Memory as Colonial Capital

"This timely volume exemplifies the value of sustained and sensitive textual analysis for understanding the global circulation of postcolonial memories. Attentive to the many ways memories mutate across media, genres, temporal horizons, and geographical and linguistic borders, the volume testifies to the vitality of the encounter between memory studies and postcolonial studies." (Pieter Vermeulen, University of Leuven, Belgium)

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.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.