Human Migration and Clashing Notions of Time in Early Modern Europe

Is there meaning in Movement?

How does so much movement impact the world?

…it also creates various syncretic forms of culture…

“Taitacha Tremors”

I.  Push and Pull Factors in Immigration…

II.   Voluntary Migration

A.   Scots to Jamaica (around 1707)

B.   Italian Immigration to Argentina

C.    Japanese Immigration to Brazil

III.         Forced Migration

A.   Criminals to Australia

In A Discourse on Western Planting,

 in 1584, Richard Hakluyt wrote:

Many men of excellent wits and of diverse singular gifts, overthrown by … some folly of youth that are not able to live in England, may there be raised again, and so their country good service; and many needful uses there may (to great purpose) require the saving of great numbers, that for trifles may otherwise be devoured by the gallows.

The children of the wandering beggars of England, that grow up idly,

and hurtful and burdenous to this realm, may there be unladen, better bred up, to the home and foreign benefit, and to their own more happy state…

1788-1868—806 ships transported 164,000 convicts to the Australian colonies

B.   Captives to the Americas

The Prince who became a slave: Abdul Rahman Ibrahima

Who are we looking for, who are we looking for?
It's Equiano we're looking for. Has he gone to the stream? Let him come back.
Has he gone to the farm? Let him return.
It's Equiano we're looking for.

--Kwa chant about the disappearance of an African boy, Equiano

The middle passage:

Africans become slaves:

All servants imported and brought into the Country. . . who were not Christians in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion. . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master. . . correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction. . . the master shall be free of all punishment. . . as if such accident never happened.

--Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705

IV.   The Meaning of it All:

The Reality of Time Travel 

Time itself is a social construction.

There are two types of thinking about time:

Monochronic Cultures: (e.g. U.S., Northern Europe)

Time is a commodity, rigid, meant to be used to complete one task at a time.

One task at a time.

Polychronic Cultures: (e.g. Latin America, Italy)

Time is more flexible, secondary to relationship.

                        Many tasks at a time.

Note the attitudes towards time of the Kaabyle in Algeria:

"Haste is seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition…the notion of an exact appointment is unknown; they agree only to meet at the next market.”                                                                                              Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960

Industrialization and globalization force a standardization of time.

(class starts at 3:00 and goes to 3:05, movies start at 2:05…these are tests of our ability to standardize, to accept overly rigid organizational systems.)

Why talk about cultural constructions of time while talking about human migration? What is the connection?

“It is the inbetween space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.”

― Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture