Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

This presentation examines Édouard Glissant’s innovative “Archipelagic time” concept as a challenge to European and Christian-influenced linear temporality and its associated spatial imaginaries. We argue that Glissant’s temporal-spatial reconceptualization offers a radical alternative to Eurocentric notions of progress and teleology embedded in traditional geographic thought. Glissant’s archipelagic metaphor serves not only as a spatial concept but as a temporal one, disrupting the linear, progressive time of Christian eschatology. We explore how this non-linear, fragmentary temporality intertwines with Glissant’s geographic imperative, creating a framework that resists colonial narratives of time and space. By contrasting Archipelagic time with Christian temporal constructs, we demonstrate how Glissant’s thought provides tools for reimagining both historical narratives and future possibilities. This temporal-spatial reconfiguration is crucial for contemporary social justice movements seeking to contest dominant Western paradigms. I posit that Glissant’s Archipelagic time offers a powerful means of critiquing and reimagining temporal-spatial relations in our current global context, with significant implications for decolonial thought and praxis. Glissant’s philosophy fundamentally challenges the notion of an autonomous, detached individual as the locus of knowledge. In his worldview, there exists no neutral, disembodied vantage point from which one can objectively survey and interpret the world. Instead, Glissant grounds thought in specific places and experiences, shifting focus from abstract statements to the contextual act of articulation itself. This approach inherently questions the underlying assumptions about who speaks, from where, and with what authority. By situating the archipelago within the historical and memorial fabric of space, Glissant roots thinking specifically in the Caribbean context and the New World experience of slavery. The Caribbean archipelago, poised between the isolation of its constituent islands and the vast expanse of the mainland, serves as a fertile ground for understanding the “dwelling space” from which thought emerges. The archipelago, in Glissant’s work, is not merely another conceptual category. Rather, it (dis)assembles the very process of thinking by directing attention to themes of loss, memory, and return. Crucially, Glissant characterizes the Caribbean archipelago as marked by a “non-history.” Unlike the gradual, sedimentary accumulation of historical consciousness in European collective memory, the Caribbean experience and further Asian archipelago are defined by loss and discontinuity. This archipelagic history, initiated by the violent rupture of the slave trade and colonization, is distinguished by shock, contraction, and explosive disruption, fundamentally altering the relationship between place, time, and thought.