ABSTRACT
How is imagining the temporal connected to imagining of cultural and racial otherness? The period between the fi fteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe has been perceived as the harbinger of the modern, and a crucial component of early modernity, it has been argued, is the growth of global trade and European colonialism. Europeans traversed, explored and conquered expanses of space. Notions of cultural alterity also tend to be expressed spatially: the other is ‘outside’ of the norm which ‘we’ constitute and defi ne; the ‘other’ is ‘marginal’, whereas we are ‘central’; ‘we’ are ‘here’, s/he is ‘there’. In this chapter I hope to substitute the traditional study of Renaissance spatial conquest and exploration of space with an examination of European engagements with the temporal dimension: where in time was the other located, and how were Renaissance hopes and fears of the future impacted by engagement with cultural difference?
