ABSTRACT
Anachronism is central to political epic which casts the historical past (genealogy) as a pre-determined, projective futurity of imperial predestination (prophecy). Postcolonial epic critically engages with the entanglement of tenses in political epic through counter-prophecies proclaiming the end of empire (curses) or forging alternative diasporic destinies (neo-Virgilian visions). Rather than demolishing the Virgilian teleology of imperial anachronism, postcolonial epic can be seen as exploiting it for its own purposes. If a text can be so contrived as to make tenses interchangeable for an imperial project, then it can also be reconfigured for post-imperial programmes of political and cultural change. The strong correlation between maritime and social mobility promoted in postcolonial epic also reflects a recentring of global history on the subaltern worker and entrepreneur. Ships emerge as alternative, transnational counter-sites to the nation-state in their capacity to spatialise, and thus resist, the linear sequentiality of imperial time and capitalist time. In their critique of the asymmetries between capital and labour, Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy thus signal a major shift in epic preoccupation from politics to political economy.
