ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 returns to the question of narrative time raised in Chapter 1. Now, however, the focus is on insurrectionary time, and on transtemporality, which builds meaning across time. The first part of the chapter focuses on spiralling space-time in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm. Chapter 1 argued that necropolitical time closes down possibility; but this chapter shows how Wenzel and Otoo use transtemporal narrative techniques to re-open possibilities across past, present, and future. Chapter 1 also explored epistemic ghosting, and this chapter analyses a literary response to that: epistemic hauntings across space-time in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory. Those who have been ghosted return resistantly, bringing back lost memories and suppressed histories. These ghosts are (in Rosi Braidotti’s terms) nomadic subjects who cross conceptual as well as temporal boundaries; dead people who paradoxically affirm the principle of life.
