Lamming,George (Author) and Bogues,Anthony (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
452 p., George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming's writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding new political and social identity.
This article, based on the 2003 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, begins with the issue of memory, but also asks: what are the limitations of studying memory? I suggest that smuggled in to current memory studies are a range of issues which are, in fact, analytically distinct from the problem of memory itself: historical temporality, consciousness of time, and consciousness of history. Underlying all these distinct problems is the overarching question of how we can conceive of ‘the past’ existing in ‘the present’. I explore this in relation to two Caribbean thinkers. I look first at C. L. R. James’s monumental and wonderful history book, The Black Jacobins, which works closely within the Hegelian idea of ‘world-history’. An alternative conceptualization can be found in George Lamming’s more phenomenological approach, manifest most in his novel, In The Castle of My Skin. These two polarities – history on the world-stage, and history in subjective mode – continue to underwrite our understanding of the-past-in-the-present. I close by turning to the work of Raphael Samuel, and suggest that his celebrated volumes, Theatres of Memory, are more concerned with the-past-in-the-present than they are with memory itself. (Author)
