The Temporality of Generations: Dialogue, Tradition, Criticism

This essay explores the relation between generations, tradition, and memory, for rethinking the problem of criticism. I suggest that the question of temporality is central to this exploration. Working through the archive of my decade-long project on Caribbean intellectuals, writers, and political actors, the wager of the essay is the following: if a dialogical relationship to older intellectual generations is important for the ways younger generations collectively remember or forget, it is important because generations (as social institutions of time) are important to those agonistic, constituting, and orienting processes of transmission of values and practices that is usefully called a tradition. And how a rising generation works out its relation of connection and disconnection to fading generations is crucial to thinking about the deconstructive and reconstructive work of criticism.