Introduction

As an analytical term, ‘entanglement’ has received attention in the last two decades in science and technology studies, archaeology, material culture, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. Entanglement has offered a new perspective on temporal and spatial relationalities through looking at how to grasp the relationship between people, things and spaces without prioritizing humans as the sole agents of change. Analyses working with an entanglement perspective can be broadly defined as either spatial or temporal. The spatial approach has been developed in material culture and science and technology studies, while the temporal one has been explored in postcolonial and decolonial studies. Working with dependency theory and world-systems analysis, the latter has focused on colonial and imperial entanglements. Here, Karl Marx's (1969) analysis of temporal incommensurability (Ungleichzeitigkeit), the parallel existence of two diachronic temporalities mutually shaping each other, has been further explored through Fernand Braudel's (1949, 1978) framework of the longue durée, interpreted by other scholars as the ‘long duration’ (Quijano 2000; Grossfoguel and Mielants 2006) and multiple relational times (Lee 2018). Within this analysis, decolonial and postcolonial scholars (Mbembe 2001; Adesanmi 2004; Dennison 2012) draw on colonial entanglement. Although the focus on temporal entanglement, particularly colonial entanglement, is paramount for the analysis and understanding of the local articulations of global inequalities, this approach needs to be set in dialogue with spatial and gender relationalities. This leads us to consider investigations of entanglement in human geography, material culture, and science and technology studies. As we will see in the discussion of Karen Barad's (2007) proposal on entanglement deriving from her research on quantum physics, the focus on relationality and multidimensional ties invites us to consider the entanglement between matter and discourse in time and space. Thus, local articulations of global inequalities must be explored through the analysis of temporal-spatial entanglements.

Combining both approaches, the temporal and the spatial, this chapter will approach the local articulation of global inequalities first by highlighting spatial-material relationalities and their multidimensional ties between things, people and space and second by tracing their historical becoming through the perspective of entanglement. Exploring Marx's perspective on temporal incommensurability, the diachronic existence of two temporalities, that is to say modernity and coloniality mutually constituting each other, will form the basis of the analysis of colonial entanglement and world-systems theory.