Blouin,Francis X. (Author) and Rosenberg,William G. (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2006
Published:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
502 p, Essays exploring the importance of archives as artifacts of culture As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, archives help define for individuals, communities, and states what is both knowable and known about their pasts. Includes Laurent Dubois' "Maroons in the archives: the uses of the past in the French Caribbean."
429 p., Founded in 1969 in Lima, Perú Negro is now the most widely recognized Afro-Peruvian dance and music company. In order to emphasize the black presence in a nation that has dominantly narrated itself as mestizo, Perú Negro has produced representations of blackness that are grounded both on the history of slavery and on Diasporic idealizations of Africanness. While meant to value blackness through its music and dance performance, Perú Negro’s representations have contributed to romanticize the slave past and essentialize the African roots. This is made clear in the group’s concept of “family” upon which Perú Negro has relied to define who can and cannot belong to the group as well as who is capable of performing blackness.
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
280 p., Examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. Argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality.
Draws on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. Discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of being and community.
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)
