Contemporaneity and Its Discontents

Abstract

Never before have we discussed and published so much on “the contemporary.” Drawing from the work of anthropologists Johannes Fabian and Marc Augé and Brazilian novelist Bernardo Carvalho, this essay theorizes contemporaneity as the active sharing of time that informs the transnational flow of culture in our global present, and takes a critical stance in this fashionable debate: critical of Giorgio Agamben’s attempt to identify the contemporary to a mode of “untimeliness,” but also wary of any concept of contemporaneity that does not take seriously the need to think the present beyond the idea of a history of the West.

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