Between the African diaspora’s broken genealogy and memory lag: The impossibility of creating a collective memory
Keywords:
collective memory, Diaspora, historical injury, memory lag, memory, obligation to memoryAbstract
The dispersion of the African diaspora has engendered a dissonance among the various African diasporas, so much so that creating a collective memory becomes a conundrum. This paper offers an insightful analysis of the memory lag between continental and diaspora Africans regarding the collective memory of slavery. It emphasizes the politics and processes of blackwashing and whitewashing that have led to a difference in the sentimental attachments to the historical injury of slavery. Drawing on Woodard’s Slave Site on Display and Achille Mbembé’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” as theoretical works and Morrison’s Paradise and Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River as fictions, the essay analyzes the nuanced ways historical traumas are remembered and experienced differently across geographical and cultural lines, particularly within the context of the African diaspora.
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