In this moment of Qaher—of accumulation and rupture—our panel considers practices that grapple with, what we might call, in the context of this year’s convention, emancipatory temporalities. Our panelists will explore how global writers and filmmakers disrupt colonial logics of time—linear progress, developmental time, the archive and museum as past— reimagining time as a resource for reckoning, healing, and liberation. Drawing upon the work of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, José Muñoz, and Katherine McKittrick, our panelists investigate visions of decolonial spacetimes across distinct sites.

Natalie El-Eid’s paper analyzes reincarnated Druze member Bassel Abi Chahine’s testimonies to his past life as a child soldier in the Lebanese Civil War (LCW), as depicted in transnational Druze artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s audio-visual documentary, Once Removed (2019). Building on Abu Hamdan’s framing of Bassel’s testimony as an act of “impossible speech,” El-Eid argues that the aural epistemologies of witnessing and testimony enabled by what she frames as “Druze afterlives” not only make evident the cyclicity of traumas set forth since the LCW, but enact a form of healing from these traumas on individual and collective levels–for the Druze, the Lebanese, and their diasporas.

Looking at another documentary film, Dahomey (2024), which follows the repatriation of looted objects from Paris to Benin, Mahnoor Ali’s paper considers the temporality of decolonial return. In Diop’s film, one of the objects speaks, its voice animating the material archive. Ali argues that the voice is critical fabulation in practice, enabling the viewer to access affective dimensions of past colonial rupture. However, turning to scholar and curator Françoise Vergès’s emphasis on discursivity in decolonial museum practice, Ali also explores how the object’s voice might merge with directorial and curatorial voice, limiting the potential of polyphonic interpretation.

Vanessa Holyoak’s paper explores the dream as a metaphorical site of resistance to the hegemony of modern objective spatialized time. They trace the non-linear timescape of the dream through a discussion of slow-cinematic films by two queer Southeast and East Asian (Thai and Malaysian/Taiwanese, respectively) filmmakers and artists: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2022) and Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001). Employing Henri Bergson’s conception of durée to think through subjective experiences of temporal flow, Holyoak argues that both films use “dreamtime” to perform a queer and postcolonial resistance of regimented heteronormative and homogeneous timelines.

Tarushi Sonthalia’s paper turns to Caribbean writer Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2018), a work of speculative fiction that draws readers into a world of ecological destruction in which characters bend crucial fundamentals such as static space and linear time. Sonthalia shows how speculative fiction’s formal experiments with temporal loops and shifting geographies confront us with our own relations to the now, to futurity and accountability, moving us to consider what we are doing—or not doing—to stave off a dire future that is already here. Sonthalia suggests that, by illuminating the hidden logics undergirding dominant social orders, speculative experiments with spacetime offer us generative, even necessary, alternative visions of borders, belonging, and cause-and-effect.

What unites these seemingly disparate interventions is a shared claim: that in moments of Qaher, artists and writers offer us sensorial and imaginative resources for thinking beyond the pasts, presents, and futures colonialism has given us. After the panelists' 12-minute interventions, we will open the space for questions about their papers, then transition into a collective conversation with the audience about how we might inhabit and practice emancipatory temporalities ourselves.

This panel features scholars of color from diverse career stages, geographic locations, and institutional contexts working in decolonial studies across the Global South and its diasporas.