Fictive Archive, Temporal Reparations, and Italy’s “Postcolonial Now”

By sketching out the theoretical contours of what Hal Foster terms a contemporary “archival impulse,” this essay highlights the analytical potential with regards to the coupling of archive and postcolonial literature in Italy. This focus leads to the examination of how the archive’s literary mediation with pastness enables new temporal trajectories, for which the recuperative impulse can also disturb normative historicist practices. In this essay, I will focus on the novel Timira : Romanzo Meticcio (2012) by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed and examine how its innovations in both narrative content and form generate essential potentialities for reframing the power relations between archive, fiction, and the political dimension of historicity. The approach adopted by both authors brings real-life details closer to literary invention and immerses fictions within concrete and factual objects, thus creating a new literary form that allows the emergence of new epistemological arrangements alternative to current trends in postcolonial criticism. In this novel, imaginaries of incompletion, fragmentation, and rhizome allude to the disruption of a past-present temporal continuum and transform the post- as a contested site pointing to a new process of becoming . Speaking directly about the function of the archive allows us to consider how the hermeneutic malleability between narrative and history intervenes critically in Italy’s current narratological ambition to imagine a postcolonial “now.” Additionally, I suggest that Timira ’s aesthetic potential pertains to an emerging cultural shift in Italy where the traditional (violent) mode of looking-backward and moving-forward has been giving way to accommodating alternative critiques of time, inviting us to reflect on the generative power of future-thinking.