Memory as Colonial Capital

Cross-Cultural Encounters in French and English

Erica L. Johnson, Éloïse Brezault, Erica L. Johnson, Éloïse Brezault

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319505763
• eBook ISBN: 9783319505770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume examines the ways that writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. theorize and employ postcolonial memory in ways that expose or challenge colonial narratives of the past, and shows how memory assumes particular forms and values in post/colonial contexts in twenty and twenty-first-century works. The problem of contested memory and colonial history continues to be an urgent and timely issue, as colonial history has served to crush, erase and manipulate collective and individual memories. Indeed, the most powerful mechanism of colonial discourse is that which alters and silences local histories and even individuals' memories in service to colonial authority. Johnson and Brezault work to contextualize the politics of writing memory in the shadow of colonial history, creating a collection that pioneers a postcolonial turn in cultural memory studies suitable for scholars interested in cultural memory, postcolonial, Francophone and ethnic studies.
Includes a foreword by Marianne Hirsch.

Table of contents

• Foreword: Memory and Its Discontents
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Memory and Memoir
• Chapter 2 The Value of Memory in Testimonies on African Civil Wars: Kidder’s and Beah’s Problematic Journey to the West
• Chapter 3 The Intimate Archive of Patrick Chamoiseau
• Chapter 4 Imagined Encounters: Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison
• Memory and History
• Chapter 5 The Bagne as Memory Site: From Colonial Reportage to Postcolonial Traces-mémoires
• Chapter 6 Memory, Orality, and Nation-Building in Patrice Nganang’s La saison des prunes
• Chapter 7 History, Testimony and Postmemory: The Algerias of Pauline Roland and Assia Djebar
• Memory, Nation, and Diaspora
• Chapter 8 On Exactitude in Poetry: The Cartographic Histories of Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road
• Chapter 9 Remapping the Memory of Slavery: Leonora Miano’s Theatrical Dream, Red in blue trilogie
• Chapter 10 “Still in the Difficulty”: The Afterlives of Archives
• Index