Plural temporalities in New World Slavery: An intellectual and personal journey with Dale W. Tomich

Abstract

The problem of historical time constitutes one of the central themes of Dale W. Tomich’s work. In his texts on African slavery in the Caribbean sugar industry, Tomich presented a profoundly innovative perspective by drawing attention to the temporal discontinuity of the phenomenon, in particular the overlap of different time strata in the same historical moment. This approach gave him the basis for proposing an equally innovative alternative to formal methods of historical comparison, in what he called substantive historical comparison. This article seeks to examine these two subjects through an autobiographical exposition, in which I try to clarify how I came into contact with these aspects of Dale W. Tomich’s intellectual trajectory.