Reading for Time in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

In: Small axe: a journal of criticism, Volume 27, Issue 3, p. 194-202

Abstract

Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) examined, of course, how European imperialism turned Africa into a subordinate zone of the world economy. But beyond that, this essay seeks to show how Rodney explored, with Marxist and Caribbean tools, the complex problem of temporality in world history: how events in one conjuncture form enduring structures; how imperial power orders, and is reproduced by, ways of living in and thinking about time; and revolutionary time, in particular the Tricontinental moment. Rodney's time conjuring was anchored both in that heroic 1960s emergency and in a tradition of challenging the constrictions of modern (imperial) time, alive in both elite and popular currents of the Caribbean intellectual tradition.