ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the abstract notion that the contemporary 'joins times', is enacted through a sequence of suggestive genealogies of the present. 'Time Today', is headed with essays by Steven Connor and Peter Osborne, both of whom confront the predominant view that time and history have entered into crisis in the late twentieth century. Caroline Rooney is hunting for the ghostly echoes of an imperial past and its persistent imprint on the present in her chosen text, Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy. The remnants of disappearing history could only be energised by movement in space, as in the 'travels in hyperreality' undertaken by Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco through America. Bill Ashcroft opens his essay by reminding us that the very notion of an English Literature is one key legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism, and one which continues to have effects on how different world literatures are conceived in relation to margins, centres and cultural identities.
