Imperial Infinity, Project Futurity and Clockwork Discipline: Dissonant temporalities in a British child migration project

This article examines a British migration project – which sent select children to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 – in order to analyse dissonant temporalities in projects of social engineering. The article focuses on three of the several complex and at times incompatible temporalities animated and juxtaposed by the project. First, it discusses ‘imperial infinity’ as the political temporality that framed the project. As ‘imperial investments’, the children were a means to securing colonial continuity well beyond project time. Second, it considers how temporal logics of social projects presuppose a rupture with the past, foregrounding their rationale of futurity. Finally, the article examines the sense of time of the migrant child placed in an institution, highlighting its
clockwork discipline and spatiotemporal standstill. Through this case, the article reflects on antagonistic temporalities within social projects, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.