Beyond Collective Memory - Structural Complicity Future Freedoms in Senegalese South African

Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for certain publics, yet remain marginal to national and continental memory discourses. Thiaroye, a Senegalese location of colonial-era massacre, and District Six, a South African neighborhood destroyed under apartheid, have epitomized a shared "memory" of racist violence and resistant community. Analyzing diverse cultural texts surrounding both places, this book argues that the metaphor of collective memory has obscured the structural character of colonial and apartheid violence, and made it difficult to explore the complicit positions that structures of violence produce. In investigating the elisions of memory discourses, Beyond Collective Memory challenges the dominance of collective memory, and calls attention to the African pasts, metaphors, and imaginaries that exist beyond it.

List of contents

Introduction
Part I: Sites of Memory
1. Making Island Stones Speak
2. Recalling Community
Part II: Places of Complicity
3. Skew Intimacies
4. Complicit Expressions
Part III: Imaginaries of Future Freedom
5. Holiday Time in the Twentieth Century
6. Archives of Future Freedom
Coda

About the author

Cullen Goldblatt is a scholar, writer, and translator. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His essays have been published in forums such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Research in African Literatures, and in the volume Crossings and Comparisons (LuKa – Literaturen und Kunst Afrikas).

Summary

Beyond Collective Memory investigates the elisions of "memory," and invites an exploration of the African pasts and imaginaries that exist beyond it.

Product details

• Authors: Cullen Goldblatt, Goldblatt Cullen
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.09.2020
• EAN: 9780367443023
• ISBN: 978-0-367-44302-3
• No. of pages: 234
• Series: Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Senegal, French, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, LITERARY CRITICISM / African, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Imperialism, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Historical Events, Colonialism & imperialism, Colonialism and imperialism, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary theory, Literary studies: postcolonial literature