ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a way of thinking about and relating to time that originates in a tradition that departs in certain key respects from some of the fundamental presuppositions informing Enlightenment-derived conceptions of linear temporality. The tradition under consideration is that of Caribbean literature; the view of time is that found in the work of Derek Walcott. The chapter puts forward an interpretation of what the sea signifies in Walcott's work in order to clarify how this powerful metaphor both implies and is bound up with his distinctive view of time. On Walcott's view, colonialism, imperialism, and related structures and tendencies did not disappear during the transition from the age of nation-states to the more decentralised era of globalisation. Walcott sees the globalised world not as differing fundamentally from the world that preceded it, but rather as a battleground for many of the same power struggles that predominated in former ages.
