engleski

From Time to Time - Time Routes and Temporal Fragments in the Representations of Eastern Adriatic

Today, the notion of the Mediterranean stirs ambivalent emotions, evokes different imaginaries, and provokes debates both in academia and public discourses. Be it discourse about the uncertainties and perils of migrating to a ‘promised future’, romanticized tourist expectations of a historic region and its cultural heritage, or emerging political associations that dwell ideas about shared cultural space, the spatial aspect figures as a continual reference when discussing these diverse Mediterranean phenomena. Despite the clear intertwinement of space and time, in many cases, the temporal frame stays unproblematic and self-evident, depicting time as a separate realm, a moderately neutral grid that is linearly structured and confined by the past, the present, and the future. Nonetheless, multiple temporalities emerge in various representations of the Mediterranean and pose legitimate questions about how we experience time. There is a growing concern for a critical understanding of temporality beyond our typical, abstract, clockwise orientation of time for good reason, and there are plenty of familiar examples. Notions of ‘’me time’’ or “no time at all” radically reconfigure our everyday life. “Time is money” parallelly co-exists with longing for “boredom” or “time at a slower pace”. Even now, in the “time of Covid-19” and ecological crises, we crave for relaxation and procrastination in order to escape the dark thoughts of not so bright future. In this talk, I will point out the multiple temporal modalities or time routes whose entanglement with spatial representations of the Mediterranean produces non-linear experiences of time. This lecture will pose questions about the nature of these time routes so often employed in the representations of Eastern Adriatic ; those shaped by dispersed temporal fragments such as anticipation, boredom, circular conceptions of time, being delayed, expectations, idleness, leisure, timelessness, and waiting. Their association with the Mediterranean in general and within the specific context of Eastern Adriatic stimulates analytically intriguing questions about processes of temporal othering and their relations with Balkanism and Orientalism discourses. Accounting for examples of travel writing, contemporary tourist representations, and local island phenomena, this presentation will problematize dispersed temporal fragments as being historically situated, socially produced, and culturally ambivalent phenomena along the time routes perceived as the zone of cultural translations and (mis)interpretations.

time routes, Eastern Adriatic, spatialization of time, temporalization of space, temporal fragments

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