Memory as colonial capital : cross-cultural encounters in French and English

Description

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. Read more... Abstract: 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. Read more... Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Introduction (Éloïse Brezault, Erica L. Johnson)....Pages 1-14 Front Matter ....Pages 15-15 The Value of Memory in Testimonies on African Civil Wars: Kidder’s and Beah’s Problematic Journey to the West (Éloïse Brezault)....Pages 17-37 The Intimate Archive of Patrick Chamoiseau (Erica L. Johnson)....Pages 39-59 Imagined Encounters: Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison (Natalie Edwards)....Pages 61-76 Front Matter ....Pages 77-77 The Bagne as Memory Site: From Colonial Reportage to Postcolonial Traces-Mémoires (Charles Forsdick)....Pages 79-97 Memory, Orality, and Nation-Building in Patrice Nganang’s La saison des prunes (Nathalie Carré)....Pages 99-119 History, Testimony and Postmemory: The Algerias of Pauline Roland and Assia Djebar (Judith DeGroat)....Pages 121-138 Front Matter ....Pages 139-139 On Exactitude in Poetry: The Cartographic Histories of Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road (Roy Osamu Kamada)....Pages 141-155 Remapping the Memory of Slavery: Leonora Miano’s Theatrical Dream, Red in blue trilogie (Judith Graves Miller)....Pages 157-178 “Still in the Difficulty”: The Afterlives of Archives (Wendy W. Walters)....Pages 179-198 Back Matter ....Pages 199-202