Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity: Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its uneven incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that despite colonial capitalism seeking to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process. In effect, while colonial capitalism wields various techniques to incorporate Indigenous and African life worlds, there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not reproduce the logic of capital. Highlighting two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx’s notion of subsumption, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, however, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary political projects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".