Amanda Lagji is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, critical time studies and terrorism and literature. She publishes widely on postcolonial literatures, including chapters in Transnational Africana Women’s Fictions (2021), Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the 21st Century (2021), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (2021), and Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral(2019). Recent articles have been published in Studies in the Novel (2020), Mobilities (2019), Safundi (2018), South Asian Review (2018), and African Literature Today (2016). Her book manuscript won the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2020 Book Award for the Best Unpublished Book Manuscript.

In this theoretically invigorating study, Amanda Lagji offers comparative close readings of work by authors from Conrad to Ishmael Beah, Armah to Coetzee (amongst others), that presses reset on our tendency to read waiting as stasis, instead recasting apparent impasse as productively disruptive to hegemonic temporalities. A timely and important work.

• AcknowledgementsList of tablesIntroduction Chapter 1. WAITING AT THE HEART OF COLONIAL TIMES REGIMESWaiting in Conrad’s CongoAmbiguities of ‘Colonial’ TimeWaiting for the Twilight of EmpireJourneying to the Heart of EmpireCHAPTER 2. PROJECTS AND PROMISSORY NOTES: THE WAITING ROOMS OF V.S. NAIPAUL AND NADINE GORDIMERConrad’s Heir: Naipaul’s African Fiction‘I will wait for the rest of my life’: Indian-Africans AbroadTemporal Dimensions of Waiting during the Interregnum in South AfricaBroken Watches: Dismantling the Waiting Rooms of HistoryCHAPTER 3. MAROONED TIME: DISRUPTIVE WAITING AND IDLENESSTimelessly Recurrent: Reading the Revolutionary MaroonCountertemporalities: History, Circularity, and FlightIdle Time: Laboring Against the State Lines of Flight: States of Freedom in Marronage CHAPTER 4. GENDERED TIMESCAPES OF WAITING: PATIENCE AND URGENCY IN NOVELS OF DISILLUSIONMENT Engendering Timescapes: Patience and Urgency Waiting Impatiently: Timescapes of Accra ‘Now’ is Here: Fierce Urgency Gendered Temporalities of Waiting CHAPTER 5. ‘STRATEGIC WAITING’ AND RECONCILIATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF CONFLICT ‘Breaking the cycle’: History, Memory, and New Beginnings Fictional Responses, Counterpoints, and Supplements to TRCs ‘Strategic Waiting’ and the Temporalities of Reconciliation Silence as Receptive Waiting ConclusionBibliography

Amanda Lagji is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, critical time studies and terrorism and literature. She publishes widely on postcolonial literatures, including chapters in Transnational Africana Women’s Fictions (2021), Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the 21st Century (2021), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (2021), and Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral(2019). Recent articles have been published in Studies in the Novel (2020), Mobilities (2019), Safundi (2018), South Asian Review (2018), and African Literature Today (2016). Her book manuscript won the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2020 Book Award for the Best Unpublished Book Manuscript.

In this theoretically invigorating study, Amanda Lagji offers comparative close readings of work by authors from Conrad to Ishmael Beah, Armah to Coetzee (amongst others), that presses reset on our tendency to read waiting as stasis, instead recasting apparent impasse as productively disruptive to hegemonic temporalities. A timely and important work.

• AcknowledgementsList of tablesIntroduction Chapter 1. WAITING AT THE HEART OF COLONIAL TIMES REGIMESWaiting in Conrad’s CongoAmbiguities of ‘Colonial’ TimeWaiting for the Twilight of EmpireJourneying to the Heart of EmpireCHAPTER 2. PROJECTS AND PROMISSORY NOTES: THE WAITING ROOMS OF V.S. NAIPAUL AND NADINE GORDIMERConrad’s Heir: Naipaul’s African Fiction‘I will wait for the rest of my life’: Indian-Africans AbroadTemporal Dimensions of Waiting during the Interregnum in South AfricaBroken Watches: Dismantling the Waiting Rooms of HistoryCHAPTER 3. MAROONED TIME: DISRUPTIVE WAITING AND IDLENESSTimelessly Recurrent: Reading the Revolutionary MaroonCountertemporalities: History, Circularity, and FlightIdle Time: Laboring Against the State Lines of Flight: States of Freedom in Marronage CHAPTER 4. GENDERED TIMESCAPES OF WAITING: PATIENCE AND URGENCY IN NOVELS OF DISILLUSIONMENT Engendering Timescapes: Patience and Urgency Waiting Impatiently: Timescapes of Accra ‘Now’ is Here: Fierce Urgency Gendered Temporalities of Waiting CHAPTER 5. ‘STRATEGIC WAITING’ AND RECONCILIATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF CONFLICT ‘Breaking the cycle’: History, Memory, and New Beginnings Fictional Responses, Counterpoints, and Supplements to TRCs ‘Strategic Waiting’ and the Temporalities of Reconciliation Silence as Receptive Waiting ConclusionBibliography

Amanda Lagji is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, critical time studies and terrorism and literature. She publishes widely on postcolonial literatures, including chapters in Transnational Africana Women’s Fictions (2021), Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the 21st Century (2021), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (2021), and Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral(2019). Recent articles have been published in Studies in the Novel (2020), Mobilities (2019), Safundi (2018), South Asian Review (2018), and African Literature Today (2016). Her book manuscript won the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2020 Book Award for the Best Unpublished Book Manuscript.

In this theoretically invigorating study, Amanda Lagji offers comparative close readings of work by authors from Conrad to Ishmael Beah, Armah to Coetzee (amongst others), that presses reset on our tendency to read waiting as stasis, instead recasting apparent impasse as productively disruptive to hegemonic temporalities. A timely and important work.

• AcknowledgementsList of tablesIntroduction Chapter 1. WAITING AT THE HEART OF COLONIAL TIMES REGIMESWaiting in Conrad’s CongoAmbiguities of ‘Colonial’ TimeWaiting for the Twilight of EmpireJourneying to the Heart of EmpireCHAPTER 2. PROJECTS AND PROMISSORY NOTES: THE WAITING ROOMS OF V.S. NAIPAUL AND NADINE GORDIMERConrad’s Heir: Naipaul’s African Fiction‘I will wait for the rest of my life’: Indian-Africans AbroadTemporal Dimensions of Waiting during the Interregnum in South AfricaBroken Watches: Dismantling the Waiting Rooms of HistoryCHAPTER 3. MAROONED TIME: DISRUPTIVE WAITING AND IDLENESSTimelessly Recurrent: Reading the Revolutionary MaroonCountertemporalities: History, Circularity, and FlightIdle Time: Laboring Against the State Lines of Flight: States of Freedom in Marronage CHAPTER 4. GENDERED TIMESCAPES OF WAITING: PATIENCE AND URGENCY IN NOVELS OF DISILLUSIONMENT Engendering Timescapes: Patience and Urgency Waiting Impatiently: Timescapes of Accra ‘Now’ is Here: Fierce Urgency Gendered Temporalities of Waiting CHAPTER 5. ‘STRATEGIC WAITING’ AND RECONCILIATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF CONFLICT ‘Breaking the cycle’: History, Memory, and New Beginnings Fictional Responses, Counterpoints, and Supplements to TRCs ‘Strategic Waiting’ and the Temporalities of Reconciliation Silence as Receptive Waiting ConclusionBibliography