Joost Fontein

Preliminary abstract: Temporal Frontiers and the Excessivity of Time in Africa brings together scholars from across the sciences and humanities to engage with current debates around temporality and forge new trajectories of interdisciplinary research. With the tension between Einstein’s empiricist notion of relativity and Bergson’s experiential approach to duration as a backdrop, we will examine how human perceptions of change and recursivity both inform and challenge the temporalities we create to make sense of and domesticate time; and how the excessivity of time defies orders imposed on it even as varying temporal scales of action and analysis alter experiences of time. As Africa has the deepest human time depth it is uniquely placed to address these issues. This closed workshop will employ diverse intellectual and methodological perspectives and empirical case studies in discussions of time, temporality, duration, and recursivity. It will produce a theoretically and methodologically innovative interdisciplinary publication, offering new benchmarks for understanding time and temporality