Description
Understanding the relationship between world politics and climate change is more necessary than ever, yet this relationship is vexed by problematic conceptualizations of time. As Hutchings argues, assumptions about time are deeply formative to judgements about world politics, yet in IR these assumptions tend to be trapped within the epistemic horizons of modernity. Taking this critique a step further, I argue that there is a coloniality of time that subtends judgement, trapping the relationship between world politics and climate change within analytics of progress, decline, and linearity. Drawing on Quijano and Mignolo, I argue that an imaginative leap is required to rupture this coloniality of time.
To make this leap, I analyze the album 'Retribution' by experimental musician and environmental activist Tanya Tagaq. In applying the analytic of the coloniality of time to the album, the past, present, and future of climate change are revealed to be existing within a temporal continuum of colonial and imperial violence. Tagaq’s artistic practice is thus read as a poetic rupture within the colonial and linear temporal structures that undergird dominant world-political thought on climate change, exploring the fissures that IR scholarship attempts to suture, and opening possibilities for a future decolonial politics.
