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Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice
- Author(s): David Scott
- Published: 2014
- Pages: 240
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- Prologue. Aftermaths 1
- Part I. Tragedy, Time
- 1. Revolution's Tragic Ends: Temporal Dimensions of Political Action 33
- 2. Stranded in the Present: The Ruins of Time 67
- Part II. Memory, Justice
- 3. Generations of Memory: The Work of Mourning 99
- 4. Evading Truths: The Rhetoric of Transitional Justice 127
- Epilogue. The Temporality of Forgiving 165
- Acknowledgments 173
- Notes 177
- Index 215
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"Omens of Adversity is a deeply impressive and critical meditation on temporality, political action, memory, and history. It is a significant contribution to multiple fields, particularly Caribbean studies, and to ongoing theoretical debates about colonialism, postcolonial studies, and temporality."—Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History
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Description
Omens of Adversity is a profound critique of the experience of postcolonial, postsocialist temporality. The case study at its core is the demise of the Grenada Revolution (1979–83), and the repercussions of its collapse. In the Anglophone Caribbean, the Grenada Revolution represented both the possibility of a break from colonial and neocolonial oppression and hope for egalitarian change and social and political justice. The Revolution's collapse in 1983 was devastating to a revolutionary generation. In hindsight, its demise signaled the end of an era of revolutionary socialist possibility. Omens of Adversity is not a history of the Revolution or its fallout. Instead, by examining related texts and phenomena, David Scott engages with broader, enduring issues of political action and tragedy, generations and memory, liberalism and transitional justice, and the possibility of forgiveness. Ultimately, Scott argues that the palpable sense of the neoliberal present as time stalled, without hope for emancipatory futures, has had far-reaching effects on how we think about the nature of political action and justice.
About The Author(s)
David Scott is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment and the editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, both also published by Duke University Press.
