Towards ‘a progressive sense of thick time’ and the future of geographical thinking

Abstract

In this commentary, I reflect on a ‘nascent temporal turn’ in geography and its future possibilities. I draw on and extend Kitchin's (2023) concept of ‘a progressive sense of time’ by juxtaposing it with other temporal frameworks such as ‘thick time’ (Datta, 2022) as well as practices of temporal politics such as ‘relational remembering’ (Hunfeld, 2022) and ‘anticipatory action’ (Anderson, 2010). I also draw upon the temporal politics of labour among the Gorkhas, an ethno-racial community in Darjeeling, a colonial hill station in India. I argue and show that the Gorkhas connect their resistance against external platforms such as ride-hailing and food delivery platforms with their longstanding subnationalist struggles for a separate state to reverse past colonial injustices and reconfigure their future. I reflect on how the temporal politics of labour among Gorkhas and the concept of a ‘progressive sense of thick time’ not only inform each other but also open up future pathways for geographical thinking and praxis.

Resisting platform power as ‘chrono-geo-racial’ politics

In 2022, I visited Darjeeling, a colonial hill station located in the state of West Bengal in India, to examine if and how digitally-mediated platform work transformed the working lives and spatiotemporal rhythms of this small mountain city. Specifically, I focused on app-based food delivery and ride-hailing platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, Ola and Uber. Platform companies expected that Darjeeling, a popular tourist destination, would experience burgeoning employment in the gig/platform economy absorbing local unemployed youth and underemployed workers in the tea plantations that are now on the decline. Contrary to such expectations, I found that the inhabitants of Darjeeling vehemently, often tacitly, and selectively opposed the platformisation of delivery and ride-hailing services and the penetration of platform capital from outside the territory; while tech giants and ‘super platforms’ such as Amazon run smoothly, nationally operating ride-hailing and food delivery platforms such as Ola, Zomato and Swiggy experienced a backlash in Darjeeling. The young inhabitants of Darjeeling expressed how these platforms failed and retreated from the hill station where local businesses and bottom-up e-commerce platforms led by local young people are on the rise, especially since the pandemic.

Instances of boycotting as well as tacit resistance against the platform economy are well-known worldwide (Anwar and Graham, 2020; Ettlinger, 2018; Leszczynski, 2020). What distinguishes Darjeeling's resistance against external ride-hailing and food delivery platforms is twofold. First, the young Gorkhas, an ethno-racial community that constitutes a majority of the population in the Darjeeling hills, connect this resistance against nationally operating platforms with their longstanding and ongoing subnationalist movement advocating for a separate state, ‘Gorkhaland’. The Gorkhas engage in the Gorkhaland Movement demanding separate statehood citing cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences from the Bengalis, an ethno-linguistic group that constitutes the majority of the population in the state of West Bengal. The Gorkhaland Movement is not only guided by the politics of identity and difference but also by resistance against ‘recursive colonisation’ (Middleton, 2020); the Gorkhas were first colonised by the British Empire who exploited and extracted their underpaid labour in tea plantations, and then by the ‘bhadrolok’ (middle-class) Bengalis who established businesses in the tourist industry in Darjeeling exploiting and extracting social and economic values from the Gorkhas. From this vantage point, the Gorkhas perceive the entry of platform capital from investors outside the territory of Darjeeling as a threat that might allow ‘Bengalis from the plains’ to continue to exploit the ‘Gorkhas in the hills’ reestablishing a regime of ‘geo-racial’ capitalism and internal coloniality (Middleton, 2020: 40).

Second, many young Gorkhas perceive the entry of platform capital from outside the territory of Darjeeling as not only a colonisation of their space/territory through ‘geo-racial’ capitalism but also as a colonisation of their time and bodies indicating a ‘chrono-geo-racial capitalism’. For example, the taxi drivers in Darjeeling revealed that the ‘appification’ and ‘platformisation’ of the ride-hailing sector will create temporal unfreedoms rather than temporal flexibility as touted in the literature on platform work as Gorkha drivers must conform to the temporal demands of apps and mainly Bengali tourists. Here, I am struck by the distinctions that Darjeeling offers, prompting a re-conceptualisation of the Gorkha resistance against some external platforms as ‘chrono-geo-racial’ politics against a regime of ‘chrono-geo-racial capitalism’ rather than simply ‘platform capitalism’ or ‘racial capitalism’ as seen in much of the resistance movements against the platform economy. The Gorkha resistance against external platforms is, therefore, not just linked to a politics of territorial sovereignty as generally might be perceived but also a politics of temporal sovereignty where their politics of time attempts to reverse past colonial injustices, present internal coloniality, and anticipated platform coloniality in the future. This politics of temporal sovereignty is not just about reclaiming personal time that is often consumed by apps and platform work but also a reversal of the historical and recursive ‘colonisation of and with time’ that generations of Gorkhas have experienced in Darjeeling.

What insights can geographers learn from this Darjeeling distinction concerning platform resistance by the Gorkhas and their temporal politics? I argue that the notion of ‘chrono-geo-racial’ politics of labour extends our understanding of the lived experiences of time and temporal politics, demanding attention from geographers beyond their traditional focus on the production, experience, and politics of space and territory.

Towards a ‘temporal turn’ in geography? A progressive sense of ‘thick’ time

In recent years, a ‘nascent temporal turn’ (Datta, 2022: 108) in geography has reinvigorated geographers’ interest in examining the production, experience, and politics of time. Disrupting earlier conceptualisations of time as objective, linear, singular, and spaceless, contemporary time geographers, instead, conceptualise time as subjective, multiple, heterogeneous, spatial, scalar, emplaced, and embodied (Dodgshon, 1999; Datta, 2022; Kitchin, 2023). Time, now, is understood as ‘connected across multiple spaces and scales by resurfacing the burdens of historic inequalities and constraints across different social groups’ (Datta, 2022: 108). Kitchin (2023: 198) commendably develops the concept of a ‘progressive sense of time’, referring to a framework of understanding the production and experience of time ‘in which temporalities elsewhere are connected and co-produced across scale’. For example, the temporalities of household, home, city, nation, and the world interact with each other to co-produce new temporal relations, ‘temporal doxas’, and ‘digital timescapes’ in the digital age (Kitchin, 2023). This interscalar notion of a ‘progressive sense of time’ draws on and extends the concepts of ‘power chronographies’ (Sharma, 2014) and ‘chronotopographies' (Crang, 2007). Broadening Massey et al.'s (1993) conceptualisation of power-geometry and a ‘progressive sense of place’ highlighting that power is differentiated across space and that space co-produces social relations rather than simply being a backdrop, Sharma (2014) calls attention to the differentiated nature of time and argues that like power-geometry there exists a power chronography – a grid with differential temporal power based on differential socio-economic and cultural contexts of individuals – and that their temporal power and temporal sovereignty depend on where they are located in this power chronography. Kitchin's (2023) notion of ‘a progressive sense of time’ incorporates and extends this notion of power chronography and argues that the production, experience, and politics of time not only are differential and multiple but also interscalar; time at various scales is co-produced as different temporalities and temporal power interact with each other. This interscalar concept of a ‘progressive sense of time’ also extends to the scale of the individual and the body, prompting conceptualisations of time as intersectional and embodied (Kitchin, 2023).

Juxtaposing the concept of a ‘progressive sense of time’ with the concept of ‘thick time’ is instrumental in the project of extending this ‘nascent’ temporal turn in geography. Datta (2022: 109), drawing on South African artist William Kentridge and Galison (2011), extends the concept of ‘thick time’ as ‘a project to decolonise the subaltern body by overlaying alternative versions of time embedded in the disruptive use of technology’. As Datta writes,

Kentridge presents ‘Thick time’ as a thickening of space with temporal crises accumulated over generations, reinforced through the technologies of timekeeping, time-management and their resultant time-burdens. For Kentridge, thick time comes into being by unwinding, by slowing down and rewinding itself, in short by capturing and materialising postcolonial and subjective experiences of time. Kentridge thus presents thick time as a refusal to conform to the colonising effects of time – he presents postcoloniality as a wish to unwind time, undo the damage done by colonial time and present a longing to reverse time itself for marginal and indigenous communities (2022: 108–109).

Thinking with Kentridge, Datta (2022: 109) further writes, ‘[b]ut in Kentridge's work, a refusal of time is not just about slowing down, rather the desire to disrupt the “linear march of time,” to rewind past injustices, undo the generational struggles and rework new aspirations for the future’.

A ‘progressive sense of time’ that is attentive to ‘thick time’ not only encompasses spatial, interscalar, intersectional, and embodied differences of temporalities and temporal power but also paves the way towards a decolonial understanding and politics of time that traverses across the past, present and the future. Examining the Gorkhas’ resistance to external platform capital in Darjeeling illustrates that their ‘chrono-geo-racial’ politics of labour is not just a territorial politics but a temporal politics where they cross-reference their past colonial injustices and generational struggles with the present threats from platforms while re-imagining and reconfiguring their future. Such practices of ‘relational remembering’ (Hunfeld, 2022: 111) and ‘anticipatory action’ (Anderson, 2010) for disrupting intergenerational injustices are critical for developing a ‘progressive sense of thick time’. The latter is attentive to the decolonial project that disrupts the separation of the past from the present and prioritises the present over the past and the future. The Gorkha's temporal politics inform the notion of a ‘progressive sense of thick time’ as attentive to past colonial and intergenerational injustices and future imaginations. More generally, a ‘progressive sense of thick time’ disrupts the notion that individuals are temporally anchored in the present and appreciates the relationality of time across the past, present, and future instead of the coloniality of time that separates the past, present, and future, prioritising the present over the past and the future.

Implications for the future of geographical thinking and praxis

‘The task for the critical scholar is not to separate one struggle from another, but to connect them’ (Said, 1978: 331–332). I suggest that research enquiries that are attentive to a ‘progressive sense of thick time’ allow geographers to explore at least three fresh ways of seeing, sensing, and connecting injustices, struggles, and resistances. First, this will allow geographers to see beyond land/property/territory-centric forms of injustices, struggles, and resistances and explore their time-centric counterparts. Disrupting hegemonic understandings in geography where subaltern struggles and resistances are connected with the epistemic registers of territory, property, and land, enquiring about the politics of ‘thick’ time will allow geographers to explore the entanglements of territory, space, time, and individuals. While political geographers have developed conceptual matrices of ‘chronopolitics’ (Klinke, 2013), research enquiries that are attentive to a ‘progressive sense of thick time’ would also explore how timescapes of ‘chronogeopolitics’ are themselves multiple, relational, interscalar, fragmented, intersectional, embodied, and contingent. A decentering and decolonial project in geography must shift attention from land/property/territory-centric registers of dispossession, struggle, and resistance to time-centric registers that capture intergenerational struggles and resistances. Second, this theoretical reorientation will allow critical scholars to move beyond the politics of ‘here-and-now’ and beyond the binaries of fast and slow. Researchers must move beyond anchoring individual stories of dispossession, struggles, and resistances in the present and explore their temporal entanglements with their past, present, and future. Lastly, such work can pave the way for a productive comparative research agenda that challenges binary accounting of regional categories such as Global North/South, western/oriental, and so forth. Instead, it may reveal new forms of ‘scalar imitation’ understood as inequalities and differentiation among subalterns that mimic exclusionary practices to which they have been subjected (Ettlinger and Bose, 2020). Towards this end, geographers need to connect lived experiences and memories of dispossession, struggles, and resistance across and within diverse timescapes to visibilise the invisible stories and voices of the marginalised.