In the Meantime : Temporality and Cultural Politics

__The world is getting faster__. This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it. Sarah Sharma engages with that assumption in this sophisticated critical inquiry into the temporalities of everyday life. Sharma conducted ethnographic research among individuals whose jobs or avocations involve a persistent focus on time: taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, corporate yoga instructors, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements. Based on that research, she develops the concept of "power-chronography" to make visible the entangled and uneven politics of temporality. Focusing on how people's different relationships to labor configures their experience of time, she argues that both "speed-up" and "slow-down" often function as a form of biopolitical social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism. The world is getting faster. This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it. Sarah Sharma engages with that assumption in this sophisticated critical inquiry into the temporalities of everyday life. Sharma conducted ethnographic research among individuals whose jobs or avocations involve a persistent focus on time: taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, corporate yoga instructors, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements. Based on that research, she develops the concept of "power-chronography" to make visible the entangled and uneven politics of temporality. Focusing on how people's different relationships to labor configure their experience of time, she argues that both "speed up" and "slow down" often function as a form of bio-political social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism. Book jacket. Tempo Tantrums : Speed And The Cultural Politics Of Time -- Jet-lag Luxury : The Architecture Of Time Maintenance -- Temporal Labor And The Taxicab : Maintaining The Time Of Others -- Dharma At The Desk : Recalibrating The Sedentary Worker -- Slow Space : Another Pace And Time -- Toward A Temporal Public. Sarah Sharma. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Based on ethnographic research with taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements, and others, Sarah Sharma argues that people's relations to labor shape their experiences of time. Trespasses presents key writings of the cultural critic Misao Miyoshi, including eleven previously published selections and a major new essay in which he calls for a global environmental protection studies.