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The Planetary Clock

The Planetary Clock

Antipodean Time and Spherical
Postmodern Fictions
PAU L G I L E S
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Paul Giles 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction: Antipodean Time and the Anthropocenic Imaginary1
Four-Dimensional Postmodernism 1
Ironies of the Anthropocene 18
Genealogies of the Planetary 38
1. Répétition Planétaire: Upside-Down Postmodernism61
Augustinian Aesthetics 61
The End of Time: Messiaen’s Musical Apocalypse 66
Retro-Modernism: Rohmer’s Antithetical Cinema 79
2. Antipodean Alice: Cold War Fetishism and Frozen Time104
Parallel Dimensions: Blackman’s ‘cross-roads’ 104
‘Ghost-Images’: Genet, Roeg, Bergman 117
Ligeti’s Apocalyptic Buffoonery 125
Nabokov, Ananyms, and Ada133
3. Queer Poetic Time: Crosstemporal Parataxis and Disjunctions
of Scale146
Larkin and ‘the seabed of Time’ 146
Against ‘Chrononormativity’: Ashbery, Rich, Gunn, Glück 157
Waiting for the Past: Tranter and Murray 167
4. ‘Reverse-Thinking’: Metahistorical Arts and Fictions183
Crosstemporal, Cross-cultural, Cross-media 183
‘The re-prefix’: Barth and Rushdie 196
Unspoolings: Lynch, Haneke, and Embedded Trauma 208
Planetary Australian Fiction: Winton, Jones, Tsiolkas 218
5. Two-Way Time Travel: Recursive Science and
‘Backward-Flowing’ Fiction237
Obsession and Atonement: Murnane and McEwan 237
The American Systems Novel: Eugenides, Foer, Powers 252
6. Postmodern Slave Narratives: Anachronism and Disorientation276
The Arts of Rememory: Butler and Morrison 276
Obama, Tarantino, and Transnational Trauma 289
vi Contents
7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

Luhrmann and the Politics of Relationality 316
Indigenous Fiction and the Global South: Hulme and Wright 326
Musical Time Shifts: Sculthorpe, Birtwistle, Benjamin 344
Conclusion: The Long Postmodernism357
Works Cited 367

Index 413
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank my colleagues in the English department and the United
States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney for providing a constructive
intellectual environment in which to write this book. More specifically, I gratefully
acknowledge the conveners and audiences of conferences and seminars where
certain sections of this book were first discussed. Under the sponsorship of Yuan
Shu and Donald Pease, I presented ‘Comparative Temporality and (Trans)National
Formation: Adrienne Rich and Les Murray’ at the American Comparative
Literature Association, New York, in March 2014. ‘Obama, Tarantino, and
Transnational Trauma’ was a paper given at a seminar on ‘Obama and
Transnational American Studies’ at the University of Mainz, Germany, in October
2014 (thanks to Alfred Hornung), and then again at the University of New South
Wales, Canberra, the following month (thanks to Heather Neilson). Some of the
analysis of Charles Blackman was included in my keynote lecture, ‘Haunted by
the Future: Antipodean Gothic and Temporal Prolepsis’, at the Gothic Association
of New Zealand and Australia Conference held in Sydney in January 2015 (thanks
to Lorna Piatti-Farnell). The material on David Mitchell was first explored at a
symposium hosted by the International American Studies Association at the
University of Sapienza, Rome, in April 2016 on International American Studies
and the Question of World Literature (thanks to Giorgio Mariani). It was also on
this trip to Europe that I first encountered the replica of Lorenzo della Volpaia’s
Planetary Clock at the Museo Galileo in Florence. I gained much from conversa-
tions with participants in the seminar ‘Transnational and Crosstemporal: World
Literature across Space and Time’ that I taught at the Institute for World Literature
at Harvard in July 2016, where various observations on Tarantino’s Django
Unchained were particularly useful. (Thanks to David Damrosch for graciously
facilitating this event.) I discussed the paintings of Fiona Hall in a lecture, ‘Lost
Homelands: The Expropriation of American Studies in the Anthropocene Era’,
given in a seminar organized by Susana Araújo on ‘Homelands and the Borders of
“America” ’ at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2016. This turned
out to be the last time I saw Amy Kaplan, an old academic sparring partner who
also spoke at this seminar and is now much missed.
I received invaluable feedback on an early draft of the book’s first chapter when
it was presented at Brigham Young University in 2017, at the kind invitation of
Brian Russell Roberts. Natalya Lusty similarly subjected some of the material on
the visual arts to stringent but enlightening critique. I also benefited from discus-
sions with Liz DeLoughrey at the ‘Global Ecologies-Local Impacts’ conference
viii Acknowledgements
organized by Iain McCalman and David Schlosberg at the Sydney Environment

Institute in 2016, and with Ursula Heise at the ‘Literary Environments: Place,
Planet and Translation’ conference convened by Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney
at Brisbane in 2017. Research for the project in its early stages was funded in part
by a grant from the Australian Research Council (DP150101848).
A few fragments from these initial excursions were subsequently converted
into earlier versions of various sections that now appear in this book. ‘Obama,
Tarantino, and Transnational Trauma’ first appeared in Obama and Transnational
American Studies, edited by Alfred Hornung (Universitatsverlag Winter, Heidelberg,
2016). The Portugal lecture, ‘Lost Homelands’, was translated by Nuno Sousa Oliveira
and published as ‘Patrias Perdidas: A Expropriacao dos Estudos Americanos na
Era do Antropoceno’ in Anglo Saxonica 14.1 (2017). In addition, a much earlier
version of the first section of Chapter 7 had its first incarnation as ‘A Good Gatsby:
Baz Luhrmann Undomesticates Fitzgerald’, in Commonweal, 1 July 2013, at the
kind invitation of Paul Baumann. A shorter account of the Australian novelists
discussed in Chapter 4 also appeared as ‘Writing for the Planet: Contemporary
Australian Fiction’, in The Planetary Turn: Art, Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in
the 21st Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Northwestern
University Press, 2015).
I would like to express appreciation to the various artists and galleries listed on
the Illustrations page for permitting reproduction of the images in this book.
I should also particularly like to thank Giorgio Strano, Curator of the Museo
Galileo in Florence, for answering my questions about Lorenzo della Volpaia. I am
especially indebted to David Hockney, Christian Thompson, and Leah King-Smith
for allowing their work to be reproduced and discussed within what Julie Green,
Head of Reproductions at David Hockney, Inc., called an ‘unusual’ context.
I am very grateful to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press for her
continued support of my work, for the incisive and detailed reports she commis-
sioned that helped to improve the final book, and to her assistant Aimee Wright
for advice about permissions issues. My own excellent research assistant, Blythe
Worthy, supported by a grant from the Faculty Research Support Scheme at the
University of Sydney, not only helped to secure copyright clearance for the
illustrations, but also made various perceptive suggestions about rephrasing in
particular instances.
Though each part of this sequence is intended to stand independently, this vol-
ume also represents a continuation of the project engaging with antipodean rep-
resentations of temporality that was inaugurated by Backgazing: Reverse Time in
Modernist Culture (OUP, 2019). The epigraph to The Planetary Clock is taken
from the second book on Recent Phenomena in the Celestial World published in
1588 by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who also planned a third volume in his
sequence but did not live to write it. I hope that is not a bad omen.
Acknowledgements ix
This book was completed before the coronavirus pandemic that became
widespread in the early months of 2020, an outbreak that testified clearly enough
to planetary interconnection in its uglier forms, though how this event relates to
the larger circumference of postmodernism will be for future historians to judge.
It is worth noting in passing, however, that Bill Gates and many other observers
have long warned of the vulnerability of a networked world to the global circula-
tion of an infectious virus, with Gates saying in 2015 that ‘microbes’ were far
more likely to kill large numbers than the ‘missiles’ that were the focus of atten-
tion from National Security experts during the Cold War years and afterwards.
Planetary systems are complicated mechanisms connected by more than simply
international finance or economic supply chains, and the planetary clock ticks
synchronistically across every latitude and hemisphere.
Sydney
September 2020
List of Illustrations
0.1 David Hockney, “The Four Seasons Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011,
Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010),” 2010–2011 25
0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972) 28
0.3 Reproduction of The Planetary Clock, by Lorenzo della Volpaia (1510) 39
0.4 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong (1977) 43
0.5 Robert Campbell Jnr, Abo History (Facts) (1988) 43
0.6 Christian Thompson, Invaded Dreams (2012) 44
0.7 Leah King-Smith, from Patterns of Connection (1991) 46
0.8 Linda Syddick Napaltjarri, ET and His Friends (1993) 47
0.9 Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time (2014) 48
0.10 Fiona Hall, Detail from Kuka iritija (Animals from another time) (2014) 49
1.1 Roland Penrose, L’île invisible (Seeing is Believing) (1937) 69
1.2 Eric Rohmer, with actors Delphine Seyrig and Francois Perrier and
composer Olivier Messiaen at the French National Arts Prize,
December 1977 80
1.3 Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Maud (Françoise Fabian) in
Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969), dir. Eric Rohmer 90
1.4 In front of the statue of Vercingetorix in Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969),
dir. Eric Rohmer 90
1.5 Maud’s apartment with the picture of a lunar eclipse, in Ma Nuit chez Maud
(1969), dir. Eric Rohmer 92
1.6 Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) and Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) with Reinette’s
painting ‘The Refusal’, in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987),
dir. Eric Rohmer 97
1.7 The Five Continents bookstore, in An Autumn Tale (1998), dir. Eric Rohmer 101
2.1 Charles Blackman, ‘Upside Down Alice’ (1956). 109
2.2 Charles Blackman, The Tea Ceremony (1981) 111
2.3 Charles Blackman, The Shoe (1956) 112
2.4 Charles Blackman, Celestial Bouquet (1985) 113
2.5 Charles Blackman, The Mysterious Forest (1985) 114
2.6 Charles Blackman, The Family (c.1955)115
2.7 Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) 116
2.8 Incongruity and juxtaposition in Walkabout (1971), dir. Nicolas Roeg 119
xii List of Illustrations
2.9 An animal carcass in the desert in Walkabout (1971), dir. Nicolas Roeg 121
2.10 Sidney Nolan, Drought Skeleton (1953) 122
2.11 Clock without hands in Wild Strawberries (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman 124
2.12 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), outer panels 141
4.1 Fire truck and white picket fence, in Blue Velvet (1986), dir. David Lynch 209
4.2 Albrecht Dürer, Traumgesicht (Dream Face) (1525) 217
6.1 Django (Jamie Foxx) and Billy Crash (Walton Goggins) in Django Unchained
(2012), dir. Quentin Tarantino 290
6.2 Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks) in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2003), dir. Quentin
Tarantino296
6.3 Close-up shot of the book Vihaio is reading in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2003),
dir. Quentin Tarantino 296
6.4 Transposing identities in the bar game in Inglourious Basterds (2009),
dir. Quentin Tarantino 302
7.1 World map of shipping routes in The Great Gatsby (2013), dir. Baz Luhrmann 325
7.2 Pieter Brueghel, The Triumph of Time (1562) 347
7.3 Image from Andreas Cellarius, The Celestial Atlas (1661), as reproduced
on the cover of the score to Thomas Adès, Concentric Paths (2005) 355
‘Suspiciendo despicio’
(When I raise my eyes to the sky, I see earthly things as well)
Tycho Brahe, De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaenomenis, Liber
Secundus (About Recent Phenomena in the Celestial World, Second
Book), 1588
Introduction
Antipodean Time and the Anthropocenic Imaginary
Four-Dimensional Postmodernism
The theme of this book is the way in which an engagement with antipodean
aspects of postmodernism inflects the representation of time across Western lit
erature and culture more generally. Although the word antipodean introduces
complex questions around positionality, as will be discussed later, the starting
point here, as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of the term, is
‘Australia and New Zealand (in relation to the northern hemisphere)’. By bringing
the localized cultures of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand into dialogue with
more established postmodern narratives, so I argue, we expand the circumfer
ence of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, making it appear more exten
sive in both time and space, while also effectively foregrounding the aesthetics of
postmodernism, tracing ways in which an embrasure of planetary dimensions
has always been integral to its constitution. Stuart Hall suggested in 1986 that
postmodernism was ‘about how the world dreams itself to be “American” ’, but it
was always much more complicated than that, and to trace the long arc of post
modernism, from its embryonic formal experimentation in the 1960s to its envir
onmental concerns in the early twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and
more complex version of this cultural phenomenon, thereby relating it to a global
circumference rather than one centred merely upon the United States.1
Conversely, to trace ways in which American writers and artists, from John Cage
to Toni Morrison, represented time according to planetary rather than merely
nationalistic coordinates is to realign postmodernism within a much more expan
sive orbit, one in which the radical temporal disjunctions incumbent upon vari
ous forms of retrograde motion can be understood as integral to the aesthetic
dimensions of US postmodernism. By correlating postmodernism with the para
doxical figure of a planetary clock, through which unfathomable spatio-temporal
distances are framed within a specific chronometric measure, we come to recog
nize how such a projection of expansive scales can be understood as itself form
ing a crucial part of the postmodernist rubric. I therefore use fictions in a broad
1 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’
Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 46.
The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions. Paul Giles, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Paul Giles. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857723.003.0001
2 The Planetary Clock
sense, to indicate not only works of prose fiction but also poetry, films, paintings,
and other cultural phenomena governed by an aesthetic framework. Indeed, one
of my contentions is that postmodernism itself is another form of fiction, a cat
egory of cultural history whose meaning necessarily fluctuates across time.
Periodization of any kind is always a fraught intellectual issue, of course, but
just as the definitional parameters of modernism have expanded in recent times
to encompass socially committed novels of the 1930s and 1940s as well as the
more widely recognized innovations of ‘high’ modernists such as T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound, so correspondingly it makes sense to think of postmodernism as a
relatively loose historical category encompassing avant-garde metafictions of the
1960s, a new focus on questions of race and gender in the 1970s and 1980s, issues
associated with computer technology from the 1990s onward, as well as anxieties
about the permeability of national borders and global warming that have charac
terized the first two decades of the twenty-first century. James Annesley has com
plained that postmodernism, ‘a framework developed initially in relation to the
analysis of literature and culture from the 1960s and 1970s,’ was later used to
explicate ‘texts from the end of the twentieth century’, to such an extent that the
explanatory term ‘lost its specificity’; but another way of looking at this might be
to say that postmodernism was never defined merely by formal concerns but was,
rather, interwoven at all levels with broader global issues.2 In this sense, it
becomes easier to see how the formation of literature and culture since the 1960s
has been shaped not only by what Timothy S. Murphy has called ‘the fundamen
tal postmodern principle of linguistic indeterminacy and slippage’, but also by a
geographical ‘slippage’ that crucially involved a decentring of Western canons.3 In
the case of postmodernism, such a shift enables us to see, for example, how envir
onmentalism—which was, as Frederick Buell observed in 2001, ‘a key part of the
globalization process’—became intertwined within the discursive matrix of
‘the global economy’, even if the emphasis during the 1990s on postmodernism as
a manifestation of multicultural cosmopolitanism and ‘the cultural logic of late
capitalism’ actually paid little attention to it.4 Environmentalism and transnation
alism, in other words, became key points of reference at the turn of the twenty-first
century even for those, like Donald Trump, who vehemently opposed their prem
ises. ‘Counter-globalization,’ as Murphy has shrewdly observed, ‘should be our
horizon of expectation for the culture of globalization as well.’5
2 James Annesley, Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary
American Novel (London: Continuum, 2006), 9.
3 Timothy S. Murphy, ‘To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for
Globalization Studies’, Symplokē 12.1/2 (2004): 24.
4 Frederick Buell, ‘Globalization without Environmental Crisis: The Divorce of Two Discourses in
U.S. Culture’, Symplokē 9.1/2 (2001): 48–9.
5 Murphy, ‘To Have Done with Postmodernism’, 29.
Introduction 3
The overall effect of this expansion in historical and geographic scope is to

reposition what Jean-François Lyotard called ‘the postmodern condition’ not as
an intellectual programme per se but as a broad cultural phenomenon shaped, in
variable and often conflicting ways, by a wide range of ideological perspectives.6
Although postmodernism has often been understood in the popular press as a
synonym for cultural radicalism and relativism, there have actually been many
different instantiations of postmodern culture, some of them informed by trad
itionalist or religious perspectives rather than simply formal experimentation or
irony, and one aim of The Planetary Clock is to describe this phenomenon in both
its intellectual and geographical variety. John Carlos Rowe in 1992 charted ‘three
different kinds of postmodernism’: an initial period of literary experimentation,
mainly in fiction, from 1965 to 1975; an era invested more in the theoretical agen
das of poststructuralism and deconstruction, roughly from 1975 to 1985; and a
‘postindustrial society’ dominated by information technology, something that
gained pace quickly after the first IBM personal computer went on sale in 1981,
with this digital capacity leading Alan Liu to call postmodernism ‘the cultural
arm of postindustrialism’.7 Working along similar though somewhat narrower
lines, Amy J. Elias in 2007 suggested that ‘aesthetic postmodernism . . . is generally
understood as having two stages of development: a late-modernist, metafictional
phase predominating in the 1960s and 1970s, and an antimodernist phase of cul
tural critique predominating in the 1980s and 1990s centring on politics of race,
class, gender, and nationhood’.8 Wendy Steiner similarly criticized definitions of
postmodernism that equated artistic importance merely with formal innovation,
arguing in particular that during the years between 1960 and 1990 fiction by
women—confessional narratives, autobiographies, and so on—was equally as
significant as work by male metafictional writers, the latter being the stuff of
what Amy Hungerford dismissively categorized as ‘the old postmodernism’.9
Hungerford has even gone so far as to suggest the period after 1945 should rather
be designated ‘long modernism’, on the grounds that ‘the second half of the
twentieth century sees not a departure from modernism’s aesthetic but its triumph
in the institution of the university and in the literary culture more generally.’10 Such
6 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
7 John Carlos Rowe, ‘Postmodernist Studies’, in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds.,
Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 180; Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work
and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 302.
8 Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post- 1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), xxvi.
9 Wendy Steiner, ‘Postmodern Fictions, 1960–1990,’ in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge
History of American Literature, VII: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 499–500; Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’,
American Literary History 20.1/2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 414.
10 Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, 418.
scepticism about the particular valence of postmodernism would fit with Andreas
Huyssen’s 1986 observation that it is primarily an American term, and that when
French intellectuals such as Lyotard and Julia Kristeva ‘think about the postmod
ern at all . . . the question seems to have been prompted by American friends, and
the discussion almost immediately and invariably turns back to problems of the
modernist aesthetic’, la modernité.11
There is, of course, always blurring and overlap between different periods, but
one pragmatic use of such historical differentiations is the way it enables scholars
to avoid the misleading notion that one distinctive era involves merely the
degradation of an earlier set of intellectual assumptions. Theodor W. Adorno
regarded the postmodern as merely a dead and decadent phase of modernism,
one where cultural work had taken on the form of reified consciousness, but for
all of his barbed genius, Adorno was neither sympathetic to nor attuned towards
postmodern styles involving an aesthetic negotiation with mass culture. One dan
ger in entirely dissolving historical periods consequently lies in the risk of not
identifying clearly enough the disparate material conditions that inform the pro
duction of cultural narratives. If modernism itself was shaped by World War I,
which exploded comfortable Edwardian assumptions of all kinds, and then by the
aftermath of World War II, which (as Werner Sollors argued) produced a new
emphasis on ‘cultural pluralism’ involving ‘intellectual critiques of fascism’ that
made modernist narratives centred upon the integrity of race or nation no longer
tenable, then postmodernism might be understood as linked systematically to the
collapse after 1973 of what David Harvey has called ‘Fordist modernism’, organ
ized around the stability of capital and labor.12 The Bretton Woods agreement in
1973 ensured that the US dollar would no longer be tied to the gold standard, and
this, together with subsequent proliferations of computer technology, rendered
local industry far more susceptible to transnational volatility. By correlating the
‘condition of postmodernity’ with broader social and political developments,
Harvey highlighted ways in which nation states had become susceptible to global
realignments across an economic as well as cultural axis.
As Jean Baudrillard noted, the ‘almost automatic reversion’ of 9/11, which
involved the Western system of globalization turned back violently against itself,
made shockingly manifest the ways in which borders of the United States, like
those of other nations, had become vulnerable to the rapid transfer of people and
capital across national frontiers, while also emphasizing the power of mass media
to shape the electronic reproduction of spectacle across a global domain.13 John
11 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 214.
12 Werner Sollors, ‘Ethnic Modernism, 1910–1950’, American Literary History 15.1 (Spring 2003):
75; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 156.
13 Jean Baudrillard, ‘L’Esprit du Terrorisme’. trans. Michel Valentin, South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2
(Spring 2002): 406.
Introduction 5
Gray similarly suggested that 9/11 merely forced into view the new ‘realities of
globalization’ that had been ‘overlooked or repressed’ during the neoliberal apo
gee of the 1990s, with its fantastic dream of ‘the end of history’, a market-driven
liberal utopia driven by the universalization of commodified Western values,
something epitomized by the foundation of the World Trade Organization in
1995.14 September 11, 2001, has been nominated by Maurizio Ascari as the offi
cial date of postmodernism’s demise, but it would be more accurate to suggest
that 9/11 was a belated product of postmodernism, a traumatic event that ren
dered the dark side of global postmodernism visible.15 More plausibly, Frank
Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe argued that 9/11 represented an end to ‘the long
American holiday from history’, an event that made clear to the American people
how their country and its values have always embodied part of a fraught histor
ical and geographical world, rather than merely epitomizing the microcosm of a
neoliberal state whose conditions could incontestably be universalized.16
Back in 1991, Fredric Jameson offered his version of postmodernism as ‘an
attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think
historically in the first place’, with his justly celebrated book offering an account of
culture permeated in its every aspect by the globalizing tentacles of ‘late capital
ism’, thereby inducing an obliteration of regionalist difference and a critical tem
per of ‘multiple historical amnesias’.17 This view of postmodernism as inherently
oppositional to the lineaments of progressive temporal sequence was endorsed
around the same time by N. Katherine Hayles, who described how an analysis of
postmodern culture ‘amounts to writing the history of no history’.18 The notion
that postmodernism ever sought specifically to neglect ‘social and historical
responsibility’ is doubtful, however, and, in any case, as the chronological con
tours of postmodernism have begun more clearly to take shape, so the phenom
enon has become easier to identify in historical terms.19 Ursula K. Heise in 2011
described the term ‘postmodernism’ as ‘mildly dated’, suggesting that questions of
‘global ecological connectedness’ had only ‘played at best a marginal role’ in its
formation, although Jameson in 2015 maintained that globalization, through its
‘displacement of old- fashioned industrial production by finance capital’,
14 John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, rev. ed. (London: Granta Books,
2002), xii; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press-Simon and
Schuster, 1992).
15 Maurizio Ascari, Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 21.
16 Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 15.
17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), ix, 170.
18 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 281.
19 Randall Stevenson, Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 177.
c ontinues to form ‘the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity
was the structure’. Jameson went on to insist that postmodernity—a word he now
says that he should have used in the first place rather than postmodernism—
continues to exemplify ‘not a style but a historical period, one in which all kinds
of things, from economics to politics, from arts to technology, from daily life to
international relations, had changed for good’. But even if we accept Jameson’s
premise of an ‘indispensable’ theoretical relationship between globalization and
postmodernity, to extend the circumference of the latter by reinscribing its
occluded antipodean aspects is to elucidate ways in which postmodernism’s
planetary dimensions, as Heise observed, have become increasingly manifest.20
Neoliberalism and international market capitalism may have been important
adjuncts to postmodern culture, but they were by no means synonymous with it,
and to reconsider postmodernism from a non-Western perspective is to elucidate
a wide variety of ideological forces that have clashed within its compass.
In this sense, to adumbrate a spherical postmodern culture is to translate the
idea of a sphere from its primary incarnation within a ‘theology of the orb’, as
exemplified in both Plato’s philosophy and medieval theology, and to emphasize
instead its inherently dualistic nature. A sphere, in Peter Sloterdijk’s definition, is
‘an orb in two halves, polarized and differentiated from the start, yet nonetheless
intimately joined’.21 Though both Plato and the Church Fathers sought to inte
grate spherical designs within ideal forms, the production of globes after about
1500 was linked to questions of geographical and commercial expansion, and the
use of sphere as a compound in contemporary language—in words such as hemi
sphere, atmosphere, and so on—speaks to a planetary condition that exceeds
mere phenomenological projection. Heidegger’s assumption of the sphere as a
basis for human ‘living’ and ‘building’ thus finds itself displaced by a planetary
environment within which interior worlds are always doubling back upon them
selves. Sloterdijk described Heidegger as ‘the greatest thinker of old Europe’, with
the philosopher’s thought being ‘a metastasis of southwestern German Old
Catholicism circa 1900’.22 By contrast, however, spherical postmodern culture
speaks not to an ‘idea of all-encompassing unity’ but, rather, to the dispersal of
‘the psychocosmic immune system of old Europe’ within planetary space.23 The
20 Ursula K. Heise, ‘Martian Ecologies and the Future of Nature,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3
& 57.4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 447–8; Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity,’ New Left Review 92
(March–April 2015): 115, 103–4.
21 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2: Globes Macrospherology (1999), trans. Wieland Hoban
(South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 364, and Spheres, Volume 1: Bubbles Microspherology
(1998), trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 45.
22 Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2, 28; Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology
(2004), trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016), 481, and ‘The Plunge and
the Turn: Speech on Heidegger’s Thinking in Motion’, in Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger (2001),
trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 5.
23 Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2, 133, 449.
Introduction 7
key geometrical characteristic of a sphere, as Angus Fletcher has noted, is that it

has ‘no edges’ and ‘implies continuous rotating influences’, a world in constant
motion. In this sense, the figure of a sphere infracts against the notion of linear
parameters, necessarily introducing ‘blurred edges’ through which any given bor
der becomes permeable.24 The spherical might thus be said to map transnational
ism on a planetary plane, introducing a mode of global rotation that creatively
compromises the separatist integrity of territorial boundaries.
It is consequently more helpful to conceptualize postmodernism as a broad
category, both spatially and temporally, rather than defining it inductively, as a
phenomenon synonymous with what Jeffrey T. Nealon called ‘the new global
casino capitalism’. In his book Post-Postmodernism (2012), Nealon argued how
his preferred term ‘marks an intensification and mutation within postmodern
ism’, with one reviewer suggesting this title was ‘potentially misleading’ for imply
ing a periodizing break when the book’s main thesis turns on continuity. Nealon
was, of course, right to point out that social and political conditions have changed
significantly since Jameson published his first essays on postmodernism in 1984,
but this is no different from signalling how, say, Victorian culture altered between
1840 and 1870. The manifold discrepancies between early and mid-Victorian
times should not obscure the homologies that also connect such thirty-year inter
vals. Indeed, to expand the temporal arc of any given scholarly field is potentially
to understand its historical dimensions with greater clarity, just as Nealon’s argu
ment about ‘the world of post-postmodern capital’ (my italics) might have been
more persuasive if some of his assumptions—about how ‘classic rock is every
where’, for example, with ‘the Eagles in the grocery store’—had been played off
against a greater sense of geographical variability, with this template of commodi
fied rock music not necessarily being one that would be recognized outside North
America.25 Australian geographer Katherine Gibson, writing collaboratively with
American scholar Julie Graham as ‘J. K. Gibson-Graham’, has drawn on Australian
cultural landscapes, from Aboriginal land rights movements to the Labor Party
governments of the 1980s and 1990s, to highlight ways in which a supposedly
‘naturalized universal of the capitalist economy’ always encountered geographical
and ideological limits, so that even in what Gibson-Graham in 2006 called ‘these
postmodern times’, it was possible to adumbrate an alternative discursive world
that was not ‘capitalocentric’, after the familiar US model.26 Postmodernism,
I argue, has always been tied to a planetary clock rather than to a national narrative,
24 Angus Fletcher, The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), 83, 88, 192.
25 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just in Time Capitalism (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 29, ix, 41, 44–5; Andrew Shipley, ‘Review of Post-Postmodernism,
by Jeffrey T. Nealon’, Symplokē 22.1/2 (2014): 427.
26 J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 166, 53, and The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 6.
and the trajectory informing its antipodean dimensions renders this kind of
spherical spectrum more clearly visible.
Even though postmodernism itself can (and should) properly be historicized,
one of its effects paradoxically involves, as Sven Birkerts noted, ‘an aesthetic that
rebukes the idea of an historical time line’, as well as a ‘flattening of historical
perspective’.27 Describing the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United
States as ‘a great age of fracture’, Daniel T. Rodgers related this sense of ‘disaggre
gation’ specifically to a reconfiguration of time, in a world where ‘globalizing mar
kets had shortened time expectations’, and where the idea of continuous linear
history had consequently been rendered redundant.28 Rodgers accounted for this
notion of ‘compressed time’ across all parts of the political spectrum: ‘the new
managerial rhetoric of quick response and flexible production’ was mirrored in
‘the eagerness of postmodernist architects to pluck symbols and motifs out of the
past into a pastiche for the present’, while Ronald Reagan’s appropriation in his
1981 inaugural address of the spirit of John Winthrop showed ‘the exuberance of
a kind of transgressive time travel’, with Brian Massumi also commenting on how,
as an old Hollywood actor, Reagan ‘operationalized the virtual in postmodern
politics’.29 Similarly addressing the compressed time scales characteristic of ‘neo
liberal temporality’, Carolyn Hardin described ‘the future-in-present temporality
of contemporary financialization’, whose accumulations were predicated not on
the Keynesian (or Fordist) assumption of a stable continuity between past, pre
sent, and future, but rather on a short-term framework governed by the immedi
acy of telepresence, in a world where the future itself had come to appear highly
unpredictable, if not incomprehensible.30 Evidence of how such a ‘present-focused
time-sense’ has formed part of what Hardin called a ‘broader cultural shift’, one
not just confined to financial markets, can be seen in the assumption that regime
change in Iraq could be, as Rodgers noted, ‘premised on compressed and foldable
time, on the ability of universal human incentives to kick in surely and quickly’,
something the foreign relations historian John Lewis Gaddis described as
‘free-market thinking applied to geopolitics’.31
The point here is neither to defend nor indict postmodern temporality for
itself, but to suggest how its assumptions vary markedly from those of (say)
modernist, Victorian, or Enlightenment temporality, and how a cross-cultural
approach can most usefully illuminate the comparative characteristics of
27 Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston, MA:
Faber, 1994), 123, 129.
28 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3, 5, 221.
29 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 230, 254, 231; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 41.
30 Carolyn Hardin, ‘Neoliberal Temporality: Time-Sense and the Shift from Pensions to 401(k)s’,
American Quarterly 66.1 (March 2014): 95, 110.
31 Hardin, ‘Neoliberal Temporality’, 110; Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 267; John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Grand
Strategy in the Second Term’, Foreign Affairs 84.1 (Jan./Feb. 2005): 15.
Introduction 9
postmodernism across both time and space. Postmodernism, what comes ‘post’
or after modernism, is etymologically a comparative formation, and the term
itself only makes discursive sense within a nexus of comparison, both spatial and
temporal. While many of the figures considered in this book have been stereotyp
ically associated with particular national traditions—Philip Larkin with England,
for example, or Les Murray with Australia, or John Barth with the United States—
my argument will be that the planetary dimensions inherent within postmodern
ism serve to fold their art into spheres that are inherently hybridized and
transnational. In this way, the identification of national identity as an elusive phe
nomenon, something quite explicit in the work of Vladimir Nabokov or Thom
Gunn for example, can be seen to frame the articulation of postmodernism more
generally. Such a comparative perspective also effectively illuminates how post
modernist temporality embraced a range of socially progressive aspects, opening
up horizons that had been repressed by more conventional figures of linear his
tory. Besides its evocation of environmental questions, postmodernism’s resist
ance to traditional constructions of historical continuity was associated with a
feminist impulse towards ‘postmodern rhythmic temporality’, as Elizabeth Deeds
Ermath described it, a rejection of the coercive nature of the ‘commanding met
anarrative’ of historical realism, and the revelation instead that ‘temporality’ is
merely ‘a convention and a collective act of faith’.32 bell hooks similarly argued
that the emphasis in postmodernism on a ‘decentered subject’ allowed potential
discursive space for Black activist politics and for a ‘bonding’ of other groups that
had been marginalized by the heavy hand of traditional history, and this became
associated with the popular idea of postmodernism as associated above all with
what Marianne DeKoven called the ‘progressive, egalitarian, diverse’ cultural
politics of ‘the long sixties’.33 It is important to observe that the renewed attention
to questions of race and gender in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s,
in particular, owed much to ways in which postmodern paradigms informed
both the critical trajectory of poststructuralism and the commitment of New
Historicism to excavate alternate versions of the past, narratives that had custom
arily been suppressed by the institutional constraints of the old history. But this
emphasis on aesthetic defamiliarization—or ‘de- doxification’, to use Linda
Hutcheon’s term—carried as its more sinister corollary the neoliberal paradigm
of the commodification and redistribution of time through a 24/7 market model
based around a world in which, as Jonathan Crary argued, human biology took
second place, where ‘sleeping’ was regarded as ‘for losers’, and where ‘the relent
less financialization and commodification of more and more regions of individual
32 Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational
Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33, 20, 30.
33 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990),
31; Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3–4.
and social life’ created ‘a time extracted from any material or identifiable
demarcations’.34 The problematization of older models of continuity, in other
words, created distinct hazards as well as opportunities across a broad cultural
spectrum, and postmodernism was never synonymous with either emancipatory
politics or the coercions of late capitalism.
Such a radical compression of temporality also carried ramifications for the
production and consumption of art. Hayles asserted baldly in 2012 that ‘[t]he Age
of Print is passing’, while Jeremy Green in 2005 described how within what he
called ‘late postmodernism’, the whole conception of a ‘literary field’ was finding
itself under siege from ‘heterogeneous mediascapes’: television, DVD, Internet,
and so on.35 Although Green did argue that ‘imaginative engagement with this
fissured terrain has produced a significant body of contemporary writing’, he
nevertheless acknowledged how a publishing industry interlocked with mass
media and with the increasingly standardized tendencies of higher education,
whereby degrees came increasingly to be regarded as a form of accreditation for
the information economy, created a situation in which writing itself was regarded
as ‘a quixotic or absurd activity, an anachronistic enterprise’.36 Creative writing
still enjoyed considerable purchase as a university subject, as Mark McGurl has
described in The Program Era; but the Leavisite idea of literary criticism as being
at the heart of a liberal humanist education, with the long novel enshrined by the
Cambridge critic’s ‘great tradition’ both representing events unfolding over
sequential time and demanding a substantial expenditure of time on the part of
willing students, had generally been superseded.37 Helen Powell described ‘the
digital age’ as emerging from the 1980s, while Charlie Gere dated the new era
from 2000, arguing that the turn of the millennium witnessed the ‘almost total
transformation of the world by digital technology’.38 The latter claim is gross
hyperbole, of course, similar to Masao Miyoshi’s extravagant assertion in 1993
that ‘Cable TV and MTV dominate the world absolutely’; but it is nevertheless
true that new electronic technologies changed common perceptions of time
across a broad axis.39 For example, Jacques Derrida noted in Archive Fever (1995)
how the model of microcomputing as a ‘mystic pad’ introduced a different kind of
34 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4;
Jonathan Crary, Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 14, 99, 29.
35 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2; Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the
Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1, 14.
36 Green, Late Postmodernism, 28, 13, 11.
37 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James,
Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
38 Helen Powell, Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema (London: Tauris, 2012), 26; C. Gere,
Digital Culture, 2md ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 13.
39 Masao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of
the Nation-State’, Critical Inquiry 19.4 (Summer 1993): 747.
Introduction 11
memory, and how ‘psychoanalysis (among other things) would not have been
what it was if e-mail had existed’.40 Paul Booth, similarly, has written of how con
temporary television narratives have affected our general understanding of his
toricity, arguing how there have been complex convergences between digital
media structures and the evocation of history itself as a reconstruction of the
past, since both involve forms of ‘temporal displacement’ that signal ‘a shifting
notion of the cultural response to time and temporality in general’, through which
bygone scenarios are projected in simulated forms.41 The consequent institution
alization and naturalization of what Baudrillard described as an ‘age of simula
tion’ predicated upon ‘a liquidation of all referentials’ ensured that the ‘theology
of truth’, a powerful conception in the modernist understanding of meaning as a
latent and often secretive phenomenon, came to find itself supplanted by a hyper
real world in which the old division between realism and simulation had been
abolished. The challenge of Andy Warhol’s art, as Baudrillard observed, was not
to analyse the iconography of Jackie Onassis or other pictorial subjects in terms of
psychological depth, but to recognize the affective power of their ‘multiple repli
cas’ within the material world’s ‘vertigo of duplication’.42
The implicit correlation between finance and politics in relation to revised con
ceptions of postmodern temporality became mirrored also in affinities between
the fields of medicine and the security state. Eric Cazdyn has analysed how ‘there
is a shared logic in the way preemption was employed by the Bush administration
to justify its attacks on Iraq and the way preemption is now emphasized in eco
nomics, psychiatry, ecology, culture, and the medical sciences’. In particular,
genetic prediction of cancer and other diseases made possible by the emergence
of biotechnology has established the notion of ‘a new chronic mode’, one in which
the current condition of a person’s body merely foreshadows a future state, just
as the so-called ‘war on terror’ involves the security state forestalling events before
they happen.43 This creates, as Massumi observed, a curious ‘affect-driven logic
of the would-have/could-have’, grounded in a ‘metaphysics of feeling’, where threats
that do not actually materialize have ‘all the affective reality of a past future, truly
felt’. As Massumi noted, ‘[p]reemption is a time concept’, pivoting on a structure
of reversal whereby future time is transposed into present time.44 This marks a
significant change from the legal assumptions that appertained through most of
40 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15.
41 Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New York: Peter Lang,
2012), 209, 212.
42 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983), 4, 12, 136.
43 Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012), 130, 5.
44 Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015), 191, 201, vii.
the twentieth century, when justice was apportioned in relation to actual deeds
rather than on the basis of mere intentions or fantasies. It also involves a distinct
shift away from the existentialist emphasis on freedom of the will as a morally
constitutive category. David Carr’s Time, Narrative, and History (1986), a book
published in a series entitled ‘Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy’, drew upon the work of Martin Heidegger in order to postulate an
ethical stance towards both past and future, one that emphasizes the moral need
to ‘strike a balance between two extremes: over-stressing our inheritance in the
present by treating it as an isolating from past and future, and over-stressing our
openness to past and future by treating it as a supra-temporal perspective’.45 Yet
while such an emphasis on freedom as a condition of ‘balance’ may have seemed
important in the middle years of the twentieth century, particularly after the
trauma of World War II, it carries less obvious resonance at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, when issues of genetic coding, and information technology
in general, have dramatically altered our understanding of what the concept of
‘inheritance,’ and therefore of existential freedom, might mean. As we will see in
Chapter 5, the scientific intertwining of biogenetics with family ancestry in a
novel such as Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002) is very different in kind from
the principled representation of temporality as ethical and political progression
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy of novels, published between 1945
and 1949. This is not to claim that Eugenides is a better novelist than Sartre,
merely to indicate that their conceptions of time and history function very differ
ently, and that such cultural differences need to be acknowledged in any critical
understanding of their work.
Postmodern time, then, characteristically involves a scrambling of linear
sequence, whereby the present is haunted by both the proleptic future and what
Huyssen has called ‘present pasts’. Huyssen described how ‘modern means of
transportation and communication’ have weakened ‘temporal boundaries’ to
such an extent that history itself has been superseded by various forms of memo
rialization, some linked to the ‘museal sensibility’ that becomes part of a popular
collective imaginary, others associated with changes in digital technology through
which computer memory creates an archived past that far exceeds the capacity for
recollection of any given individual.46 Huyssen commented on how this ‘shift
from history to memory’ involved a ‘welcome critique of compromised teleo
logical notions of history,’ with the incorporation of ‘[m]emory as re-presentation,
as making present’ providing a valuable corrective to established histories based
45 David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 42.
46 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 1, and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. On how ‘automated electronic systems of memory’ have impacted
upon relations between present and past, see also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time
and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xiii.
Introduction 13
on highly selective versions of the past that amounted in many cases to forms of
institutional ‘amnesia’.47 All of the public apologies to both the living and the dead
that have characterized the postmodern era—for the Holocaust, for child abuse,
to the ‘Stolen Generations’ of Indigenous Australians who were removed from
their families—presuppose a world in which the past is considered malleable,
with the genre of apology predicated on an assumption that history might have
gone in another direction if different ethical choices had been made. Jameson, by
contrast, subordinates ethics to politics, and for him history is ‘what hurts’, involv
ing a series of complex social and economic determinants that ensures the past
‘had to happen the way it did’.48 Within the postmodern culture of apology, how
ever, blame is characteristically associated instead with the actions of individuals;
indeed, there is a curious paradox—verging on a structural contradiction—asso
ciated with the notion of moral responsibility within postmodernism, whereby
the swerve away from existential autonomy as a functional category does not
exonerate the individual guilt of those caught up in earlier scenes of exploitation.
There do seem to be implicit statutes of limitations in such exercises—nobody, for
example, has so far apologized for the treatment of child chimney-sweeps in
nineteenth-century London, lamentable though that undoubtedly was by today’s
standards—but the general principle of the apology involves an appropriation of
the past for corrective purposes and the supposed amelioration of injustice by a
dissemination of sentimental affect. There have been some examples of this
re-appropriation of the past that have generally been considered successful, such
as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa after the
abolition of apartheid in 1994, which sought cathartically to expurgate the past by
granting amnesty to those prepared to bear witness to their previous actions.
But again, this Commission was invested more in transforming narratives of
the future by the way it sought to reconfigure the terms and power equations of the
past. Whatever the philosophical status of this kind of temporal shift, it has clearly
influenced the representation of time in postmodern art and culture. As we shall
see in Chapter 4, Michael Rothberg’s analysis of ‘multidirectional memory’, link
ing adult to child and evoking a ‘transversal’ form of memory that transmits itself
across generations, is relevant to the cinema of Michael Haneke, whose film
Hidden (2005) evokes the latent violence that links contemporary Paris to the
French-Algerian war, just as Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) obliquely
47 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6, and Present Pasts, 10, 21.

48 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 102, and ‘Periodizing the 60s’, in The Ideologies of Theory (London:
Verso, 2008), 483. In a barb at Emmanuel Levinas, Jameson notes: ‘I have so often been taken to task
for my arguments against ethics (in politics as well as aesthetics) that it seems worth observing in
passing that Otherness is a very dangerous category, one we are well off without’ (Postmodernism, 290).
conjures up the traumatic memory of Nazi Germany.49 Trauma, in other words,

has become the stuff that postmodern temporality thrives upon.
My concern here, then, is not so much with a philosophy of time but with an
aesthetics of time, the ways in which postmodern temporality represents the
world in different fashions from the temporal styles of previous eras. One aspect
of this aestheticization of postmodernist time involves a recognition of ways in
which it evokes conceptions of a spectral presence that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
noted, was generally not available to ‘the secular code of historical and humanist
time—that is, a time bereft of gods and spirits’.50 The haunting aspects of trauma
also transgress against more traditional aspects of progressive humanist time,
while the idea of a spectral past looming over the empirical present is also a theme
that has been extensively explored within Indigenous culture. It is, of course, easy
enough to understand academic suspicion of scholars who insist upon the real
presence of ancestral spirits; one may be put in mind of the Welshman Glendower,
in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part One, who claims he ‘can call spirits from the
vasty deep’, to which the more down-to-earth Hotspur responds: ‘Why, so can I,
or so can any man;/But will they come when you do call for them?’51 But as
Chakrabarty, drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, observed: ‘gods are as real as
ideology is, that is to say. . . they are embedded in practices’.52 Žižek’s notion of
how the ‘fundamental level of ideology. . . is not of an illusion masking the real
state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality
itself ’ carries particular resonance within a framework of postmodernism, where
apparently secular formations find themselves countervailed by many residual
loyalties (involving ethnic inheritance as well as religion), and where the dividing
line between belief and scepticism is often blurred or inchoate.53 The notion of a
four-dimensional postmodernism thus refers not only to an understanding com
mon in the world of theoretical physics of time itself as the fourth dimension of
space, but also to the prospect of antipodean postmodernism opening up a lim
inal zone in between sacred and secular, one in which a transposition of perspec
tives elucidates different angles of vision, both geographic and ontological. My
purpose is not to claim any kind of categorical primacy for antipodean postmod
ernism but, rather, to suggest ways in which it works productively to disorient
more familiar accounts of the subject, thereby rendering them permeable to alter
native spatio-temporal dimensions.
49 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 18.
50 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History and the Times of Gods’, in Lisa Lowe and David
Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 39.
51 William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part One, Act Three, Scene I, lines 52–8, in The
Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951), 496–7.
52 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 41.
53 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33.
Introduction 15
In this sense, the version of historicism committed to what Chakrabarty called

a ‘metanarrative of progress’ might be seen in itself as endemic to an ‘elitism’ that
would dismiss religious affect as beneath intellectual consideration by the ‘disen
chanted language of sociology’.54 By bringing Western time into the orbit of
antipodean time, and by considering ways in which traditional understandings
of linear progress turn back upon themselves, my purpose is not to validate
Indigenous culture as a metaphysical entity but, rather, to analyse ways in which
postmodern time across a global axis often involves a destabilization of conven
tional boundaries between the secular and the supernatural. Writing in 1979, as
the ‘computerization of society’ was beginning to reconstruct Western society
according to an ‘operativity criterion’ of technological efficiency within which
‘metaphysical philosophy’ appeared to be redundant, Lyotard defined the ‘post
modern condition’ as involving an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’; but such
an attempt to universalize the codes of Western secularism glossed over many
emotional affiliations that could not fit so clearly within a sceptical accord.55 Jean
Genet in a 1977 interview said he thought there was ‘nothing happier or more
joyful’ than Monteverdi’s mass of the Beata Vergine, and he also remarked on a
Japanese Noh play ‘which really moved me’ in its evocation of the transition from
Buddhist into Shinto religion, even though the French writer firmly dismissed
any notion of granting such aesthetic fabrications the status of any kind of literal
truth: ‘Do you think I’m Buddhist or Shinto?’ The real scandal of Genet was not
so much sexual or political transgression, but an investment in the gravitas of art
itself as a phenomenon that could outweigh worldly constraints; he remarked that
after reading in bed a page of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, he ‘then
had to think for two hours before starting again’.56 For Genet, the potentially rad
ical, disruptive power of art could never be subordinated to the interests of any
kind of orthodoxy, communist, Catholic, or otherwise.
In Australia, the academic tradition of Cultural Studies that developed during
the latter part of the twentieth century has tended to marginalize, if not altogether
proscribe, this realm of aesthetics as tending towards a dangerously deviant
cathexis, a distortion of the consolidation of normative social values in the inter
ests of promoting a merely self-indulgent or socially elitist style. Australian critic
Simon During compared the cultural prestige associated with traditional forms
of the humanities to older and now largely superannuated models of learning
that propped up vested or aristocratic interests, ‘the world of Scholasticism and
the trivium; the worlds of old Anglican rural, parochial, and liturgical life, and so
on’. Tony Bennett likewise related conceptions of ‘art’s autonomy’ not only to
54 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 50–1, 49.

55 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 67, xxiv–xxv.
56 ‘Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte’, trans. Patrick McCarthy, New Review No. 37 (April
1977): 10–11.
formulations of professional expertise linked to the consolidation of social power,

but also to a romanticized notion of freedom that can be traced back to Kant and
‘bears the continuing impress of a secular and historicized version of Christian
metaphysics’.57 Yet Genet’s investment was in neither freedom nor Christianity
but, rather, an imaginative rearrangement and traducement of social structures,
which he sought to spin on their head so they could be apprehended from an
alternative perspective. In this way, there are significant homologies between the
antipodean and the aesthetic, in that both involve not transcendence but system
atic repositioning, a recalibration of the normative codes of Western culture.
Rather than relegating antipodean aesthetics to a footnote, I argue that to bring
the art of Australasia into dialogue with Western culture more generally is to
expand postmodernism’s geographical orbit so as to gain a more nuanced view of
its temporal scales, the planetary clock that chronicles the manifold variations of
time on Earth. Ato Quayson used the term ‘calibrations’ to describe ‘a reading
practice’ that brought together ‘close reading of literature with what lies beyond it
as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradic
tion that inform both literature and society’, and The Planetary Clock seeks simi
larly to calibrate literature, art, and film in the light of broader ‘interdisciplinary
modulations’ across differential geospatial equations.58 Hayles, who prefers the
term ‘digitalism’ to postmodernism, has suggested that antiquated models of lit
erary scholarship should be reclassified under the label ‘Comparative Media
Studies’, and such a reformulation would speak to the sense of literature as an
exhausted enterprise that During, Bennett, and others have talked about.59 The
contention of this book, however, is that the formulation of aesthetic value across
a broad spectrum of art forms—music, film, and the visual arts, as well as litera
ture—offers an apparatus of aesthetics that exceeds the boundaries of the quotid
ian, provoking forms of alterity that open up different kinds of ways to understand
the world.
The defamiliarization of time was a common theme in visual art of the 1960s,
ranging from the subversion of conventional narrative constraints in Warhol’s
eight-hour film Empire (1964), which features one shot of the Empire State build
ing from mid-evening until 3 a.m. the next day, to the fluctuating time schemes in
the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. The brilliance of Empire, as Pamela L. Lee
wrote, lies in its ‘seemingly literal relationship to time’, the ways in which it
57 Simon During, ‘Stop Defending the Humanities’, Public Books, 1 March 2014, online: http://
www.publicbooks.org/stop- defending-the-humanities/, accessed 24 Jan. 2017; Tony Bennett,
‘Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise’, New Literary History 41.2 (Spring 2010): 267–8. Both During and
Bennett were born outside Australia—During in New Zealand, Bennett in the UK—but they cur
rently work at the University of Queensland and Western Sydney University respectively and have
become academically associated with the shift from literary to cultural studies.
58 Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press,
2003), xi.
59 Hayles, How We Think, 7.
Introduction 17
orchestrates its shots so as to disrupt the selective temporal conventions around

which regular art is organized, while Antonioni’s work similarly problematizes
traditional assumptions of linear sequence.60 In the latter’s L’Avventura (The
Adventure, 1960), there is a specific allusion to Australia, since the film follows a
group of wealthy friends from Rome who search the coastal islands off Sicily for
Anna (Lea Massari), who has suddenly disappeared without trace from their
boating holiday. With a storm looming on the island, they take refuge in a hut
and encounter its occupant, a fisherman who tells them the hut’s owners are in
Australia, from where he himself has returned after thirty years, pointing to
photographs of his antipodean relatives pinned to the walls of his abode to prove
it. In a flat-footed reading of this scene, Lindsay Barrett complained of how ‘these
narcissists have no interest in [the fisherman’s] story: they ask him no questions
about himself, or Australia, or the years he spent there; all they care about is the
adventure of their search’. However, the enigmatic and disorienting nature of this
Aeolian landscape, whose islands (as one of the characters remarks) were once
volcanoes, reflects the larger dislocations of space and time that are crucial to the
tenor of this film, evoking as it does scenes of classical and religious ruin where
the reality of time itself appears to become evanescent, to implode upon itself or
go into reverse.61 As we shall see throughout this book, the anomalous temporal
ity associated with ‘indigenous and aboriginal peoples’ consistently interrupts
Eurocentric assumptions, invoking dimensions of the uncanny or alterity that
introduce what Iain Chambers has called ‘a critical uncertainty’ into ‘institutional’
Western chronotopes.62 But such alterity is not merely the product of n on-Western
cultures. As I discuss in Chapter 1, both French composer Olivier Messiaen
and film-maker Eric Rohmer use religious imagery to reconstruct postmodern
narratives in a way that allows space for the uncanny, and to expand postmod
ernism’s orbit to include antipodean variations is again to elucidate alternative
angles on Western as well as Australasian cultures. Chakrabarty, when c omparing
‘secular’ and ‘humanist time’ to its ‘subaltern’ corollaries, focused on the invoca
tion of ‘Gods, spirits, and other “supernatural” forces’ in South Asia, with an
acknowledgment as well of how various communal stories in ‘Africa, or Latin
America’ disrupt the global penetration of ‘capitalism’; but the spherical strain of
an antipodean imaginary, extrapolating from the specific geographical circum
stances of the Southern continent larger dimensions of a lterity, also carries a
particular charge within this context.63
60 Pamela L. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 279.
61 Lindsay Barrett, ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Being an Australian: John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird
Mob’, in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon, eds., Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in
Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012), 244.
62 Iain Chambers, ‘Citizenship, Language, and Modernity’, PMLA 117.1 (Jan. 2002): 30, 28.
63 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 39, 36, 57.
Reinscribing postmodernism within a planetary framework in this way does

not involve merely invoking Indigenous culture as a corrective to Western deca
dence. Johannes Fabian, in his poststructuralist account of anthropology Time and
the Other (1983), cautioned specifically against relegating the study of any social
organization to a mythical time of origins, and the burden of Fabian’s argument
was that anthropology itself is always tied up with the ironies of language and with
the ‘dialectical contradiction’ inextricably entangled in all questions of representa
tion. What Fabian called the anachronism and ‘allochronism of anthropology’ is
thus not a categorical mistake, but an aspect integral to its intellectual condition of
being.64 To bring Western postmodernism into juxtaposition with its antipodean
counterpart is consequently not merely to replenish the former with a lost world of
spirit, nor simply to deconstruct the latter through exposing it to neoliberal forms
of commodification. Instead, it elicits a reciprocally illuminating circuit between
these differential potentialities, suggesting how they are bound up in complex
ways each with the other. Such a projection of temporality along multiple scales
simultaneously is itself characteristic of postmodernism recalibrated across a
spherical domain, with English composer Harrison Birtwistle (to be discussed in
Chapter 7) organizing his musical piece for electronic tape Chronometer (1971)
around an idea of time unfolding in different registers. Chronometer juxtaposes a
loud stopwatch, the bells of fourteenth-century Wells Cathedral and the chiming
of Big Ben, with this iconic London clock being slowed down on tape to a distant
rhythmic echo resembling a heartbeat, as if to counterpoint clockwork time with a
slower, organic process of time’s gradual unfolding. Such métissage represents both
an aestheticization of time and its alignment along different ontological scales, and
it is a similar sense of radical variability that illuminates the art of postmodernism
within a planetary framework. One limitation of US versions of postmodernism,
in their intellectual association with New Historicism and its emancipatory narra
tives of race and gender, was the way they tended simply to take over what Brook
Thomas called the ‘progressive temporal continuity’ associated with a ‘pragmatic
sense of temporality,’ so that there were ‘unacknowledged continuities’ between the
teleology of old history and New Historicism.65 By contrast, to invoke a long post
modernism, extensive both in its temporal scope and its spatial extent, is to recon
struct this sense of time according to more heterogeneous markers.
Ironies of the Anthropocene
The apparent antithesis between postmodernism on the one hand and environ
mental politics on the other can be traced back as far as William Cronon’s classic
64 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 164, 32.
65 Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 79, 22.
Introduction 19
1992 essay, ‘A Place for Stories’, which complained of how there was ‘something
profoundly unsatisfying and ultimately self-deluding about an endless postmod
ernist deconstruction of texts that fails to ground itself in history, in community,
in politics, and finally in the moral problem of living on earth’.66 Bruno Latour
similarly chastised postmodernism for ‘its rejoicing in virtual reality’, along with
‘its overemphasis on reflexivity, its maddening efforts to write texts that do not
carry any risk of presence’, and he accused ‘Postmoderns of the past and of the
present’ of attempting ‘to break the connection between the discovery of natural
laws of the cosmos and the problems of making the Body Politic safe for its
citizens’.67 One structural irony here, however, is that predictions of climate change
have themselves been amplified by a postmodernist intellectual context, with cli
matology heavily reliant on computer-generated models that allow scientists to
study the complex interactions among oceans, land, atmosphere, flora, fauna,
clouds, and human industry.68 It is true, as climate scientist Paul N. Edwards
observed, that all meteorological knowledge has always been indebted to abstract
scientific systems of one kind or another, since climate ‘is essentially the history of
weather, averaged over time’, and is thus necessarily dependent on a ‘model-data
symbiosis’.69 To say climate change is a virtual conception is not to suggest it is
merely phantasmagoric or fanciful, but to suspend the ontological divide between
empirical reality and the postmodern simulacrum in a manner that follows pre
cisely Baudrillard’s projection of ‘perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of
signs’.70 Virtual reality is as real as any other.
This is not, then, to take issue with the general science of climate change, based
upon measures of rising oceans, thawing polar icecaps, and an increasing preva
lence of extreme weather; as Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles summarize this
case, ‘[t]he basic facts are now clear and essentially beyond dispute’.71 It is, how
ever, to acknowledge that there are many different discursive contexts within
which such science might be conceptualized, and that the ‘careful hedging’
practised by professional scientists cognizant of the limitations of all theories
pertaining to climate prediction often gets lost amidst the loud pressure from
mass media and politicians for simple ‘data’ that can be extrapolated to make a
popular case. This has led, as Mike Hulme has argued, to a situation in which
66 William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History
78.3 (March 1992): 1374.
67 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 21–2, 217.
68 Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2015), 38.
69 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 287, 352.
70 Jean Baudrillard, America (1986), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 76.
71 Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is
Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), 9.
the science of climatology has become framed within a wide spectrum of

competing philosophical beliefs.72 Jeffrey T. Kiehl, for example, hoped to counteract
‘our habitual patterns of negativity’ in relation to climate change matters by
drawing on Jungian psychology and Buddhism as a path towards ‘compassionate
action’, a quasi-religious directive of ‘transformation’ owing more to a cathexis of
emotional affect than to rational analysis: ‘If we open our hearts and feel our con
nection to the world,’ he writes, ‘our actions will be true.’73 Such a call to feel the
urgency of climate change rather than merely to analyse the problem rationally
brings to mind what Patricia T. Clough in 2007 called ‘the Affective Turn’, a move
ment charged with an emphasis different from the linguistic turn, focussing as it
does not so much on language as on the kind of sensory responses generated by a
‘biomediated body’—touch, taste, smell, and so on—all of which have been influ
enced by recent research in the cognitive neurosciences.74 It is, though, not diffi
cult to see how, in its openness to ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally
other than conscious knowing’, such theories of affect participate in the same kind
of quarrel with more abstract forms of rationalism that galvanized postmodern
ism in its earlier days, when it sought radically to scrutinize modernism’s grand
(and grandiose) narratives under the sign of manifold cultural difference.75
To reformulate ‘the climate change problem’ within a postmodern mode is thus
not at all to reduce it to a merely ludic category, even though for instrumental
purposes, as Eric A. Posner and David Wesibach have suggested, there may be
good political reasons for disconnecting it from a more idealistic ‘corrective just
ice model’. Posner and Wesibach recognized how ‘justice-related arguments’ have
the capacity to undermine prospects for an international climate change agree
ment and thus to create increased risks for the general state of human well-being,
especially in poor nations, and so they chose to argue pragmatically for a ‘broadly
welfarist’ approach to this issue.76 The larger point, though, is that a more cap
acious definition of postmodernist culture would encompass both rhetorical
irony and ethical commitment, with the mise-en-abîme of linguistic deconstruc
tion not necessarily positioning itself in opposition to environmental concerns
for the planet. Such a symbiotic interface between the kind of epistemological
slippage characteristic of poststructuralist theory and scenarios of moral
72 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and
Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 233, 218.
73 Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), xi–xii, 143.
74 Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’ (2007), in
Melissa Gregg and Gregory T. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 207; Gregory T. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in
Gregg and Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, 7–8.
75 Seigworth and Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, 1.
76 Eric A. Posner and David Weisbach, Climate Change Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 190, 192, 9.
Introduction 21
engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist writers

such as David Foster Wallace, and one of the larger benefits of antipodean
postmodernism is the way it turns the planet conceptually on its axis, allowing
such an interplay between irony and the Anthropocene to form a constituent part
of global postmodernism’s definition. By deconstructing ossified oppositions—
North versus South, as well as irony versus ethics—an antipodean postmodern
ism effectively expands what might seem like a narrow periodizing concept into a
more variegated, flexible phenomenon. It is also noteworthy that the profile of
global warming as a scientific issue was significantly advanced in the 1970s by the
development of spectral mathematics as a new way to calculate the Earth’s tem
peratures, moving away from the linear grids of latitude and longitude that had
until then dominated atmospheric research through the devising of a mathemat
ical system more fully responsive to variations caused by the Earth’s spherical
shape. Spectral mathematics brought polar geography into greater prominence
by, as Edwards observed, addressing ‘one of the most difficult problems in Earth
system modelling: representing wave motion on a sphere’.77 One of the pioneers
in this method was William Bourke, who was based at Australia’s Commonwealth
Meteorology Research Centre, and this indicates how the expansion of environ
mental science to recognize the shape of the planet can be understood as analo
gous to a move to redefine postmodernism according to a spherical model.78
Part of the problem with academic environmentalism in general is that it has
been too quick to take sides, to follow the example of Cronon in adducing a
‘moral center’ to environmental history, one that would position it antithetically
to postmodernism.79 Such an invocation of what Sabine Wilke called ‘global
environmental justice’ has involved linking environmental politics to systems of
colonial oppression that raise questions around identity and community, a stra
tegic shift that led Rob Nixon to indict what he called ‘the age of neoliberal glo
balization’ for suppressing the interests of too many people.80 This is not to
criticize the political position of Wilke or Nixon in itself, and the latter’s citation
of Arundhati Roy’s argument that globalization is ‘like a light which shines
brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness’ carries particu
lar purchase in the era of Trump and Brexit, when there has been a sharp popular
reaction against the social and economic loading of the dice by those who, during
the heyday of neoliberalism, were able to manipulate global markets to their own
advantage. But to align this inequitable politics with a ‘slow violence’ that brings
77 Edwards, A Vast Machine, 165.

78 On the ‘magnitude of the “pole problem” ’, see Michael Naughton, Philippe Courtier, and William
Bourke, ‘Representation Errors in Various Grid and Spectral Truncations for a Symmetric Feature on
the Sphere’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 122, No. 529 (Jan. 1996): 254.
79 Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories’, 1370.
80 Sabine Wilke, ‘Anthropocentric Fictions: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age’, Rachel
Carson Center Perspectives, No. 3 (2013): 67; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of
the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46.
about environmental depredation is to conflate issues that are working themselves

out within radically different trajectories, one on the level of worldly affairs, the
other within the realm of planetary simulation. Nixon’s assertion of the ‘over
whelming, virtually unanimous, consensus among climate scientists that climate
change is happening, is human-induced, is accelerating, and will have cata
strophic consequences for human and much nonhuman life on earth’ may be
plausible enough, and Edwards concurs that while ‘[p]robabilities are all we
have . . . the probability that the skeptics’ claims are true is vanishingly small’, since
the ‘facts of global warming are unequivocally supported by the climate know
ledge infrastructure.’81 But the ways in which climate issues are represented, and
the complicated political options arising out of them, are another matter entirely.
Nicole Seymour has aptly claimed that in its insistence on the ‘transparency of
truth’, ecocriticism has too often avoided ‘self-reflexivity, and metacritique’, of the
kind integral to postmodern fictions. To fold environmentalism into postmod
ernism, then, is both to introduce an ecological dimension into postmodernism
and also to recognize how enviromentalism’s ‘reputation for sanctimony and
self-
righteousness’ might productively be crossed by more ironic aspects of
‘queerness’ and ‘affect’. Nature, suggested Seymour, is no less of a performative
category than gender.82
One paradox here involves the way in which the Anthropocene is itself a
non-anthropocenic concept, something that attempts specifically to counter the
‘narcissistic reflex’ of human exceptionalism by a contrary emphasis on the integ
rity of non-human objects, what Jane Bennett called ‘the vitality of matter’. Such
vitality involves, in Bennett’s view, ‘the capacity of things—edibles, commodities,
storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and design of humans but
also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies
of their own’.83 From this angle, there might appear to be an anomalously
anthropomorphic aspect to the Anthropocene, an appropriation of human tools
of measurement to calibrate processes that are non-human in their operation.
Such a double-bind serves ironically to draw attention to the limits of human agency,
even as the term itself invokes the malignant repercussions of human industrial
civilization. Another structural irony is the fact that it will only be possible to
date the Anthropocene in retrospect, from a hypothetical point way beyond the
temporal horizons of contemporary historians. As Jeremy Davies has observed,
there are innumerable disagreements about when the Anthropocene era, involving
the warming of the planet due to human activity, might properly be said to have
81 Nixon, Slow Violence, 172, 39; Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library,
1999), 123; Edwards, A Vast Machine, 429.
82 Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 26, 16, 19, 119.
83 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), xvi, ix, vii.
Introduction 23
begun. Some opt for the era of the Cold War, pointing to the Manhattan Project’s
first nuclear test in 1945; others point to James Watt’s patents on steam engine
design in 1784, or to the emergence of European capitalist regimes of globalizing
commodity chains in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, or to Columbus’s first
transatlantic voyage in 1492; still others suggest that climate change is not a phe
nomenon specific to the last few centuries, but can be traced back to agriculture
and settlement that began some five thousand years ago.84
While it may not be within the competence of any cultural critic to adjudicate
among these conflicting claims, it is entirely appropriate to highlight the
degrees of epistemological uncertainty associated with such projections and
the rhetorical ironies embedded within the conception of the Anthropocene
itself. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey has written of how ‘the Anthropocene must be
provincialized’, since it is a ‘masculinist and ethnocentric’ concept weighted too
much towards the ‘global north’ and correspondingly light on marine issues of
oceanography and islands, with the additional irony that the emergence of the
Anthropocene was imbricated during the Cold War with nuclear science, since it
was the military tracking of radioactive fallout after World War II that led to the
development of radiocarbon dating and more accurate models of the planet’s
deep time. On a more systemic level, however, it is also true that the Anthropocene
is necessarily an allegorical formation, one involving what DeLoughrey described
as ‘an aporia or discontinuity’ at its core.85 Pursuing this complex relation between
the planetary environment and its discursive configuration, Srinivas Aravamudan
described climate change through the trope of ‘catachronism’, an ‘inversion of
anachronism’ that ‘re-characterizes the past and the present in terms of a future
proclaimed as determinate, but that is of course not yet fully realized’.86 The editor
of the special issue of diacritics where Aravamudan’s essay appeared noted how
our consciousness of the Anthropocene has ‘ushered in strange and chaotic tem
poralities’, ones associated with extraordinary expansions of temporal scale.87
Aravamudan chronicled how the last major extinction event was an asteroid col
lision with the Earth some 65 million years ago, and how there have been ‘eleven
major climate change events’ involving glaciation and interglacial interludes over
the past million years. All of this renders ‘the quasi-Nazi propositions of deep
ecology’ highly problematic in terms of contemporary politics, since these diver
gences of scale between social time and ecological time are so great.88
Aravamudan’s notion that the ‘Anthropocene is never simply what you predict it
84 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press,
2016), 89–104.
85 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2019), 20, 12, 69, 10. DeLoughrey’s model of ‘provincializing’ the Anthropocene is indebted to Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, and her use of ‘aporia’ to the work of Paul de Man.
86 Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘The Catachronism of Climate Change’, diacritics 41.3 (2013): 8.
87 Karen Pinkus, ‘From the Editor: Climate Change Criticism’, diacritics 41.3 (2013): 3.
88 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 13, 23.
will be; otherwise the future would be just an extension of the present’ can be
linked conceptually to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the ‘black swan’ idea of
history, which is based upon ‘the structure of randomness in empirical reality’.
Taleb specifically expressed scepticism about ‘the models used to forecast climate
change’, suggesting that technological developments or other unexpected events
might prevent the simple extrapolation of a future state from current conditions.89
Indeed, Paul Smethurst has linked the apocalyptic trope of ‘global warming’ to a
modernist style of grand narrative, one that seeks to extrapolate predictions from
the past, despite the fact that the models of chaos theory and unpredictability
associated with postmodern chronotopes signal ‘not the end of history, but the
end of history as a map’.90 One of the structural ironies associated with the
Anthropocene (as opposed to the science of climate change) involves the way this
concept is framed by a postmodern condition but circumscribed discursively by
older styles of rhetoric.
The issue here involves not only philosophical randomness, but also the prob
lematic correlation between radically different time scales. British painter David
Hockney in 2008 dismissed climate change activists as ‘hair-shirt’ people, adding:
I blame computers. They can make predictive models of anything, and tell us
we’re all heading towards doom. But in our grandparents’ day, what do you think
people were worrying about? Hellfire and eternal damnation caused by our bad
conduct. Global warming has just replaced God. Something to feel guilty about.
The new religion.91
It is true that the idea of apocalyptic catastrophe can be ‘oddly comforting’, as

Aravamudan noted, and also that the notion of the Anthropocene as ‘a negative
theology of messianicity’ has attracted the intellectual support of many Christian
proselytizers.92 Links between theology and ecology have an extensive cultural
history, going back to William Paley in the eighteenth century: ‘Long before ecol
ogy emerged as a scientific discipline,’ observed Alan Bewell, ‘it was an important
aspect of natural theology, which celebrated the intricate ecological relationships
existing among plants and animals as an expression of the wisdom and design of
Creation.’93 Given this intellectual genealogy, it is not difficult to understand how
89 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 24; Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the
Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010), xxxii, 315.
90 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 83–4.
91 Andy McSmith, ‘Painter Sees Red: Is David Hockney the Grumpiest Man in Britain?’
Independent (UK), 5 June 2008, online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/painter-
sees-red-is-david-hockney-the-grumpiest-man-in-britain-840532.html, accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
92 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 10, 24.
93 Alan Bewell, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 297–8.
Introduction 25
Thom van Dooren’s utopian commitment to ‘ecologies of hope’ owes as much to

his academic background in religious studies as to his environmental activism.94
Some of the more foolish clerical commentators who have sought to extrapolate
divine teachings from contemporary events effectively corroborate Hockney’s point
about the guilt-ridden aetiology of climate change with, for example, the Bishop of
Carlisle in 2007 claiming that severe flooding in England was a ‘strong and definite
judgment from God’ and a sign of the community’s ‘moral degeneration’.95
Hockney himself, who specifically rejected the Nonconformist religion of his
native Yorkshire, created in 2011 The Four Seasons: Woldgate Woods (Figure 0.1),
a brilliant sequence of digital videos synchronized around the changing seasons
throughout the year in a rural area close to his family home in Bridlington, with
Figure 0.1 David Hockney, ‘The Four Seasons Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011,
Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010),’ (2010–2011). 36 digital videos
synchronized and presented on 36 monitors to comprise a single artwork. Edition of
10 with 2 A.P.s; Duration 4:21.
© David Hockney
94 Thom van Dooren, ‘Provisioning Crows: Ecologies of Hope in the Mariana Islands’, Association
for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand, University of
Sydney, 25 Nov. 2016. See also van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Though now a professor in the Department of Gender and
Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, van Dooren completed his BA at the Australian National
University in 2003 majoring in philosophy and religious studies. In an essay on vultures in India, he
characteristically attributed their ‘differential treatment’ to ‘significant cultural and religious dimensions
of Hinduism and life in India’. Thom van Dooren, ‘Vultures and their People in India: Equity and
Entanglement in a Time of Extinctions’, Australian Humanities Review No. 50 (May 2011), online: http://
www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2011/vandooren.html, accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
95 Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, 161.
the cameras passing through the landscape to create a four- minute video
synchronized as a single artwork on multiple screens. The larger connotations of
this work involve projecting a broader sense of regular temporality and represent
ing time itself as a continuous passage, rather than seeking merely to document
particular moments in time. But this seasonal aesthetic frame also implies how
the cycles of nature continue on their way unobstructed by any idiosyncratic
human designs. Despite his enthusiastic appropriation of avant-garde technolo
gies in the interests of art, Hockney’s representation of time here is conservative
and organicist, more akin to that in James Thomson’s poem The Seasons (1740), a
form that involves not the linear teleology characteristic of Christian hope or
conflagration, but a neoclassical patterning of natural repetitions.96
As Heise has observed, the Anthropocene has mostly been associated in liter
ary terms with science fiction, the genre that deals most explicitly with the fate of
the planet as a whole, although it is obvious enough that ‘cli fi’ (as it is now called)
from previous eras is not notable for its historical accuracy or prophetic insight.97
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) describes a scenario of global warming
caused by solar storms and a consequent colonization of the Arctic Circle,
which has turned into ‘a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature
of eight-five degrees’.98 The novel cites surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí and
Max Ernst, and it evokes surrealist-like images of clock faces without hands, with
one of the characters here contemplating reversing a clock’s direction and run
ning it backwards. This speaks to Ballard’s interest in his dramatis personae being
‘plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and
devices that have been dormant for epochs’, and such retrogression is juxtaposed
against radically different temporal scales, with Kerans, the novel’s central pro
tagonist, feeling ‘like a man marooned in a time sea, hemmed in by the shifting
planes of dissonant realities millions of years apart’.99 Brilliant though this is as a
surrealist jeu d’esprit, it hardly accords with the argument of ecocritic Adam
Trexler that ‘climate change is upon us’ and that all contemporary fiction must
necessarily engage, in one way or another, with climate change as ‘part of every
day life’.100 Ballard himself was a great admirer of Baudrillard, and his own fic
tional narratives position themselves not so much in the future but in what the
author called a ‘visionary present’ where parallel worlds intersect, thereby making
historical reality co-terminous with virtual reality.101 Trexler’s activist assumptions
96 On ‘the classical closed circle of cyclic time’ and its opposition to Christian models of ‘apoca
lypse’ and ‘deliverance’, see Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Theological/Worldly’, in Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias,
eds., Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 290.
97 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203. On ‘cli fi’, see Deborah Jordan, Climate Change Narratives in
Australian Fiction (Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), 29.
98 J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962; rpt. London: Millennium-Gollancz, 1999), 21.
99 Ballard, The Drowned World, 63, 29, 44, 129. 100 Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 5, 233.
101 J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Short Stories (London: HarperCollins, 2001), ix.
Introduction 27
risk overlooking the fact that Anthropocene novels are indeed works of
‘imaginative fiction’, not philosophical or scientific treatises.102 Ironically, however,
the fabricated nature of these fictional narratives works reciprocally to draw
attention to the postmodernist context of climate change itself, an issue that
gained traction when forms of prolepsis and simulacrum were becoming natural
ized within the wider culture.
This is not of course to advocate a position of climate scepticism, nor to deny
the pertinence of scientific evidence about global warming in the twenty-first
century. It is, though, to come at this issue intellectually from a different perspec
tive, one that would allow us to understand climate change as part of a larger
postmodernist constellation, with all of the aporias such a framework necessarily
involves. Again, my concern here is not so much with the politics of the
Anthropocene as with its aesthetics, with the confluence of forces that has pro
pelled the fate of the planet into full view and consequently informed the con
tours of postmodernist art. As Elizabeth A. Povinelli has written, the concept of
the Anthropocene is not just a meteorological or geological event but something
that can be traced back to political disturbances that emerged in the 1960s,
involving Indigenous opposition to mining activity and a projection of ‘Gaia’ as
‘the whole earth’. This planetary understanding was given added impetus by the
startling photographs of Earth sent back from the Apollo 8 spacecraft on
Christmas Eve 1968, and by photographs of the planet suspended in outer space
from Apollo 17 in 1972 (Figure 0.2)103 Though this Apollo project itself was inex
tricably tied to U.S. ‘militarism in the Cold War’, as DeLoughrey has argued, the
clear visibility in these iconic ‘Blue Marble’ images of the oceans and Antarctica,
along with their vast spatial dimensions by comparison with continental land
masses, effectively resituated narrow nationalistic agendas within a wider orbit.104
Cultural conflict between corporate mining interests and an Indigenous cul
ture immersed in the natural world is dramatized in German director Werner
Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984), which is set in Australia. In his
commentary on the film, however, Herzog specifically disavowed any affiliation
with ‘ “New Age” people’ or ‘the Green Party’. Instead, his narrative seeks in a more
circuitous manner to address ways in which all Indigenous culture is framed by
102 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 189.
103 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 13, 10. For the official NASA historian’s observation of how it was ‘no accident
that the first Earth Day was held in 1970 in the midst of the Apollo flights to the moon,’ see
Steven J. Dick, Astrobiology, Discovery and Societal Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 234. Because of the Earth’s rotational position when Apollo 11’s astronauts first set foot on the
moon in 1969, the first television pictures of the lunar surface were transmitted through NASA track
ing stations in Australia.
104 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,’ Public Culture 26.2
(Spring 2014): 262.
Figure 0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972).

Courtesy of NASA
distortion and displacement—translation, in the largest sense of that word—so

that the film’s premise turns not on authenticity but, again, on a style of simulac
rum. Herzog commented on how ‘the Green Ants mythology’ that structures his
narrative ‘does have similarities to Aboriginal mythology, but it has been partly
invented by me,’ and his film is designed neither for documentary accuracy nor
for polemic purposes, but to address tensions between Indigeneity and modern
ity more generally.105 ‘Commitment,’ as Jacques Rancière has written, ‘is not a
category of art . . . An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that
his art is committed?’ As Rancière went on to acknowledge, this ‘does not mean
that art is apolitical’, but ‘that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own
meta-politics.’106 Aesthetic significations, in other words, tend to be complex and
multifaceted rather than proselytizing or unidirectional. Stephen Muecke,
pledged from an Australian critical perspective to an activist deployment of
Humanities expertise ‘in the public fora’, saw the task of ‘the contemporary
105 Werner Herzog, audio commentary, DVD extras, Where the Green Ants Dream, dir. Werner
Herzog (London: Infinity Arthouse, 2006).
106 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), trans. Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 50.
Introduction 29
humanities’ as ‘changing the planetary mind’; but such a subordination of art to

instrumental purposes does not necessarily speak properly to the radically differ
ent kinds of knowledge that postmodern aesthetics can engender.107
The emphasis on an ontology of things that marks ecological criticism has
frequently positioned postmodernism as its target, with Timothy Morton for
example critiquing ‘the aestheticized, slightly plastic irony of the postmodern age’,
which he characterized as ‘a weird transit lounge outside of history’.108 But the
‘posthuman’ perspective promoted by ecocriticism’s emphasis on non-human
matter can itself be understood as a postmodern phenomenon. Its manifestation
functions as a mirror image of the paradoxical scenario whereby the Anthropocene
adduces non-anthropocenic concepts, since the diminution of human agency in
the light of what Mark McGurl calls a ‘new cultural geology’ is tied systematically
to a postmodern discursive matrix. McGurl’s formulation of a ‘post-post-modern
or exomodern’ condition involves moving beyond the ‘residually humanist and
even “romantic” ’ spectres that he understood to be inherent in ‘leading formula
tions of the postmodern’.109 It is certainly true that the invocation of ‘geologic
time’ gives another spin to ‘the posthuman comedy’, one in which ‘scientific
knowledge of the spatiotemporal vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman
world becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential prob
lem’, and where the ‘utter indifference’ of geological nature to human politics or
culture serves to elicit a sense of ‘ludicrousness’ at the ‘apparent lowliness’ of
‘human designs’. But such a comedy of debasement, deriving from the capacity of
‘natural processes’ to ‘enclose, infiltrate, and humiliate human designs’, has always
been part of antipodean postmodernism, and one reason these ‘posthuman’ land
scapes seem so unfamiliar to Western eyes is because the antipodean aspects that
have always been implicit within planetary postmodernism have tended to be
overlooked or suppressed.110 Latour’s analysis of how in the Anthropocene
‘[t]here is no distant place anymore’ carries particular resonance in the context of
Australia, whose extensive prehistory and vast spatial planes can be seen as no
longer merely marginal to the destiny of Western civilization, but as symbiotically
intertwined with it.111 Geoffrey Blainey famously associated Australian history
with ‘the tyranny of distance’, arguing that it had been marked in special ways by
107 Stephen Muecke, ‘An Ecology of Institutions: Recomposing the Humanities’, New Literary
History 47.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2016): 242–3.
108 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 4.
109 Mark McGurl, ‘The New Cultural Geology,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 & 57.4 (Fall/
Winter 2011): 383, 380.
110 McGurl, ‘The New Cultural Geology,’ 380, and ‘The Posthuman Comedy,’ Critical Inquiry 38.3
(Spring 2012): 537, 541, 539, 550.
111 Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45.1 (Winter
2014): 2.
such a sense of distance from Western centres, but such a model of displacement
and distantiation has now become endemic to planetary time more generally.112
If Clark is correct to say that ecocriticism throws ‘into sharp relief the
anthropocentric limits of dominant forms of postcolonial criticism and politics’,
then to shift from the tired understanding of Australian culture as a subaltern
entity to a more capacious understanding of how its vast spatiotemporal contours
speak to a wider planetary condition serves to enrich our broader understanding
of the postmodern condition. This is especially the case since, as Clark noted,
‘Australia stands out as a particularly stark exemplar of the challenges of the
Anthropocene.’113 Several cultural critics have taken note of ‘the Clock of the Long
Now’, a project concocted by Danny Hills, Brian Eno, and other San Francisco
artists featuring a clock funded by Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon, to be built
inside a mountain in West Texas, a timepiece that is designed to tick once a year
and strike once a century, with a cuckoo emerging once a millennium. Within the
world of radical conceptual art, as Michelle Bastian has observed, this might be
seen as an attempt to steer attention away from contemporary compressions of
space and time and to foster instead a sense of ‘continuity and longevity’.114 But in
an Australian context where it was once possible to walk directly from Tasmania
in the south to New Guinea in the north and where ‘the last great rising of the
seas’—an event that occurred about 18,000 years ago, long after the arrival of
Aboriginal peoples—can itself be counted as part of human history, processes of
geological reformation and climate change have long been assimilated in a much
less forced manner into everyday life on planet Earth.115 Mike Smith’s recent
work on the archaeology of Australia’s deserts has determined that human occu
pation of the continent goes back 60,000 years, much further than previously
thought. Such a vast expansion of the scale of human history indicates how the
Holocene, beginning some 11,700 years ago, can be seen from this perspective as
a relatively recent event, how Indigenous peoples survived the Ice Age (extend
ing from 30,000 to 19,000 years ago), and how climate change itself can thus be
understood as part of a larger cyclic phenomenon.116 Whereas the conventional
Western historical scale of just a few thousand years necessarily produces a highly
constricted view of the relation between man and his environment, Smith’s
112 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966),
3rd ed. (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001).
113 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 23, 116.
114 Michelle Bastian, ‘Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Geological Crises’,
Environmental Philosophy 9.1 (2012): 40; Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of
Amazon’, MLQ 77.3 (Sept. 2016): 468.
115 Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia
(Melbourne: Penguin Australia, 2015), ix.
116 Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 341–3.
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the invaders of his country, and diligently suppressed at its inception
each demonstration in favor of national integrity and independence.
In their despair, the Spanish Moslems now resorted to a strange
expedient. Distracted by their misfortunes, which seemed but the
prelude to greater calamities, and without friends or allies, they
turned in their distress to the Sultan of Turkey, a potentate who, not
only for his eminence as a Mussulman ruler, but also as Commander
of the Faithful, the religious representative of the Prophet, was
entitled to the reverence, as he was intrusted with the protection, of
the various nations of the Mohammedan world. In pathetic terms
they represented the evils to which they had for centuries been
subjected by Christian encroachment, their inability to longer resist
the progress of conquest, the sacrifices and losses they had been
compelled to endure, the enslavement of their brethren, and the
difficulties which their ultimate subjection must inevitably impose
upon the existence and perpetuation of the Moslem faith. Moved by
the piteous supplication of his fellow-sectaries, Bajazet II.
despatched two Franciscan friars to Rome, to threaten the Pope with
retaliation upon the Christians in his dominions—who under Turkish
rule enjoyed the utmost liberty of thought and action—unless he
used his power to restrain his Catholic dependents in Spain. His
Holiness sent the envoys of the Sultan to the Spanish Court bearing
a letter from himself, which simply recounted the facts, but prudently
omitted any recommendations. The answer of Ferdinand and
Isabella was both ingenious and plausible. They claimed, not
unjustly, the entire Peninsula by right of inheritance; an inheritance
usurped by the ancestors of those who now laid claim to territory
about to be lost in the same manner in which it was acquired; they
declared that their title to this empire had never been renounced or
forfeited, but had been constantly asserted through seven centuries
of warfare; and that under their dominion all infidel tributaries
enjoyed privileges equal to those conferred upon Christians in any
Mohammedan community in the world. In order to gain the favor of
the Mussulman monarch, Ferdinand promised to assist him with men
and ships in the war which he was then waging against the Emir of
Egypt. The Catholic sovereigns seem to have had the best of the
argument, for nothing further is related of the controversy; and the
Sultan interfered no more in the affairs of the Peninsula, but left the
unfortunate votaries of Islam to their fate.
As the nature of the country through which Baza was approached
made the transportation of heavy artillery extremely difficult, it was
deemed preferable to reduce the city by blockade. All supplies were
necessarily conveyed by pack-train, and, in consequence of the
great amount required, there was occasionally a scarcity of
provisions. No inconvenient effects after five months of enforced
seclusion were apparent in the conduct of the people of Baza. The
daily attacks, skirmishes, defiances, continued without intermission;
and while deserters frequently reported the insufficiency of food, no
evidence of want was visible in the movements of the soldiers,
whose activity and prowess indicated anything but the weakness
born of famine and emaciation. The approach of winter, a season of
great severity in the mountains of Baza, inspired the Moors with
renewed and enthusiastic confidence. On the other hand, the
Christians, admonished of the hardships they were liable to
encounter, prepared as best they could to alleviate and endure them.
The executive ability of Isabella, who in every campaign had
assumed the arduous duty of keeping the army provided with
whatever was required for the conduct of military operations, was
never more eminently displayed than at the siege of Baza.
Notwithstanding the difficulties attaching to the carriage of supplies,
plenty, for the greater portion of the time, reigned in the besieging
army. From the head-quarters of the Queen at Jaen, convoys under
strong escorts were constantly passing and repassing through the
mountains with vast quantities of grain and munitions of war. Such
confidence was felt in the security of transportation through the
enemy’s country that, from every province of the Peninsula as well
as from Sicily, merchants brought their wares to the camp, where a
ready market was found for objects of luxury,—“articles,” as a
contemporaneous chronicler plaintively remarks, “which render
soldiers effeminate and injure armies, while they are in no respect
advantageous to them.”
In accordance with their usual policy, the Spaniards proceeded to
impress the enemy with the permanent character of their enterprise.
A great number of huts of stone, cemented with mud, were built, and
laid out in streets with all the regularity of a town. In addition to
these, destined for the nobility and their vassals, many rude shelters
were constructed from the trunks and branches of trees for the
accommodation of the common soldiers, the horses, and the
followers of the camp. These labors had hardly been completed
when a furious storm undermined the walls, demolished the
buildings, and involved in a scene of chaos the quarters of the entire
army. The lighter materials were instantly swept away by the
mountain torrents. Many soldiers were killed by the crumbling
hovels, or, pinned down by heavy weights, were suffocated in the
mire. The provisions were nearly all destroyed, and the roads so
damaged that communication with Jaen was completely interrupted.
The greatest distress soon prevailed. For nearly two weeks the
soldiers remained without shelter and almost without food. Wading
knee-deep in mud, drenched with constant rain, debilitated by
hunger, hundreds died from exposure and from the fevers resulting
from unsanitary conditions. During all this time the hostility of the
Moors never for a moment slackened. In sheer desperation the
Christians, although faint with weakness and disease, maintained
their ground. Those who had from the first advised against the siege
as impracticable now became importunate. The King listened to their
remonstrances, and began to consider in his own mind the propriety
of a retreat. Once more the inflexible resolution of Isabella revived
the sinking spirits of her consort and her subjects and restored the
fortunes of the campaign. In reply to the communications of
Ferdinand, recounting the difficulties and discouragements he was
forced to endure, she urged patience, determination, courage. Six
thousand men were sent forth at once from Jaen to clear and repair
the paths through the sierra. Convoys with ample supplies followed
closely upon the heels of the pioneers. In addition to this, knowing
that the soldiers deprived of their pay for months were impatient and
inclined to be mutinous, the Queen wrote personal letters to the
wealthy nobles requesting advances of money, and deposited her
own gold and silver plate and jewels in Barcelona and Valencia, as
security for loans. An idea may be formed of the straits to which the
treasury had been reduced by the war from the fact that the royal
crown of Castile and a magnificent necklace of great value on which
sixty thousand florins had been advanced remained in the latter city
unredeemed in 1490, six years after they had been pledged. By
these energetic measures a large sum was obtained, from which all
arrears could be discharged and the remainder applied to the
prosecution of war.
But while this substantial assistance was of the greatest value in
preserving the army, it was far from removing the prevalent
apprehension and discontent. The great reliance that was placed on
the Queen, and the universal respect entertained for her judgment,
were now manifested in the general desire that she should visit the
camp. The King did not hesitate to declare that he sorely needed her
advice. Those who still favored the continuance of active operations
hoped that her presence would infuse fresh enthusiasm into the
minds of the disheartened troops; the malcontents, weary of
hardship and sighing for the pleasures of Cordova and Seville, were
convinced that personal experience of the dangers of the siege,
which, while productive of enormous expense and loss of life, offered
little prospect of adequate compensation, would induce their
sovereign to favor the abandonment of such an unprofitable
enterprise. Six months had elapsed without the acquirement of any
substantial advantage. In spite of the fact that every day of that time
had been marked by one or more bloody encounters, the Moslems
were apparently as determined as ever. The reports of deserters
now conveyed the information that provisions for several months still
remained in the city. The women of Baza, animated by a noble spirit
of self-denial, had contributed their jewels to pay the garrison. All
attempts at negotiation—considered by the Moors as conclusive
evidences of weakness—had been repulsed, and the latter did not
conceal their expectation that the winter storms would yet force the
retreat of the enemy. But the inability to employ heavy ordnance was
the most serious drawback of all. Without it the fortifications of Baza
were impregnable. The reduction by blockade was tedious, perilous,
uncertain. While, as in the case of Malaga, no relief from exterior
sources could be expected, the besieged were not exposed to
artillery fire, and the event was, in fact, entirely a question of physical
endurance.
Under these discouraging circumstances, Isabella set out from
Jaen. In her train were members of the Royal Council, Cardinal
Mendoza, the Archbishop of Seville, and an imposing array of
prelates and nobles, of knights and ladies, who represented the
piety, the dignity, and the beauty of the Court. The arrival of the
Queen diffused universal joy and confidence throughout the camp;
hostilities, which heretofore had been incessant, were suspended;
silence and peace reigned where but a few hours before had
resounded the noise and turmoil of conflict; and the Moors began to
evince a disposition to entertain proposals for surrender, which until
this time they had persistently refused to consider. In consequence
of this favorable inclination of the besieged, an interview was held
between the Don Gutierre de Cardenas, Commander of Leon, as the
representative of the Catholic sovereigns, and Sidi Yahya, the
Moslem governor. The question was submitted to the citizens of
Baza, and by them referred to Al-Zagal. In their representations to
the King, the people set forth the painful circumstances of their
extremity, the hopelessness of aid, the apparently inexhaustible
resources of the enemy, and their dread of the consequences, if
misfortune should follow further resistance. To this appeal Al-Zagal
generously replied that it was his wish that his subjects should act in
this case as might seem most advantageous to them.
When this decision became known the utmost consternation
spread throughout the great city of Guadix. Long the seat of royal
power, isolated by its retired situation and by the mountains that
surrounded it from active participation in, or personal experience of,
the events which had contributed to the downfall of the monarchy, its
inhabitants looked forward with undisguised repugnance and fear to
the supremacy of a foreign ruler and the introduction of a hostile
religion. The people, divided into two parties, one of which favored
submission and the other resistance, were distracted by the
contradictory arguments of the leaders, whose indignation was
intensified by the acrimony of dispute; general distrust prevailed; the
exercise of authority was for the moment suspended; the streets
resounded with pathetic lamentations; and the trembling citizens,
with pallid faces and half-frenzied with terror, asked each other if
even their lives would be spared. It was with the utmost difficulty that
persons of influence and distinction could pacify their ignorant
neighbors, whose excited feelings had rendered them a prey to the
most dismal apprehensions.
The reply of Al-Zagal was no sooner received than Sidi Yahya
made arrangements for the surrender of Baza. Some provisions of
the articles of capitulation were secret, and were never divulged.
Many Moors of high rank were enriched by their subserviency to the
enemy, which indicated a previous understanding, unsuspected at
the time by their countrymen. The terms made public were almost
identical with the most favorable ones granted to other cities. Non-
residents who had volunteered their assistance during the siege
were dismissed without restraint or ransom. All were confirmed in the
possession of their personal effects; to the citizens was accorded the
choice of continued residence or emigration; no restriction was to be
imposed on the use of laws, customs, language, or religion; the
taxes were to remain unchanged; and, in consideration of their
obedience, the people were to fully enjoy the protection and receive
the assistance of their new sovereigns. Hostages were delivered by
the governor and the principal officials of the city; valuable gifts were
presented to the latter, who did homage to the King and Queen; and
the six days within which the city was to be evacuated, as provided
by the treaty, having elapsed, Baza, after a most memorable
defence, passed into the hands of the Christians on the fourth day of
December, 1489.
As soon as information of its surrender had reached the various
towns within its jurisdiction, their magistrates hastened to secure
equal advantages by a timely submission. Within a few days,
Almuñecar, Purchena, Tabernas, the innumerable settlements of the
Alpujarras—in short, all the territory lying between Almeria and
Granada—were added to the rapidly extending dominions of the
Spanish Crown. The influence of Sidi Yahya, who visited Guadix for
that purpose, was the means of inducing Al-Zagal to relinquish that
city and Almeria, with their dependencies, the last relics of his
diminished empire. The valiant old soldier, who had so long and so
stoutly withstood the attacks of adverse fortune, was certainly
deserving of a better fate. His sagacity and penetration readily
convinced him of the futility of further resistance; he submitted with
humility to the inexorable decree of Allah, and yielded with apparent
willingness, but inward abhorrence, the sole remaining vestiges of
his power. In return for these concessions his conquerors generously
granted him his life, and the government of the small and barren
principality of Andarax, where the habitual deference of his inferiors
and the indulgence of fortune permitted him, for a time, the
enjoyment of the titles and the exercise of the privileges of royalty.
Of the fragments of the vast and opulent Hispano-Arab monarchy,
with its scores of magnificent cities, its landscape diversified by all
the evidences of agricultural science and industry, its harbors the
seat of a world-wide commerce, its society graced by every
refinement of literary and artistic culture, there remained now but a
limited and distracted province, bounded by the mountain ranges
which encompassed its capital. That capital, although for years
subjected to the pernicious and destructive effects of constant
revolution and sanguinary disorder, still preserved, to a great extent,
untarnished and unimpaired, its pristine elegance and beauty.
Through the interested and politic forbearance of its enemies, it
retained the delusive semblance of freedom and the pretensions of
an imperial metropolis. No diminution in the number of its inhabitants
was perceptible. The places of those sacrificed in foreign and
domestic wars had been filled by refugees from ravaged lands and
plundered cities. It was only in the decimated ranks of the nobility
that the appalling results of national misfortune were apparent. Few
indeed remained of those gallant cavaliers whose exploits in the field
had for years sustained the exalted reputation of the Granadan
chivalry. Of the five thousand present at the accession of Muley
Hassan, but three hundred had survived. In the superb palaces, a
royal slave, supported by a monthly pension from the Spanish
Crown, maintained the unsubstantial parade of sovereignty and
power. There were few indications visible to suggest the frightful
scenes through which the city had passed. The barricades raised by
armed sedition had been removed. The blood-stains had
disappeared from the streets. Far above, on the highest tower of the
citadel, might be discerned, impaled on pikes and beaten by many a
storm, the grisly heads of those political agitators who had paid the
penalty of unsuccessful insurrection with their lives. Except these
significant tokens of despotic severity there was nothing to indicate
the threatening cloud which hung over fair Granada. Within the
ample circuit of its walls the hand of war had not yet placed its
withering grasp. Its orchards still yielded their delicious fruits. Its
gardens were still fragrant with the mingled odors of myriads of
blossoms. In the bazaars, traders from every province of the
Peninsula, relying upon the assurance of Christian protection,
exchanged in peace their various wares. In the factories, which still
produced in diminished quantities the richest fabrics, the busy
artisans plied their trades. But this condition of apparent tranquillity
was delusive. In the breasts of the aristocracy still rankled the enmity
of generations. The populace was exasperated by tyranny and the
infliction of long-continued outrage. The calamities induced by
treason and barbarity were first in the minds of all. No exhibition of
royal pomp could conceal the fact that the King had been for years a
vassal of the infidel. No concession to public prejudice could atone
for the butchery of relatives, the invasion of privacy, the confiscation
of treasure. Over palace and mosque, over park and thoroughfare,
hovered the ineffaceable memories of recent and bloody fraternal
strife. In every public edifice, in every private abode, the trophies of
victory reposed in suggestive proximity to the emblems of mourning
and death.
The Vega, however, once the marvel of agricultural perfection and
the centre of Moslem industry, presented a far different appearance.
The verdant groves with which its surface had been diversified were
gone. Its hydraulic system was disarranged and in part destroyed;
the canals were filled up with rubbish; the rivulets diverted from their
former course, and useless. Instead of the splendid villas, the
graceful mosques, the snowy cottages embowered in roses, a few
straggling huts rose at intervals over the uniform scene of ruin and
devastation. Here and there, a patch of green, marking the spot
where cultivation had begun to revive, contrasted with the generally
charred and desolate aspect of the landscape. An occasional half-
demolished tower indicated the former refuge of the laborer,
sufficient against an ordinary marauding party, but powerless before
armies numbering tens of thousands.
To such limited dimensions was the once all-powerful Moslem
empire in Europe now reduced. Almost from the very day of its
foundation it had been distracted by feud and sedition. It had
witnessed the rise and growth of kingdoms; the birth of dynasties
which from insignificant beginnings now bade fair to overshadow the
world with their power; the portentous growth of a religious system
that already menaced liberty of thought, and was soon to exert a
potent and wide-spread influence for evil. The banner of the Cross
had moved in a slow but steady progress from the frozen valleys of
the Pyrenees to the verdant banks of the Darro. The cold,
inhospitable region of the Asturias, destitute of the smiling attractions
of Nature, without military roads or adequate subsistence, had
repelled the assaults and checked the enterprise of the Moslems,
who disdained and avoided a foe equally remarkable for poverty,
fanaticism, and valor. The inability to appreciate and the neglect to
crush this once despised but eventually formidable enemy was the
first step in the decline of the Moorish power. Its fall was accelerated
by many diverse circumstances. The glaring defects of its
monarchical system, the absolute want of cohesion of its numerous
and discordant political elements, the manifold evils derived from
polygamous institutions and disputed inheritance, all became
manifest when the factions of Islam began to contend for superiority
in the bitter and interminable struggle for wealth and dominion.
In the rapidity and perfection of its intellectual development no
nation ever approached the Spanish Arabs. But as their rise was
sudden and brilliant, so their fall was the more crushing and
disastrous. The truism that progressive degeneracy is the inevitable
fate of every people who have reached the highest point of
intellectual culture and material progress was once more to be
demonstrated. Unfortunately for humanity, while the physical
sciences advance, the art of government almost invariably
retrogrades. The most perfect form of civilization is not favorable to
the permanence of a state existing under the most finished social
conditions. The greater the degree of intelligence, the lower the
standard of political morality. These facts are strikingly exemplified in
the closing history of the kingdom of Granada. At that period no
people was as far advanced in the attainment of knowledge; in the
practical application of scientific principles; in familiarity with and
appreciation of the mechanical and the elegant arts. And, it must be
added, nowhere was there less patriotism, less loyalty, less of that
spirit of mutual concession and self-sacrifice indispensable to the
preservation of communities and the maintenance of empire.
Sovereign and subject alike, by turns, betrayed each other to the
enemy. The most sacred obligations that can exist between the
governors and the governed were repudiated without a blush.
Crimes that would have appalled barbarians were so common as
scarcely to excite comment. An ignoble competition seemed to exist
between bodies of citizens of the same blood, and professing the
same religious faith, to throw themselves into the power of an artful
and perfidious adversary who was the mortal enemy of all. A
universal degradation, from whose blight even the most illustrious
were not exempt, pervaded all classes,—a condition which had at
last reached its climax after its gradual development through
centuries, and was finally disclosed by that perversion of manners,
morals, government, and laws which so significantly indicates the
corruption and the decadence of nations.
The main provision in the compact exacted at Loja by the Catholic
sovereigns from Boabdil in his distress involved the surrender of
Granada and all the contiguous territory subject to his jurisdiction, as
soon as the dominions of Al-Zagal had been incorporated into the
Spanish monarchy. Compliance with the terms of this agreement
was now formally demanded. The weak and unprincipled King, who
in making the bargain had never anticipated its enforcement or
appreciated the debilitated condition of the kingdom and the
imminent danger of its downfall, was thunderstruck when he learned
that the power of his uncle had suddenly collapsed. It had been his
hope that the complacent subserviency he had exhibited in the
protection of the interests of his country’s enemies, the abject
submission with which he had implored their aid against his subjects,
and the costly gifts which he had secretly distributed among
influential courtiers standing in the shadow of the throne, would
suffice to procure for him the enjoyment of at least the name and the
appearance of royal authority for the remainder of his life. Therefore,
with a view to deferring the evil, yet with no definite expectation of
preventing it, he tried to temporize. He represented that immediate
fulfilment of his contract was impossible, for the reason that, as great
numbers of persons driven out of the conquered territory had since
become citizens of Granada, it was necessary to consult their
interests and obtain their acquiescence in the terms demanded.
Anxious to avoid a renewal of hostilities, Ferdinand offered to bestow
upon him certain estates from whose revenue he might live in luxury,
dependent solely upon the acknowledgment of vassalage and the
payment of a moderate tribute. But Boabdil, always vacillating when
promptness and decision were required, always headstrong when
the exigencies of the occasion demanded compliance, as usual
adopted an impolitic course. Turning a deaf ear to the remonstrances
of his most sagacious advisers, who recognized the advantages of
submission and the folly of resistance, he began to listen to the rash
counsels of the youthful nobles and desperate adventurers whose
votes were unanimously for war.
Then Ferdinand sent to the people of Granada a copy of the
secret treaty which revealed the perfidy and dishonor of their King.
Its publication aroused such universal indignation and contempt that
nothing but his inaccessible position in the citadel of the Alhambra
saved his life. The streets were filled with a surging mob, whose
clamors rose menacingly to the battlements of the palace. The
renegades, santons, exiles, and soldiers of fortune inflamed the
fickle and turbulent populace, whose supremacy signified anarchy,
proscription, and death. Fortunately for the detested monarch, the
soldiers remained faithful to his cause, and their devotion alone
preserved him from the violence of his infuriated subjects. By
strenuous efforts the old Arab aristocracy and the wealthy merchants
finally succeeded in restoring order. The crowds, still uttering
ominous threats, sullenly dispersed. The shops were once more
opened. Traffic was resumed, and the citizens, with a despairing
sense of helplessness and trepidation, moved uneasily through the
streets. Boabdil, conscious that the only choice now left to him was
that of abdication or war, selected the latter alternative, and publicly
announced his intention to fight, and to prolong, if he could not
palliate, the last throes of an expiring monarchy. The conditions
resulting from the suddenly altered relations of the courts of Castile
and Granada obtained for the Moors some minor advantages; the
castle of Padul and a few other forts near the capital were taken; an
expedition led by Ferdinand in person through the Vega for the
purpose of destroying the harvests failed to thoroughly accomplish
its object; and, constantly harassed by the enemy, the Christians
were eventually forced to retreat.
The pitiful remnant of the kingdom of Granada, heretofore torn by
sedition and threatened with conquest, was now to experience the
active hostility of those who should have ventured their lives to
defend it before it was reduced to extremity. The eminent qualities of
Sidi Yahya, the former governor of Baza, his courtesy and his
prowess, his illustrious birth, and the gallantry with which he had
maintained his trust, had extorted the reluctant applause of his
enemies, commendation formerly denied to others of equal merit but
inferior lineage. These noble attributes had, however, recently been
darkened by actions which brought upon him the imputation of
corruption, apostasy, venality, and treason. He was more than
suspected of having sacrificed the people of Baza for his personal
benefit. Men eyed with suspicion the favor he enjoyed with the
Christians, the sudden wealth he had acquired, the close relations
he maintained with the enemy. These accusations, which his
subsequent conduct tended rather to confirm than to remove, were
well grounded. In recognition of his influence great interest was
taken in him. Every attempt was made to induce him to renounce his
religion. The most learned and distinguished prelates labored to
convince him of his errors. Even the Queen interposed her good
offices in an attempt at proselytism. Magnificent presents were
bestowed upon him as an earnest of greater and more substantial
rewards. At first, amidst all of the importunity and temptation of his
zealous advisers, the constancy of the subtle Moor remained
apparently unshaken. This firmness was, however, simulated. He
had long before determined to profit by the certain benefits of a
voluntary conversion. His resistance only served to enhance the
credit of those who effected his apparent change of heart. After
having been duly “catechised,” as the chronicler significantly
remarks, he became a good Christian, and was secretly received
into the bosom of the Church.
Sidi Yahya, anxious to demonstrate his fidelity to his new suzerain
and to remove any prejudice that might result from his contumacy,
evinced the greatest enthusiasm for the Spanish cause. With a
hundred and fifty followers, he assisted in the foray which laid waste
the environs of Granada; and, by the use of a well-worn stratagem,
captured an important outpost of the capital, and earned at the same
time the applause of his recently acquired friends and the execration
of those still bound to him by the ties of a common ancestry, and
who had been so lately professors of a common faith. Upon the
elevation now known as The Soto de Roma, two leagues from the
city, stood in the fifteenth century a strong castle, built to protect the
royal orchards and parks by which it was surrounded. At the head of
his command and apparently escorting a number of Christian
captives, Sidi Yahya approached the fortress, and, stating that he
was closely pursued, requested immediate shelter. The soldiers of
the garrison, deceived by the dress, by the arms, and especially by
the language of the strangers, whom they supposed to be a party
from Granada, without hesitation opened the gates. A few moments
afterwards they were prisoners; their pretended friends disclosed the
fact that they were the vassals of Spain; and the banner of Castile
and Leon was raised upon the battlements. By such methods did the
renowned Moorish captain attempt to emphasize his new allegiance,
thereby meriting the detestation of every faithful Moslem, and
tarnishing the lustre of a military record which, until his political and
religious apostasy, had remained without a blemish. Al-Zagal also
answered the summons of Ferdinand with two hundred cavalry; and,
in sight of those towers where he had formerly reigned supreme,
displayed the same dash and courage which had signalized his
operations while he was the most formidable adversary of those
sovereigns whom the fortunes of war now compelled him to serve in
a subordinate capacity.
The exploit of the princely apostate was soon eclipsed by the
capture of Alhendin. That castle, situated near Granada, was one of
the strongest in the Vega, and had not long before surrendered to
the Spaniards without resistance. Invested suddenly by the forces of
Boabdil, the slender garrison was unable to withstand the impetuous
attack of the Moors, who fought in relays and left the besieged no
respite day or night. Four days sufficed to reduce the Christians to
extremity; all communication with their friends being interrupted left
them no alternative but submission; they were led in triumph to the
dungeons of the capital, and Alhendin was razed to the ground. After
Alhendin, the castles of Alboloduy and Marchena attracted the
hostility of the Moorish King. Both were stormed and pillaged; their
Castilian garrisons were enslaved, and the lands dependent on
them, which formed part of the fief of Sidi Yahya, were ravaged
without mercy. The Mudejares of the surrounding country were
tortured or massacred; the cattle driven away; and the victorious
Boabdil returned to Granada, where he was received with the
greatest enthusiasm. These brilliant deeds raised the fainting hopes
of the Moslems; prompted by the deceptive but plausible
expectations of victory, they dreamed of the return of independence
and the restoration of empire; the army increased rapidly in
numbers; and arrangements were made for the prosecution of an
extensive and vigorous campaign. The siege of Salobreña, whose
port offered easy communication with the African coast, was next
undertaken. Its defenders, provided with insufficient rations, were
soon oppressed with hunger, and, exhausted by the desperate
charges of the Moslem soldiery, who, adopting the tactics successful
at Alhendin, maintained a furious and incessant combat, the suburbs
and the town were stormed; and the garrison, driven to the citadel,
began to yield to despair. The numbers of the enemy and their
strong position rendered the relief of the place impossible without the
aid of a powerful army; but Hernan Perez del Pulgar, with seventy
lances, cut his way through the lines, and his arrival infused new
energy into the despondent minds of the besieged. Again and again
the Moorish battalions were repulsed; there was no time for the
employment of the slow but more certain operations of artillery;
intelligence reached the Moslems that Ferdinand was approaching;
and Boabdil, after a rapid and inglorious retreat, found safety within
the walls of his capital. The unexpected spirit displayed by the
Moorish King aroused the martial ardor of the Mudejares, who had
so recently renounced their allegiance to Al-Zagal, and were eager
to cast off the yoke which they had assumed from necessity.
Communication was secretly opened between the malcontents of
Guadix, Almeria, Baza, and the Moslem court; many recruits from
these and other cities enlisted in the army of Granada; and
preparations for a conspiracy were inaugurated which only awaited a
propitious moment to burst forth into a general and bloody
insurrection.
It was impossible to preserve a secret known to whole
communities, and, informers being abundant among the Moors, it
was not long before full details of the plot were in possession of the
Spanish authorities. As practically all of the Mudejares were
implicated, either as active participants or as sympathizers, it was
not considered advisable to inflict the extreme severity of
punishment that the case demanded, so milder, but fully as effective,
measures were decided upon. Guadix was the centre of the
disaffection, and the Marquis of Villena, Captain-General of the
district, induced all the inhabitants of that city to gather outside the
walls under pretext of an enumeration. He then closed the gates,
acquainted them with the reason for this precaution, and ordered
them to await the arrival of the King. When Ferdinand came, a few
days subsequently, he declared that the unfortunate people of
Guadix had forfeited their claims to protection or clemency, and he
gave them the alternative of immediate exile or a tributary residence
in his dominions in open and unfortified villages. The same rigorous
terms were offered to Baza and Almeria; a large emigration to
Tlemcen and Fez took place; a considerable number of industrious
Moors established themselves in Andalusia, where the Inquisition
eventually visited its tortures upon them or their descendants; and
thus, without the least effort or even apparent formality of
confiscation, the rich possessions of the Moors—their elegant villas,
their plantations and vineyards, their sumptuous residences,
mosques, and gardens—passed into the rapacious hands of the
Christians.
The mountaineer subjects of Al-Zagal regarded with anything but
approval his renunciation of his rights of sovereignty and the zeal he
displayed in the service of the national enemy. After the capture of
Alhendin they rebelled, declared for Boabdil, and attempted the
murder of the venerable monarch whom in the day of his glory they
had honored with almost the reverence due to a divinity. Al-Zagal,
well aware of what the consequences would be if he remained,
signified his willingness to surrender the paltry dignity he had
received in exchange for his abdication for five million maravedis and
free transportation to Africa, which had been among the conditions of
the treaty. Ferdinand eagerly accepted his proposition; the Moslem
prince with a great following passed the sea; and thus the Spanish
monarchy not only acquired a considerable increase of territory, but
was delivered from a vassal who lacked only the provocation, which
might at any time arise, to prove a most dangerous enemy. Nothing
in mediæval history is more sad than the ultimate fate of this brave
old warrior who had faced death with undaunted spirit on a hundred
fields of battle. The perfidious Sultan of Fez, in ruthless violation of
the laws of hospitality, plundered, imprisoned, and blinded him. The
dashing general, who had once been the idol of the populace of
Granada and the pride of its soldiery, wandered for many years a
beggar, clad in rags, through the cities of Northern Africa, an object
of pity and curiosity to the rabble of the Desert, by whom he was
pointed out to strangers as the former King of Andalusia.
It was at this time that the Quixotic personage Pulgar, whose
reckless spirit delighted in the achievement of hazardous
undertakings, which, to men of rational judgment, seemed foolhardy
and impracticable, performed the most noted and perilous of all his
feats. With fifty followers he set out one night from Alhama to burn
the city of Granada. Guided by a faithful renegade, the party
remained concealed during the day in an obscure and unfrequented
valley of the sierra, and, as darkness came on, they silently
approached the walls enclosing the channel of the Darro until they
reached a bridge. Under this, six were detailed to remain and guard
the horses, while Pulgar and the others entered the city. The Moslem
capital was plunged in slumber, and the adventurers, issuing from a
sewer into the silent streets, proceeded to the principal mosque.
There Pulgar, in a characteristic spirit of bravado, unfolded a paper
on which was inscribed the legend, “Ave Maria,” and pinned it with
his dagger to the bronze-plated door. Then hastening to the
Alcaiceria, or Silk-Market, he produced a fagot with which he was
provided and prepared to start the conflagration. At the last moment,
it was discovered that the tinder, indispensable for this purpose, had
been left at the mosque. While trying to strike fire with flint and steel,
a patrol suddenly appeared. The Spaniards, drawing their swords,
drove back the enemy, and, retiring to the spot where they had left
their companions, all rode rapidly away. This exploit of Pulgar, which
appealed so strongly to the romantic natures of his countrymen,
gained for him also the admiring commendation of his sovereigns,
who granted him during his lifetime the seat of honor in the cathedral
choir, and at his death placed his tomb upon the very spot where he
knelt to plant his dagger in the door of the great Moslem temple.
Everything now being in readiness for the final campaign,
Ferdinand, on the twentieth of April, 1491, at the head of fifty
thousand men in two grand divisions, again entered the Vega. The
Marquis of Villena was despatched to the Alpujarras to destroy the
provisions collected there for the use of the capital. Then the army
went into permanent quarters in an intrenched camp near Granada,
where it was soon joined by the Queen. On account of its great
population, as well as the desire to preserve as mementos of
conquest its splendid architectural monuments, it had been
determined to reduce the city by famine. Parties were organized to
scour the country in every direction and cut off all supplies. Frequent
expeditions, made in force, swept for a radius of many miles every
trace of verdure from the face of the land. The beautiful suburbs,
which had hitherto been exempt from hostile violence, now became
a prey to the ruthless destroyer. In vain, Boabdil, charging at the
head of his cavalry, endeavored to stay his resistless progress. His
soldiers were repulsed; his guard was cut to pieces; and he himself
only escaped the evils of a second and a more disastrous captivity
through the superior swiftness of his horse. The orchards and
vineyards on the western side of the city were laid waste, and all the
buildings within reach of the Spaniards—castles, mills, villas,
palaces, and towers—were involved in one common destruction.
Two months after the resumption of hostilities, the carelessness of
a servant of the royal household set fire to a tent; and the
conflagration caused by the accident swept away in a few moments
the entire Christian camp. Great confusion ensued; the troops were
called to arms, and means at once taken to repel an attack should
one be attempted; but the enemy remained quietly behind his
defences. Any fallacious hopes that might have arisen in the minds
of the Moors as a result of this catastrophe were soon dissipated. A
substantial city, regularly laid out and fortified, guarded by ditches
and gates, and provided with an ample square in the centre for the
parade and exercise of troops, soon rose upon the site of the ruined
encampment, and was named, with the characteristic piety of its
founders, Santa Fé.
The siege of Granada, while one of the most important in the
history of the Reconquest, was not, like many others, diversified by
any incidents of absorbing interest. An occasional skirmish with
indecisive results; a foray and the burning of some isolated castle; a
chivalric encounter of knights challenged by mortal defiance; a
perpetual succession of rounds and patrols,—such were the
monotonous events which characterized the investment of the last
Moslem stronghold. Every reliance was placed upon the blockade,
and the use of heavy ordnance was not adopted at any time in the
reduction of the city. The intrepidity of the Moslems was never more
conspicuous than in this their final struggle for national existence.
The rapid and terrifying evolutions, the wild and furious charge, the
unsuspected and treacherous ambuscade peculiar to their tactics,
were all employed with audacious courage and crafty resource, but
with indifferent success. Before long, the great multitude within the
walls began to experience the agonies of hunger. With want came
discontent; with discontent, clamorous demands for capitulation, and
ominous murmurs of sedition and violence. The infuriated populace
swarmed in the public places, threatening the wealthy with pillage
and the monarch with death. The prospect of the triumph of the
odious infidel aroused the fanaticism of the santons, who,
counselling resistance to the end, communicated their frenzy to their
superstitious followers, thus vastly increasing the difficulties of the
situation. Outside of the citadel anarchy reigned supreme. The doors
of all the shops and houses were closed and barricaded. The nobles
and the principal citizens took refuge in the Alhambra; and there an
assembly of all those of conspicuous dignity and influence was held
to determine on the course to be pursued. The vote was unanimous
in favor of submission. Boabdil acquiesced in silence; and Abul-
Kasim, the governor of the city, was deputed to visit the Christian
camp in the character of envoy and open negotiations relative to
surrender. Received with every mark of courtesy, the Moorish
ambassador obtained at once the concession of a truce of thirty
days’ duration from the first day of December. The articles of
capitulation were much more liberal than any heretofore granted to
the vanquished Moslems, but in their scope and significance there
was a general similarity. Rendered wise by experience, the Moors
endeavored to have the treaty guaranteed by the Pope, and its
observance sworn to by the Spanish monarchs; but the omission of
these doubtful warrants of security was obtained by the bribery of
their commissioners, who quietly and successfully ignored the
instructions of their countrymen. In consideration of the delivery of
Granada and its surrounding territory, the Catholic sovereigns bound
themselves and their royal descendants to forever permit the Moors
to practise without molestation or injury the rites of their faith and the
observances prescribed by their customs and their laws. Their
mosques were to be always consecrated to their worship, and their
sanctity was to be inviolate and never profaned by the presence of a
misbeliever. All regulations relative to the collection of revenues for
sacred purposes were to continue in force; Moslem judges were to
preside in the tribunals; and the laws which governed the transfers of
real property, as well as those of inheritance and every form of civil
rights, were to remain unaltered. In regard to public instruction,
absolute independence was solemnly guaranteed, and the
interference of Christians with schools or with anything pertaining
thereto was prohibited. Unqualified liberty of conscience was
conceded to the children of mingled Spanish and Moorish blood; all
debts and obligations previously incurred were to be faithfully
discharged and all penalties exacted; disputes between Christian
and Moslem were to be settled amicably by arbitration; and the
alguazils and other executive officers appointed under the Moslem
code were to discharge, without interruption, their various and
respective duties. In other articles were embodied sanitary and
police regulations,—the distinction of markets, the preservation and
purity of the waters, and numerous matters of inferior importance
arising from the dissimilarity of social customs and the wide
divergence exhibited by the forms and ceremonies of two
irreconcilable religions. In addition to these were certain provisions
defining the rights and privileges conferred upon Boabdil and his
relatives, and the enumeration of the possessions they were
hereafter to enjoy. As a return for the invaluable services he had
rendered his enemies at the expense of his country, the richest
portions of the royal patrimony, embracing twelve extensive districts,
were declared to be vested in perpetuity in himself and his
descendants; all the members of his family received large estates;
the Valley of Purchena was allotted to him as the principality for
which he was to render homage; and an ample pension was added
by the apparent gratitude or suspicious generosity of the conquerors.
On the second day of January, 1492, preparations were made for
the relinquishment of the last vestige of Moslem power in the
Spanish Peninsula. Seven hundred and eighty years had elapsed
since the army of Tarik had shattered and overthrown the crumbling
fabric of the Visigothic monarchy. As a result of that event, a handful
of despised and neglected peasants, hidden in the mist-clad
mountains of the North, had formed a nucleus around which had
clustered the elements of a great nation and the fame and prestige
of an invincible soldiery. The conquest just achieved, important as it
was, was still but trifling in comparison with those which, in the
succeeding century, were to be gained by the arms of that far-famed
and chivalrous nation. The wealth of the Spanish Arabs was
insignificant when contrasted with the incalculable treasures of
Mexico and Peru. The capture of Malaga and Granada was almost
inappreciable in national glory and political effect when compared
with the battle of Pavia or the siege and sack of Rome. But it was still
a magnificent triumph; the culmination of centuries of battle; the
realization of the dreams of many generations of princes and
prelates, the accomplishment of whose aims seemed often
chimerical and hopeless. Every circumstance was called into play,
every resource adopted, to make the spectacle of the rendition of the
Moslem capital imposing and memorable. The entire army was
drawn up in military array. The field was gay with waving banners,
burnished armor, many-colored mantles, and surcoats of silk and

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The Planetary Clock : Antipodean Time

and Spherical Postmodern Fictions

The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the

Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason 1st

Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061: A Long-Term

Next Generation Compliance: Environmental Regulation

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7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

Works Cited 367

organized by Iain McCalman and David Schlosberg at the Sydney Environment

xii List of Illustrations

2 The Planetary Clock

The overall effect of this expansion in historical and geographic scope is to

4 The Planetary Clock

6 The Planetary Clock

key geometrical characteristic of a sphere, as Angus Fletcher has noted, is that it

8 The Planetary Clock

10 The Planetary Clock

12 The Planetary Clock

47 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6, and Present Pasts, 10, 21.

14 The Planetary Clock

conjures up the traumatic memory of Nazi Germany.49 Trauma, in other words,

49 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

In this sense, the version of historicism committed to what Chakrabarty called

54 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 50–1, 49.

16 The Planetary Clock

formulations of professional expertise linked to the consolidation of social power,

orchestrates its shots so as to disrupt the selective temporal conventions around

18 The Planetary Clock

Reinscribing postmodernism within a planetary framework in this way does

Ironies of the Anthropocene

20 The Planetary Clock

the science of climatology has become framed within a wide spectrum of

engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist ­writers

77 Edwards, A Vast Machine, 165.

22 The Planetary Clock

about environmental depredation is to conflate issues that are working themselves

24 The Planetary Clock

It is true that the idea of apocalyptic catastrophe can be ‘oddly comforting’, as

Thom van Dooren’s utopian commitment to ‘ecologies of hope’ owes as much to

26 The Planetary Clock

28 The Planetary Clock

Figure 0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972).

distortion and displacement—translation, in the largest sense of that word—so

humanities’ as ‘changing the planetary mind’; but such a subordination of art to

30 The Planetary Clock

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7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

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engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist writers