Event Details

Welcome to new staff: Dr Kwasu Tembo (Lancaster) presents research on time travel and trauma.

Abstract:

In this session, I will present what is becoming my first draft for a single authored monograph with the working title “The Time Machine & The Hammer”, comprised of two parts and six chapters. My paper will focus on three of said six chapters. First, it will discuss the philosophy of time, with particular attention paid to Heraclitan conceptions of time and change as ontologically and existentially unstable categories of being. It will then outline how this notion elides with several ‘temporal axioms’ around which ground my approach to time based on basic principles from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, Deleuze and Whitehead’s respective discussions of repetition and difference, and Latour’s ideas of the network. I will suggest that time, in relation to concepts of change, becoming, and instability as we experience them, both is and is not a plane, domain of discourse, situation, and network. Second, referring to Alenka Zupancic’s (re)reading of Freud and Lacan through and against Brassier, I’ll discuss temporality in relation to being, trauma, and time, specifically through memory. Thirdly, I will outline my contention for the basic features of any time machine, which I call a “[SPILCE]projector”. I will conclude by discussing how it is that the body and the camera can be thought of as time machines, with reference to the work of Susan Bordo, Deleuze’s discourses on film along with those of Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, and Kuleshov. Interspersed in the above will be references to my chosen case study texts which include Timecrimes, Predestination, Primer, La Jetee, and Time Lapse, and a short scene from La Jetee will be shown to illustrate the central tension in my reading of time as a comingling of ideas of endowment and debt, freedom and constraint, and opportunity and anxiety

Bio:

Kwasu Tembo earned his undergraduate degree in Honours English Literature at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with a concentration in Critical and Literary Theory. He subsequently undertook an MScR in Critical Theory at the University of Edinburgh, and completed his PhD at the same institution. His dissertation focussed on theorizing and historicizing the issues of debates surrounding the role of Power, Identity, and Otherness in DC Comics' flagship character Superman. He taught courses in composition, literary and critical theory, and Africana literature and film at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana - where he also served as Director of its Writing Centre - before joining the ELCW Department in 2023.He has published on a wide range of topics, texts, and media in a variety of international journals and anthologies, as well as his recent single-authored monograph concerning the life and career of the Russian-American polymath Genndy Tartakovsky (Genndy Tartakovsky: Sincerity in Animation, Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently writing a second monograph for Lexington Books due for publication in 2024. Titled Trauma and Time Travel in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: The Time Machine and the Hammer (Lexington Books, 2024), the text analyses what he calls the 'inter-tension' between trauma and time using examples from 20th and 21st century time travel science fiction cinema as dialogic case studies.