This article challenges the linear, progressivist temporalities that dominate international legal thought by engaging with eighteenth-century Senegambia as a distinct material and temporal site. It explores how the lifeworlds of gender-nonconforming Mande griots (jeliw), embedded within insurrectionary West African conceptions of time and personhood, disrupt the normative assumptions of international law’s historical narratives. Drawing on Black radical, decolonial queer and trans/feminist traditions, the article examines how colonial legal formations not only supported a burgeoning circum-Atlantic economy of enslavement, but also imposed violent reckonings of time and subjectivity. In tracing the geontologically plural ‘proto-colonial’ Senegambian temporalities, the article foregrounds ways of being that resist the extractivist linear logics of international law. Against the enduring imperial intimacies and technologies of subjectivation that continue to shape international law’s reckonings with time and meaning, the article asks what the stories and ways of being-in-the-world that emerge from the temporal otherwise might reveal about connections foreclosed by colonial violence — connections that could have been, were lost, and are thus not yet.
