ABSTRACT
When is catastrophe? This would appear to be a question with a clear answer. If we understand a catastrophe as a calamitous event that causes widespread destruction and suffering, there should be no need to pose such a question. There should be no need to ask, for instance, when the Indian Ocean earthquake struck, creating a tsunami that would lead to more than 200,000 deaths (December 26, 2004—for those who have forgotten); or when a poisonous gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India killed thousands of nearby residents (December 2–3, 1984); or when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast (August 29, 2005). How could this question—“When is catastrophe?”—be anything other than rhetorical? If catastrophes are, by definition, exceptional events of such a magnitude that worlds and lives are dramatically overturned, a catastrophe would seem to be an event that admits no uncertainties with regards to its timing. The Time of Catastrophe poses this seemingly straightforward question anew, arguing that there is much to be gained by interrogating the temporal conceits of conventional understandings of catastrophe and the catastrophic.
