The novel is now widely understood as a temporal art, one that employs narrative in order to give form to the human experience of time (Paul Ricoeur). In the wake of several influential movements in late-twentieth century literary studies, among them new historicism and postcolonial studies, it is also now a commonplace to understand the novel as a reflection of the particular time and place of its composition (Edward Said). These twin disclosures have led researchers to distinguish between the genre’s essentially temporal condition and a smaller category of works that directly reflect on time in formal or thematic ways. While there is no subgenre of the novel—bildungsroman, zeitroman, historical novel, or otherwise—that universally and self-consciously addresses itself to the nature of time, scholars have observed that at certain historical thresholds each of these has been repurposed to reflect on temporality. For example, during the early modernist period the Anglophone bildungsroman ceased to represent the predictable, linear development of characters and instead marked their stunted development or early demise (Jed Esty). Likewise, the historical novel under the pressures of postmodernity no longer described the collective becoming of national peoples and began to meditate on the seeming inability of contemporaries to represent historical time (Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson). The dominant approach in literary studies to questioning the linear, historicist, progressive, and developmental patterns of the traditional Western novel has so far been to examine the epochal events—revolution, war, or emergence of social anomie—that have made these assumptions seem unwarranted.

Rather than focusing on the historical events responsible for dislodging existing forms of time consciousness, our panel will address novels written by minority subjects that reflect a temporal consciousness out of sync with dominant assumptions about the rhythms, speed, and duration of collective time. A great deal of scholarship now exists linking the experience of social exclusion to the rejection of normative forms of time-consciousness (Saidiya Hartman, Lena Jayyusi, Elizabeth Freeman), but little sustained effort has been made to bring these insights to bear on the novel form. This panel examines twentieth- and twenty-first century novels written by minority subjects in the U.S.—including immigrant, indigenous, racialized, and ethnic others—that dispense with or critically interrogate the master narrative of national progress. We are interested in the ways that positions of social marginality may entail an acute consciousness about the problem of historical time that otherwise goes unnoticed and also confer a privileged vantage point for narrating alternative structures of time.

John Streamas argues that for marginalized individuals, time always registers its opacity and insists on being thought. For the unmarked—white, male, straight—subjects who determine a society’s norms, time becomes “ambient,” a given of existence that requires no further interrogation. Those who have been made into minorities, by contrast, experience time as traumatic, a source of perennial injury that allows for no accommodation. Streamas tracks the narrative techniques employed by two novelists, Octavia Butler and Ruth Ozeki, that function to disrupt the consensus about linear, progressive time. The protagonists of Butler’s Kindred and Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being move between past and future, speed and slowness, to diagnose the falsity of the progressive and accelerationist metanarratives of modernity. For Streamas, these novels both diagnose the hollowness of dominant temporal logics while also suggesting alternative temporalities—slowing down or disarranging temporal sequence—that might be more livable.

Laura De Vos contrasts settler time to the indigenous “survivance”—a polysemous term connoting endurance, resistance, and a spectral, subaltern existence—dramatized in novels like Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Like settler time, which is comprised of an iterating, cumulative, and spiraling violence that both revisits old crimes and intensifies their violence, indigenous strategies of survival also draw on past world-making activities to renew collective life. But whereas the logic of settler violence aims to disarticulate indigenous history into discrete moments that can be plotted along a linear timeline and so be controlled, the indigenous novel about time aims to restore the rich set of relations across time and between lived spaces that animate indigenous cultures. For De Vos the novel about time constitutes a tool for eliciting the binding ties between contemporary indigenous communities and their ancestors—among others—that settler projects had worked to undo.

Erin Murrah-Mandril explores the ways in which Chicano/a novels conjoin multiple temporalities, dominant and in various degrees of subalternity, in dialogic relation. Ostensible Bildungsromane like Americo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez and Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him convey the agonistic encounter between dominant U.S. exceptionalist, forgotten Spanish, erased indigenous, and subordinated Mexican temporalities. These discrepant temporalities don’t allow for an easy synthesis; they instead dramatize the ways that historical loss preempts recognizable character development. But whereas Paredes’ novel limits itself to critiquing the progressive narrative that occludes this loss, Rivera’s aims to delegitimize all historical metanarratives and so allow the individual to conceptualize time on her own terms.

Pelin Kivrak finds a desynchronization of the lives of strangers in novels written by immigrants to the United States. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao destabilize the assumption of simultaneity upon which traditional novelistic narrative depends for its staging of ethical encounters. And yet these novels don’t eliminate the possibility of encounters entirely: they instead generate a set of unexpected encounters that Kivrak calls, borrowing from Nabokov and Rushdie, “foldedness.” Through the figure of foldedness Kivrak tests the contemporary novel about time’s capacities to think the possibility of meaningful human relations at a moment when national injustice has rendered these lives out of sync.

These papers, each limited to 14 minutes, will be followed by an open question and answer session that will last for approximately 20 minutes.