Re-Membering 'revolution' As/from the 'yet to Come'

This paper returns to the experiences of two sets of struggles, in Mexico and South Africa, to centre questions of time and temporality in their reading, from perspectives that open them up to being reimagined outside of dominant logics of success and failure, and possibilities for social change and alternatives for life. With 1994 as its start, it focuses on the Zapatistas, and struggles in Johannesburg against the logic of commodification that began to define the terrain of transition unfolding after the end of formal apartheid. In the literature produced by social movement theorists and scholars in academia and in activist communities (this author included), they came to be narrativised and treated as struggles against neoliberalism, each manifesting differently in relation to the particular effects felt as a result of the related policies implemented in each place and time. Globalisation - anti- and then alter- became the frame through which they became part of a 'movement of movements'. In these forms of representation and analysis, their existence and forms of struggle were mostly submitted to the dominant logics of linear time that determine how notions of Development, Progress, and Possibility are defined in writing movements into History. This paper mobilises the concepts of 're-memory' (developed from its use as a narrative device in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved) and 'becoming' (from an engagement with its use in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri) alongside key approaches, meanings, and practices that are central to these two sets of struggles to open up possibilities for reading them differently such that time is no longer linear, that being is not just one, and that past and present and future become many - after Nietzsche, in the realm of the 'yet to come' - for new imaginaries of the social.