Synopses & Reviews
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 andquot;power-chronographyandquot; 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 andquot;speed-upandquot; and andquot;slow-downandquot; often function as a form of biopolitical social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism.
Review
andquot;In these dispatches from the frontlines of global capitalism, Sarah Sharma shows the unequal distribution of what Lewis Mumford decades ago called shock absorbers. Harold Innis meets Marx and postcolonial theory: time turns out to have both a price and color. The tale that life is getting faster will never look the same once youandrsquo;ve read the vivid slices of life portrayed in this book.andquot;
Review
andquot;A thoughtful book on an important topic, In the Meantime is filled with rich ethnographic detail. I loved the chapter on taxi drivers and appreciate the integrity and intelligence that Sarah Sharma brings to bear in her analyses of middle-class and wealthy subjects, groups that can and should be studied with care and attention.andquot;
Review
andquot;In The Meantime reads like a novel. Sharmaandrsquo;s sharp attack on speedup believers is accentuated with detailed portraits of the lives at the core and at the margins of global capital. It is this vivid composite of detailed narratives that describe the social fabric of time which drives you through the pages.... Sharma has found a very convincing perspective in which the human body becomes the nexus of the shift from spatial to temporal power relations. Her image of the social fabric of time is great in its vividness and physicality.andquot;
Review
andquot;In the Meantime persuasively argues a provocative thesis about temporality in society. The thesis is bold, compelling, and would be widely interesting to scholars in cultural studies and media studies.... Sharma achieves a sophisticated balance of cultural theory, ethnographic research, and personal prose.andquot;
Review
andquot;There are hugely enjoyable moments in this book. Many will recognise the and#39;public display of busynessand#39; of people on their laptops in cafes and transport hubs (p. 53).... Sharmaand#39;s portraits and vignettes are required reading for academics and non-academics alike.andquot;
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Tempo Tantrums: Speed and the Cultural Politics of Time 1
1. Jet-Lag Luxury: The Architecture of Time Maintenance 27
2. Temporal Labor and the Taxicab: Maintaining the Time of Others 55
3. Dharma at the Desk: Recalibrating the Sedentary Worker 81
4. Slow Space: Another Pace and Time 108
Conclusion. Toward a Temporal Public 137
Notes 151
Bibliography 177
Index 187