The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share

This article explores the intricate interplay between history and memory against the backdrop of contemporary historical developments in French speaking African countries, by taking the view that history and memory are both human attempts to recapture the past, resulting in more or less intellectual re constructions. Through various occurrences across the changing socio political context in Francophone Africa, it offers an interpretation of how changing social frames of reference shape memory and influence historical knowledge, bequeathing a 'presentist' perspective on both. The article ultimately demonstrates that the divergent and conflicting ways in which history and memory either feed off or mutually manipulate each other, are also part and parcel of political processes in Francophone Africa.

Critical Discourse Studies, 2017

How self-evident is a colonial rationality today? This paper begins by tracing a ‘text trajectory’ about nineteenth century imperialism and colonialism through several educational spaces: curricular guidelines, textbook, teachers’ reflections on history education, material discursive classroom interactions and pupils’ communication about the topic. In a first step, we observe how entrenched and common sensical a great-power discourse about imperialism and colonialism is in current educational practices. We suggest that pupils ‘hyperstate’ a discursive position on colonialism which appears shocking when stated explicitly, but which is already subtly entextualised in curricular and media discourse. However, in a second step, the analysis orients to the molecular lines and foldings, the unexpected intra-connections and unplanned ‘lines of flight’. In this way, the apparent stability of the colonial rationality begins to wobble (just slightly). The memory practices enacted by pupils, curricula, teachers, authors and the material affordances of textbooks repeat entrenched colonial hierarchies and racisms, ‘and also’ exceed any overly simple understanding of how colonial rationality plays out in contemporary discourse.

Critical Discourse Studies, 2017

How self-evident is a colonial rationality today? This paper begins by tracing a 'text trajectory' about nineteenth century imperialism and colonialism through several educational spaces: curricular guidelines, textbook, teachers' reflections on history education, material discursive classroom interactions and pupils' communication about the topic. In a first step, we observe how entrenched and common sensical a great-power discourse about imperialism and colonialism is in current educational practices. We suggest that pupils 'hyperstate' a discursive position on colonialism which appears shocking when stated explicitly, but which is already subtly entextualised in curricular and media discourse. However, in a second step, the analysis orients to the molecular lines and foldings, the unexpected intra-connections and unplanned 'lines of flight'. In this way, the apparent stability of the colonial rationality begins to wobble (just slightly). The memory practices enacted by pupils, curricula, teachers, authors and the material affordances of textbooks repeat entrenched colonial hierarchies and racisms, 'and also' exceed any overly simple understanding of how colonial rationality plays out in contemporary discourse.

To take on a tradition, then, and what is most powerful and gripping within it, one must affirm and contest not only the arguments and claims of tradition but traditional ways of making arguments and claims, of claiming authority, producing evidence, and gaining conviction, traditional modes of receiving and reading the tradition. Hence it is necessary not only to take a critical stance toward the tradition but to adopt a performative strategy with regard to it. Whereas Derrida's texts thus analyse traditional philosophical issues and concepts in order to reveal something untraditional within them, they also perform traditional critical gestures in order to invent other, unprecedented gestures from within them. (Naas 2003: xix-xx) Derrida's strategy of 'taking on a tradition' has obvious implications for the domain of cultural heritage and cultural memory 1 . Written as a 'thought piece', this first chapter deploys this strategy to provide a broad critical rehearsal of the conceptual, intellectual, and moral-ethical issues at stake in selected 'performative moments' of memory-work and the attendant construction of heritage imaginaries. The critical contribution of this chapter is to narrate the historical 'Westernisation' of heritage memory and the challenges made to this discourse as it is confronted by an 'othering' identified as an 'Africanist turn'. Thus my objective in this paper is to use Derrida's critical framework in order to return to selected 'performative moments' within the 'tradition' of African heritage, and, in a further connectivity with Derrida -who, as a Sephardic Jew

Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity, 2016

W e all engage in memory work, but history-that is, our understandings and interpretations of it-plays a central role in framing acts of remembering. My interest in Africa's past has led me to consider the tension between history and memory on the African continent and in the Diaspora. History and memory both matter for identities and communities. Many scholars have come to view history as a form of social memory, rather than an unbiased narrative or story. 1 They acknowledge that collective memory, in turn, is a form of history, for how people remember helps us to make sense of our past, ground us in the present, and prepare us for the future. 2 Indeed, the ways in which we remember-and forget-shape and shift our interpretations of history, of change over time, of disruption and of continuity. 3 History is representation, and cultural memories are deployed to benefit certain groups over others. "Traditions" turn into honored cultural institutions. The state shapes the identity of the national community by producing historical narratives. Yet as the identity of the South African nation has changed so dramatically since the 1990s, so has the notion of community. Groups once fairly rigid under the segregated society of South African apartheid now cross boundaries and challenge old orders. Not everything has changed, however, as history and memory demonstrate in this African context. National myths emerge from a blend of history and memory, fact and fiction. These myths are often quite inauthentic, but they become authentic and highly symbolic, often appearing to be "natural. " The state promotes a collective memory and attempts to control this very public memory despite its ambiguous nature. 4 Yet often there are competing narratives that manage to slowly erode national myths over the long term or swiftly override them in a flash during political and economic transitions. Moments of transformation, such as the heady time surrounding South Africa's attainment of full independence in 1994, provide evidence with which to examine how disclosure and silence (public and private) work to shape social representations of history.

Africa Today, 2006

This collection of essays centers on the relationship between memory work and political processes in several West African nations: Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Guinea-Conakry, and Mali. 1 The authors analyze from different angles what Hagberg (this volume) aptly calls "politicized memory," that is, selective recollections of the past that reflect politically informed agendas for the present. State-promoted memorialization of the past, both colonial and postcolonial, has long been recognized as a powerful strategy of state affirmation and legitimization. In addition, scholars have become increasingly aware that remembrance and memorialization represent arenas for the confrontation of a variety of social and political forces, such as the state, the political opposition, and minority groups (Comaroff 2005; Eyoh 1998; Mbembe 1986; Werbner 1998). Memory and its symbolic expressions (both tangible and intangible) come to reflect power claims as well as critiques of power. The study of memory challenges positivist understandings of history and ethnography-scholarly projects informed by the search for objective historical truths and pristine cultural traditions (Bellagamba, this volume). What aspects of the past will be remembered or forgotten, how, and by whom reflect agendas and orientations in the present (see Bellagamba and Goerg, this volume). Memory is not a static entity, but a process, one in which preservation and change, if in differing degrees, are mutually implicated (Clifford 2004). Memory articulations 2 intimately reflect negotiations among local, national, and international actors and their often diverging agendas (ibid.). For instance, Bellagamba shows how, in The Gambia, decisions about what to preserve, document, and exhibit depended upon the cultural agenda of the government, preservation policies promoted by international organizations (such as UNESCO), and scholarly traditions. Similarly, Arnoldi focuses on the hybrid process of public memory formation in postcolonial Mali: she details how institutions such as art festivals and museums, now perceived and portrayed as authentic Malian artistic traditions, are complex historical formations, which emerged during the colonial period. Though these cultural institutions are of foreign origin, they have been reappropriated in light of local traditions, and have become intrinsic parts of the national patrimony.

Journal of Dutch Literature, 2012

Littératures, Poétiques, Mondes, Ed. Micéala Symington, 2015