Guest editorial

摘要

We all wait. As Henri Lefebvre (2002) suggested, waiting is a prominent feature of modern everyday life. During the 20th century the increasing regimentation and bureaucratization of time in the West, combined with the growing reach of the state into people's everyday lives, created multiple settings-such as traffic jams, offices, and clinics-in which people were compelled to wait (see Bissell, 2007; Corbridge, 2004).rnBut what of 'chronic waiting': the growing number of situations in which people wait for years or whole lifetimes? Of course, there is nothing new about prolonged 'waiting', which also characterized the experiences of colonized populations (Chakrabarty, 2000). But Jean-Francois Bayart's (2007) recent argument-that waiting has become central to subaltern experience-is powerful. Bayart cites as evidence an increase in the numbers of international migrants occupying detention centers on the edge of industrial states; terrorist suspects being held in extraterritorial 'camps'; the rising prison population in the US and parts of Europe; and people forced to move between countries in the global South in the aftermath of war, violence, famine, or economic collapse (according to UNHCR the world's refugee population increased tenfold between 1950 and 2004).