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 Content
1. Introduction.- 2. “The Value of Memory in Testimonies on African Civil Wars: Kidder’s and Beah’s Problematic Journey to the West, ” by Éloïse Brezault.- 3. “The Intimate Archive of Patrick Chamoiseau, ” by Erica L. Johnson.- 4. “Imagined Encounters: Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison, ” by Natalie Edwards.- 5.“The Bagne as Memory Site: From Colonial Reportage to Postcolonial Traces-mémoires, ” by Charles Forsdick.- 6. “Memory, Orality, and Nation-Building in Patrice Nganang’s La saison des prunes, ” by Nathalie Carré.- 7. “History, Testimony and Postmemory: The Algerias of Pauline Roland and Assia Djebar, ” Judith De Groat. – 8. “On Exactitude in Poetry: The Cartographic Histories of Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road, ” Roy Osamu Kamada.- 9.“Remapping the Memory of Slavery: Leonora Miano’s Theatrical Dream, Red in blue trilogie, ” by Judith G. Miller.- 10.“‘Still in the Difficulty’: The Afterlives of Archives, ” by Wendy Walters.
About the author
Erica L. Johnson is Associate Professor in the English Department at Pace University in New York City and the author of
Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and
Home, Maison, Casa (2003). She is also the co-editor with Patricia Moran of
The Female Face of Shame (2013) and
Jean Rhys: Twenty-First Century Approaches (2015). She has published widely on modernist and postcolonial literature.
Éloïse Brezault is Assistant Professor at Saint Lawrence University and the author of
Johnny Chien Méchant par Emmanuel Dongala (2012), on the representation of child soldiers in Dongala’s novel,
Johnny Mad Dog. She has published a collection of interviews with Francophone African writers,
Afrique, Paroles d’écrivains (2010). She currently works as the associate editor of the academic journal
Nouvelles Études Francophones and she has written numerous articles on Francophone African literature and postcolonial studies.
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