology contributed to the intellectual justification of the colonial enterprise by providing politics and economics with the notion of evolutionary Time – a scheme in which ‘not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream’ (Fabian, 1993: 17). The ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian, 1993: 31) is therefore an existential, political and rhetorical device through which non-Western worlds are denied temporal coexistence with the West, and therefore robbed of validity and laid bare for Western plunder. Decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2011) refers to this temporal logic as the ‘coloniality of time’. Similarly, postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) refers to the ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ structure of time.

The racial workings of this temporal ordering are well understood. Evolutionary science and eugenics built a racist scientific system in terms of which people of different races were understood to be in different phases of evolutionary development, culminating in the fully human, fully developed white Western subject.

In this article, I argue that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. In my exploration of the gendered aspects of colonial temporality I bring together two bodies of work, namely, on the one hand, Western feminist theory’s analysis of how dominant Western constructions of time work to exclude woman, and on the other hand, postcolonial and decolonial analyses of how Western linear temporality positions the colonised in a perpetual past. Influential theoretical analyses of the workings of colonial temporality (for example those of Mignolo, Fabian and Chakrabarty) tend to proceed in gender neutral terms, and conversely, feminist analyses of the patriarchal implications and effects of Western linear chronology mostly fail to account for racial difference.¹ In this article I aim to add a layer to our understanding of colonial temporality by highlighting how the discursive process through which the colonised is situated in the past, needs gender to do its work. At the same time, I bring to the surface the racial logic underpinning woman’s exclusion from Western time as progress, and highlight certain important differences between how this time set positions Western woman, on the one hand, and the colonised and especially colonised woman, on the other. The idea is not to provide a complete or cohesive theory, but to engage in a slow and partial disentangling of the complicated web in which gender narratives are interweaved and enmeshed with colonial ideas about progress that continue to structure our world.

A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project. Addressing the colonial denial of coevalness will require close scrutiny of how we construct gender and kinship relations in the postcolony, and how we are complicit in the maintenance of the colonial denial of coevalness through how we discursively, socially and politically position women in our societies. This is an insight that is absent from the dominant understandings of the workings of colonial temporality. I show in this article how feminist projects, like the one of Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, that work to uncover traces of alternative precolonial sexuate histories and knowledges that differ radically from the dominant Western account of human sexuality, are key to the undoing of the colonial denial of coevalness.

I start my argument in the next section of this article by briefly summarising the Western feminist critique that has been levelled against the dominant Western conception of time, namely that woman is excluded from Western linear time as progress or project, on account of the way in which she is associated with the body, reproduction and therefore nature. In the third section I highlight and explore in detail the place and role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness. As point of departure, I use Mignolo’s argument that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. Mignolo explains that colonial/modern thought situates the colonised in nature and tradition which are regarded to exist outside of the forward movement of time, while the Western subject manages to transcend the rhythms of nature and the trappings of tradition to enter into culture and modernity, which exist in the present and continuously reach into the future. I develop Mignolo’s analysis by highlighting the ways in which the bodies of women become the markers of, as well as marked by, the temporal distinctions of nature/culture and tradition/modernity. In the process I point out the overlaps between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal othering of the colonised, on the other hand, but also the key differences, and crucially, the way in which these processes position Western women and previously colonised woman in vastly different ways. In the fourth section I look at the connection that Mignolo draws between the colonial denial of coevalness and the colonial subalternisation of knowledges. Mignolo makes the point that the colonial denial of coevalness involves the erasure, dismissal or distortion of alternative knowledges that compete with those of the West, on account of such knowledges being outdated or ‘behind’ in their understanding of the world. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. If the association of the colonised with nature and tradition relies on reductionist colonial tropes of indigenous sexual deviance, monstrosity and oppression, it can be argued that attempts by indigenous feminist scholars to excavate, reconstruct or reimagine precolonial sexuate lives in all their nuance and complexity, have a crucial role to play in the destabilisation of the colonial difference set up through these temporal distinctions, and the process of delinking the idea of progress from Western sexual models.

Western time and the feminine Other

The seemingly universal notion of time as a straight line with an arrowhead (symbolising the present) moving in the direction of the future, divided into measurable and consistent units, through which order, regularity and productivity are designated, has been shown by many scholars to be a cultural construct of the industrial-capitalist, Christian Western society (see for example: Comaroff, 1991; Adam, 1998; Perkins, 2001; Nanni, 2011). This notion of time replaced the view of time as cyclic repetition in tune with nature (as put forward by Western philosophers like Aristotle) (McKenzie, 1971: 78–79; Mignolo, 2011: 155).

There is ample scholarship documenting and exploring alternative ways of understanding, measuring and living time (that differ significantly from this Western notion of time as progress, arrival, project) that were prevalent in different precolonial societies. In African scholarship, John Mbiti ([1969] 1990) argues for example that the African notion of time is two-dimensional (further discussed by Kibujjo M. Kalumba, 2005). And Joshua N. Kudadjie (1996) makes an argument for Ga and Dangme time as a spiral. Richard Broome (2005) and Josephine Flood (1996) discuss precolonial timekeeping in Australia which was done according to social and ecological time patterns that, although different from Western clock time, were not at all random or haphazard.² Rather than being universal and inevitable (as it is represented in globally dominant strands of thought and popular culture), scholars have therefore revealed Western linear chronology to be a political and cultural construct that serves particular ends.³

Many Western scholars have been showing how Western linear chronology, or time as ‘reckoning’ as Mignolo (2011: 150) refers to it, wreaks havoc also against the internal others of the Western symbolic order,⁴ like woman. Feminist critiques of Western linear chronology hold forth that the dominant Western conception of time positions woman as the constitutive outside of linear time as progression. There are at least two closely related grounds for this exclusion: first, the association of woman with cyclical and monumental time, and second, the association of woman with space/place. In what follows, it will be seen that both of these grounds involve a discursive conflation of woman with nature.

In The Second Sex (1949), De Beauvoir argues that maternity imprisons woman in repetition and immanence in so far as it involves acts that are repeated ‘from day to day in an identical form, which were perpetuated almost without change from century to century; they produced nothing new’ (1949: 88). Giving birth and suckling are not activities where there is a project involved, but are natural functions to which woman submits passively (De Beauvoir, 1949: 88). In contrast, through goal setting, inventions and creation, man as Homo Faber is able to break through this endless cycle of immanence, to ‘burst out of the present’ and to lay down ‘the foundations for a new future’ (De Beauvoir, 1949: 89). Woman’s relegation to the outside of linear time therefore has to do with the way in which woman is responsible for procreation – a natural, material process that is cyclical in nature.

Similarly, in her famous essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1986) Kristeva explains that feminine subjectivity is linked to cyclical and monumental time, the former being about repetition, and the latter relating to the idea of this repetition being perpetuated into eternity. Kristeva characterises the time of history (time as project, departure, progression) as linear time, and this belongs to male subjectivity.⁵

Closely related to the way in which woman is associated with the cyclical and monumental time of nature and natural reproduction, is the way in which she becomes associated with space (within which the human species is generated). Referring to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1993: 9) makes the argument that in dominant strands of Western thought, time becomes the interiority of the subject and space its exteriority.⁶ Woman as mother represents this exteriority of the subject, the place for man, thereby becoming a thing (Irigaray, 1993: 11).⁷

In response to Western linear chronology’s temporal exclusion of the gendered Other, feminist and queer scholars have been trying to think time outside of the linear or ‘progressive’ paradigm in a way that renders ‘other’ others visible. This has given rise to alternative notions of time such as ‘woman’s time’ (see for example: Kristeva, 1986) and ‘queer time’ (see for example: Halberstam, 2005).

Gender and the denial of coevalness

Gender and nature

In what follows I will highlight how colonial/modern thought also positions the colonised in close proximity to nature, and on account thereof, renders the colonised the inert exterior of the Western modern present. In this sense, woman’s expulsion from Western time (as project, teleology, departure, progression and arrival) is comparable to the colonial denial of coevalness through which the colonised is relegated to a permanent ‘waiting room of history’ (a notion used by Chakrabarty, 2000: 8).

In his book The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011), Mignolo centres the distinction between culture and nature in his understanding of the colonial denial of coevalness. Mignolo explains that the linear construction of time in terms of the evolutionary logic of historical progress, spearheaded by Europe, is specifically conceptualised as ‘an imaginary chronological line going from nature to culture’ (2011: 151). The spatial ordering of past and present therefore also designates the distinction between nature and culture. ‘The more you go toward the past, the closer you get to nature’ (Mignolo, 2011: 152). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, time was measured by many societies (including the Europeans) in a way that was integrated into the flow of nature (Mignolo, 2011: 166). However, in the eighteenth century, this made way for a linear time set (which was made the ‘real’ time of history) (Mignolo, 2011: 170), which reduces nature to the fixed and inert backdrop or exteriority of human subjectivity and the progress of civilisation.

A well-known trope in this regard is the association of the African with nature. In his book On the Postcolony (2001), Achille Mbembe writes that ‘discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal – to be exact, about the beast’ (Mbembe, 2001: 1). South African feminist philosopher Louise du Toit (2019: 133) argues that in this sense the racial othering in the colony draws on and repeats differently the gendered othering of Western patriarchy which opposes woman-as-nature to a transcendent human subjectivity. Because the colonised is subjugated on account of a symbolic proximity to nature, which is coded feminine in the Western symbolic order, the colonised is feminised (Du Toit, 2019: 133). In terms of this trope, the ‘wilderness’ or the colony becomes a sensuous and inviting woman that is impregnated with the seeds of civilisation, and the ‘civilising’ mission is a performance of masculine sexual virility and domination.⁸

However, temporal distancing as colonial device is gendered in ways that exceed the matter of the relation between woman and nature. The association of the colonised with nature (as inert and fixed and existing outside of time) is done through a range of (often contradicting) sexual metaphors and symbols. One recurring trope in this regard is the narrative of the African with the scandalously oversized genitals, which are posited as indicative of a wild hypersexuality. Sander Gilman writes for example that in the nineteenth century ‘the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a “primitive” sexual appetite but also the external signs of this temperament – primitive genitalia’ (Gilman, 1985: 45; see also: Abrahams 1997). In the colonial/modern imagination the black African is therefore reduced to a bodily immediacy, which is understood in sexualised terms and precludes the transcendence that distinguishes the human subject from nature. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writes in Black Orpheus:

The Black remains the great male of the earth, the sperm of the world. His existence – it is the great vegetal patience; his work – it is the repetition from year to year of the sacred coitus. He creates and is fertile because he creates […] To labor, to plant, to eat, is to make love with nature. It is thus that they rejoin the dances and the phallic rites of the African Blacks (1976: 44–45).

Like woman, as described by De Beauvoir, the black African is trapped in the repetitive cycles of nature and therefore doomed to an existence of physical immediacy, barred from the transcendence and progress through which the Western man becomes a fully human subject. However, here the sexuality of the colonised is not understood in terms of passivity (as Western thought constructs feminine sexuality), but as grotesquely active, generative and hyper-virile in a way that is neither masculine nor feminine in terms of Western gender norms.

Although there are therefore important overlaps in the process through which (Western) woman and the colonised are associated with nature, it does not only come down to a feminisation of the colonised. Rather, the association of the colonised with nature also relies on narratives of sinful and bestial sexuality that render the colonised monstrously non-gendered, and therefore even further removed from the Western ideal of human subjectivity than (Western) woman. Argentinian feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (2010: 743) argues in this regard that the imposed and perceived sexual purity, passivity and domesticity of the European woman in service of the European man become markers of progress and culture.⁹ Accordingly, it is through their conforming to a framework of dichotomous gendering that bourgeois white Europeans were ‘civilised’ and fully human (Lugones, 2010: 743). Lugones argues that the colonised who do not conform to such a dichotomous gendering become something other than ‘men’ and ‘women’ from the colonial ‘civilising’ perspective (Lugones, 2010: 744). Rather, colonised men became non-human males judged from the normative understanding of ‘man’, the human being par excellence, and colonised women became non-human females, judged from the normative understanding of ‘women’ (the human inversion of men) (Lugones, 2010: 744). Accordingly, controlling the sexuality of the white woman through confining her to a certain standard of femininity (characterised by weakness, materiality, passivity, in binary opposition to active and transcendent masculinity) becomes a key feature of the colonial difference with reference to which the coloniser posits himself as having transcended nature to accede to culture, and therefore existing in the present.

The sexualised language and imagery at work in the colonial writings and scientific discourse to effect the racial and temporal Othering of the colonised people have grave implications for colonised women (or ‘colonised females’ as Lugones would say) that persist in the ‘post’-colony. In her book Rape, a South African Nightmare (2015), South African feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola shows how the colonial narratives about the ‘backwardness’ of the colonised, centred on descriptions of abnormal or oversized genitalia, wild promiscuity and hypersexuality, also work to justify the sexual abuse of the colonised woman. In this paradigm, no sexual acts perpetrated against the colonised woman count as rape, because she is understood to be desirous of any sexual advances made on her, and in any case, is always already raped by her monstrously sexed male counterpart (Gqola, 2015: 37–41). Accordingly, although there is an overlap between the way in which Western linear chronology reduces both woman and the colonised to the inert exterior of time as progress, on account of their conflation with nature, it positions the Western woman and the colonised woman in different ways. The past into which the colonised is thrusted (on account of the sexualised discourse through which colonial modernity situates the colonised in proximity to nature) is one of primordial and violent sexual urges where the rape of colonised women is naturalised, therefore tolerated. At the same time, when such rape continues unabatedly in the ‘post’-colony (on account of it being tolerated), it can conveniently serve as justification for the narrative of the evolutionary ‘backwardness’ or ‘primitivity’ of colonised society. This is understood in contrast to the West as a place that has transcended such ‘natural’ (therefore ‘primal’) behaviours through ‘culture’ (culture taking the form of a very specific gender system that projects on woman a sexual purity and passivity).

Tradition and modernity

The second temporal distinction that Mignolo regards to function at the centre of the colonial denial of coevalness, is the distinction between modernity and tradition. Mignolo (2011: 160) argues that just as ‘nature’ is an invention of modernity/coloniality, so is tradition. In terms of this logic, the life worlds of colonised civilisations can be dismissed on account of being ruled by practices, rituals and norms echoing from an archaic past – ‘tradition’. In contrast, the presently existing traditions or cultural practices of Western people are situated at the forefront of time, moving into the future, which means that such traditions or cultural practices transcend the status of ‘tradition’ and become ‘modern’.

In this section I aim to show how this distinction between tradition and modernity is specifically inscribed on the bodies of colonised women, by coloniser and colonised. Here too different narratives are tightly interwoven. On the one hand, scholars like Mahmood Mamdani show how, in the colonial situation, a static and distorted version of indigenous ‘tradition’ is imposed on the colonised as a form of colonial governmentality (mirroring the monarchical, authoritarian and patriarchal practices of the colonial state) (Mamdani, 2001: 22; see also: Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 121–156). Where custom was a dynamic and complex part of the precolonial colonised society (as it is part of any existing society), it became an instrument of political power in the colony through which the colonised were incorporated into a state-enforced customary order (Mamdani, 2001: xvii). Many postcolonial and decolonial feminist scholars show how what was imposed by the coloniser as indigenous ‘tradition’ through enforced imperial systems of ‘customary’ law often entailed oppressive distortions of indigenous gender practices or sexuate lives, as interpreted through the heteropatriarchal lens of the coloniser (see for example: Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 126–127; Nzegwu, 2012: 63–102).

On the other hand, domination was exerted over the colonised through the violent erosion of indigenous practices, masked as an attempt at ‘freeing’ the colonised (and especially the colonised woman) from ‘oppressive’ traditional practices. Fanon (1965: 37) explains this dynamic when he writes how the officials of the French administration in Algeria focused their attention on unveiling the Algerian woman (or ‘conquering’ her) in order to erode the structure of Algerian society and its capacity for resistance. In order to justify this course of action, the coloniser promises to ‘free’ the Algerian woman who they represent as humiliated, cloistered, objectified and dehumanised by the Algerian man (Fanon, 1965: 38).¹⁰ In other words, colonial rule identified specific gendered practices as that which the colonised needed to be ‘freed’ from in order to ‘progress’ to civilised modernity. Nakanyike Musisi writes with reference to the Baganda under British colonial rule: ‘[i]n the end, the treatment of women became the key measure of Buganda’s […] ability to advance as a modern nation. Missionary and colonial images of Kiganda practices that debased women were held up as reasons for Buganda’s regretful state and failure to progress’ (2002: 99; see also: Turrittin, 2002).

Accordingly, by reading Mamdani and Fanon together, a double role of the colonial temporal distinction between tradition and modernity becomes evident. On the one hand, the colonised is walled into a fixed and isolated version of tradition, distorted through the Western heteropatriarchal lens of the coloniser, with the aim of exerting control over the colonised. On the other hand, the pursuit of selectively ‘freeing’ the colonised from the oppression of this same tradition through ‘civilising’ practices becomes a justification for abuse and domination of the coloniser over the colonised. In both instances, the ‘tradition’ at stake is often gendered and related to the bodies of colonised women. That which places the colonised in proximity to ‘tradition’ rather than modernity, and therefore freezes the colonised society in the past, revolves around, marks and disciplines the bodies of colonised women.

In resistance to this attack on indigenous society through the bodies of colonised women, the colonised society fights back in the same register (Fanon, 1965: 46). In other words, the conservation of gendered practices fixed by colonial discourse as the ‘tradition’ of the colonised then becomes a focal point of the anti-colonial resistance. These gendered practices, that were previously dynamic and multi-layered, become static and frozen, and serve as a battleground between coloniser and colonised, at the dire expense of women.

The way in which women’s bodies become the vessel or carrier of ‘tradition’, activated in both colonising discourses and the anti-colonial or decolonising struggles, is closely connected to the way in which women become bearers of nation and national identity in nationalist rhetoric. Nationalist thinking, and therefore also often anti-colonial struggles for self-determination, commonly conceive of man as actor for the nation, while woman becomes the symbol of nation on account of serving as biological reproducer of ethnic collectivities, transmitter of culture and signifier of ethnic/national/colonial difference.¹¹ Certain forms of nationalism then activate specific gendered practices or systems as symbolic representations of an ‘authentic’ cultural identity and consequently resist transformation of gender relations in the name of preserving national culture and fighting colonialism and neo-colonialism (see: Cornell, 1998; Du Toit, 2013). An obvious example of this is how the practice of female circumcision is vehemently defended and upheld in some parts of Africa in the name of protecting culture and nation.¹² As with the temporal distinction between nature and culture, the implications of the colonial distinction between tradition and modernity therefore reach into the present. For example, today, in many African contexts, feminist struggles for the liberation of women have become synonymous with imperial agendas, and feminism is often characterised as alien to Africa (see for example: Chukukere, 1998: 134; Eze, 2015: 312). The temporal colonial distinction between tradition and modernity therefore continues to position the ‘West’ as the place of feminism and sexual freedom, in contrast with the (‘post’-)colony as a place of unyielding male dominance.

Judith Butler (2008, 2009) shows (with reference to contemporary anti-Islamic sentiments in the global north) how this dynamic works to legitimate racist hierarchies between the West and its Others, as well as the forms of coercion and discrimination justified by such hierarchies. The (perceived) absence of sexual freedom among certain peoples is read by the West as a way in which non-Western Others have not yet evolved to the fully human status that characterises the lives of people in ‘sexually liberated’ Western societies. This legitimises the oppression of non-Western Others by the West (which regards itself as able to articulate the paradigmatic principles of being human, on account of being the place where sexual freedom has reached its zenith).

The Western woman’s progressive attainment of sexual freedom is therefore a temporal marker of modernity that is constructed against the perceived ‘traditional’ unfreedom of the colonised. This serves as legitimising fiction for the racialised distinction between tradition and modernity. The Western woman’s partial entrance into Western linear time as progress is used to repeatedly reinstate the colonial denial of coevalness. At the same time, this perceived/projected/constructed patriarchal oppression of the previously colonised woman legitimates the maintenance of Western dominance over non-Western others in so far as it confirms the West as articulating the paradigmatic principles of human life, of which the colonial Others are falling short.

Indigenous feminist knowledge production as antidote to the colonial denial of coevalness

Importantly, Mignolo understands the colonial denial of coevalness to be intimately tied to the colonial subalternisation of knowledges, a process which further bolsters Western domination and the marginalisation of its Others. The dominant construction of Western time through the generation of the ‘primitive’ works to devalue different life worlds, by reducing them to an anterior stage of the Same (see also: Lugones, 2010: 749). Other civilisations, with conceptualisations of the world that compete with dominant Western understandings, are ‘behind’ in their understanding; they must still reach the truth, their knowledge need not be taken seriously. It can therefore be said that part of the resilience of the chronopolitical structuring of space can be ascribed to the way in which it constructs knowledge and history from one specific vantage point, which has the result that competing knowledges and cosmologies are erased. In this section, I make the point that the erasure of gender knowledges and sexuate histories is not simply one erasure among many, but a crucial erasure on which the linear temporality of coloniality hinges.

In her book The Invention of Women (1997), Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí writes that ‘in cross-cultural gender studies, theorists impose Western categories on non-Western cultures and then project such categories as natural’ (1997: 11). These Western categories erase or distort the alternative constructions of non-Western and African societies (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 16). The example central to Oyĕwùmí’s work is the way in which gender categories are created in Yorùbá society. She argues that the hierarchical binary construction of gender as it exists in dominant (Western) thought did not exist in precolonial Yorùbá society, where subjectivity was constructed in radically relational and fluid terms. However, these indigenous knowledges are displaced through the universalisation of Western gender categories in knowledge production, on the assumption that ‘Western experiences define the human’ (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 16). As a result, Oyĕwùmí explains, ‘provincialising the West’ is ‘an epic struggle’ because the alternative knowledges and epistemologies that would pose a challenge to the universality of Western knowledges are erased (2016: 4).

Oyĕwùmí is not alone in asserting that the hierarchical masculine/feminine or man/woman binary is a Western cultural construct. Similar to Oyĕwùmí, Will Roscoe, writing about Native North America, argues that ‘Western observers constantly replicate heterosexual binarism wherever they turn their gaze’ (1998: 210). Many other scholars, from Africa and elsewhere, are describing and theorising vastly different and non-binary forms of sexuate lives and kinship configurations that were displaced, distorted or repressed by the colonial imposition of the heteropatriarchal gender binary and concomitant kinship norms (see for example: Silverblatt (1998); Marcos (2006); De Ayala (2009); Wieringa (2010); Rifkin (2011); Nzegwu (2012)).

Considering the role that gender norms play in colonial narratives distinguishing nature from culture, and tradition from modernity (as seen in the preceding sections), which underpin the colonial denial of coevalness, the power of the colonial imposition of binary heteropatriarchal gender norms should not be underestimated. It was seen above that the temporal distinctions of nature/culture and tradition/modernity are made largely with reference to the absence or presence of Western binary gender norms. Lugones (2010) argues in this regard that Western heterosexual binary gender norms and kinship configurations became a mark of civilisation, so that ‘civilising’ the ‘native’ meant fitting indigenous people into the binary categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ whose sexual and kinship relations take the form of heteropatriarchal monogamous nuclearity. Indigenous knowledges and histories of alternative ways of organising sexuate subjects are not taken seriously as alternative models in their own right, but are, on account of their differences to the Western binary model, rejected and dismissed as that which has to be reformed in the name of civilisation and progress.¹³ This rejection, dismissal or distortion is exactly what deprives us of counter-narratives to the unilinear gendered colonial accounts of progress and history. Because linear colonial temporality relies on the universalisation of a single narrative of human progress, defined with reference to a very specific system of binary gender norms embedded in a Western account of human sexuality, the erasure of alternative sexuate histories and knowledges is central to the maintenance of the timeline (which in turn justifies the erasure of such alternative knowledges). Reimagining or reconstructing indigenous/non-Western/pre-colonial gender knowledges beyond the reductionist and harmful colonial tropes, as Oyĕwùmí does, contributes to the destabilisation of the colonial difference set up through these temporal distinctions. Nuanced explorations of indigenous gender knowledges and practices deconstruct the othering processes through which the colonised is positioned in the past on account of gendered associations with nature and tradition. On the basis of these arguments, it can be said that the erasure of indigenous gender knowledges, sexuate histories and kinship configurations is not simply one of the epistemic erasures effected by colonialism, but an erasure on which the temporal logic of coloniality relies.

There is of course great irony here. Now that the ‘West’ is starting to question the gender binary and reaching a point where it starts to conceive of gender in more plural and fluid terms, it regards this shift as a uniquely Western achievement, which is used to distinguish Western subjects from their less-than-human Others (as explained by Butler above). The fact that in many other places there exist long histories of non-binary, radically fluid ways of conceiving of sexuate bodies and relations, that were violently rejected and repressed by Western Imperial governmentality in the name of ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’, is forgotten.

Importantly, the point is not to flip the timeline in the other direction – in other words to try to make the argument that peoples like the Yorùbá were actually ‘ahead’ in time. Nor is the point to emulate precolonial gender and sexuate models as necessarily liberatory. The point is to work to deconstruct unilinear accounts of progress and history, through uncovering and taking seriously a multiplicity of societal structures and configurations that existed outside of the Western binary heterosexual model, that were sophisticated, complex and interesting in their own right. In other words, by uncovering or reimagining alternative indigenous sexuate histories and knowledges that were repressed, erased or distorted through the colonial imposition of the Western binary heteropatriarchal model, we can start delinking the idea of progress from Western sexual models and deconstruct the linearity of the narrative of ‘progress’ marked by a progressive unfolding of what the West deems to be sexual freedom.

Conclusion

In this article, I have brought together different bodies of scholarship in order to highlight the key role of gender in colonial temporality, something which has been explored mostly in gender neutral terms in established postcolonial and decolonial theorisations. I therefore show how gender-blind analyses like those of Mignolo, Fabian and Chakrabarty fail to capture a critical aspect of the temporal logic of colonialism.

In the process, I also show how the classic Western feminist critiques of woman’s relation to time are limited in the sense that they are unable to account for the position of the colonised woman. I highlight certain parallels, but also key differences, in woman’s expulsion from Western linear chronology, on the one hand, and the colonial denial of coevalness, on the other, and consequently how Western linear time positions Western woman in profoundly different ways from how it positions the colonised woman. More specifically, I show how the exclusion of woman from Western time as progress is interweaved with or takes part in the colonial banishment of the colonised from the present, in so far as Western binary gender norms (in terms of which woman is the passive inversion or negative of man) become a marker of progress in time. The exclusion of the colonised from time as progress relies on gendered constructs that render the colonised woman the ‘natural’ object of rape and the bearer of a static and distorted tradition. And conversely, I connect this to the way in which Western woman’s progressive attainment of (sexual) freedom ironically becomes represented as a paradigmatically Western accomplishment, that serves as the basis for racial hierarchy between the West and its Others, and on account thereof becomes unavailable and/or unattractive to women in societies that are resisting neo-colonial oppressions. With this analysis, I therefore complicate and deepen our current understanding of the connections between time, coloniality, gender, feminism and progress.

The major point that I make, through a slow unravelling of various narratives and strands of scholarship, is that the project of undoing the colonial denial of coevalness is an inherently feminist one, in which the creative and tentative reconstruction or reimagining of sexuate knowledges and histories that were erased or distorted through colonial rule, has a crucial role to play. I argue that the erasure of precolonial sexuate histories (as explored by Oyĕwùmí with reference to the Yorùbá) is what the colonial timeline depends on, because its notion of progress (with reference to temporal distinctions like nature/culture, tradition/modernity) is anchored in a singular ‘truth’ or history of human sexuality and gender. Looking for traces of alternative sexuate histories and lives therefore works to delink progress from one standard of sexual freedom. Indigenous feminist knowledges are thus needed to dismantle the scaffolding of colonial temporality. The undoing of the colonial denial of coevalness becomes dependent on feminist retellings, theorising or reimaginings of alternative stories to white heteropatriarchal binarity. At the same time, it is very difficult to bring these stories to the surface and to make them audible, because colonial temporality displaces or erases such knowledges. When feminist articulation of such alternative sexuate histories and knowledges does happen, it does so against the grain of colonial time that continues to shape our world.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Azille Coetzee

Notes

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