Robyn Wiegman, Duke University
This talk takes on the Center for the Humanities 2012 theme by surveying debates about temporality in contemporary scholarship. It begins by thinking about how the keywords—stasis, repetition, transformation—are loaded with both critical and political expectations before exploring various contestations that collectively converge on a struggle over the definition and political character of the present: queer theory’s quest for queer time; postcolonial studies’ engagement with “ruination”; and feminist theory’s turn toward a “new materialism.” Seeking less to decipher “the times we are in” than to wonder over our critical certainty that we have a grasp on the present, the talk parses the language, affects, and political investments that shape the circulation of temporality as an object of inquiry in the interpretative human sciences today.