Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory

Abstract

[...]this activity suggested to me a relation between the idea of an archive, the modalities of memory, the problem of a tradition, and practices of criticism.4 One way of approaching criticism is to think of it as a dimension of a community's mode of remembering, an exercise, literally and metaphorically, of re-membering, of putting back together aspects of our common life so as to make visible what has been obscured, what has been excluded, what has been forgotten. [...]this form of understanding is what an archaeological sensibility consists of.8 It has seemed to me, then, that part of what Hill's Garvey project allows us to see is the idea of an investigation in which the conventional end of scholarly research-the definitive authored monograph-is forever deferred (if not displaced), while the discursive conditions of any possible monograph are fundamentally transformed by the construction of a new archive of sources and at the same time (in the introductions that frame the collected documents) the organization of a new cartography of the relationship between a life and a movement and the global worlds of their activity.9 And therefore what it enables is an enlargement of the sources of public memory, a complication of the possible pictures of the past available for remembering, and an enrichment of the possibilities of criticism by which to reshape our present.10 II Undoubtedly, Robert Hill's Marcus Garvey Papers project would count as an exemplary instance of Pierre Nora's famous lieux de mémoire, one of those disparate sites where, as he says, "memory crystallizes and secretes itself. [...]there is the withering away of the symbology of emancipationist hopes, and the narrative emplotment of Romance through which modern subjects were interpellated into the horizon of "longing for total revolution. On the one hand, there has been a renewal of debates concerning "older" instances of reparations claims-from the German historians crisis around representations of the Holocaust and the 1997 Swiss decision to establish a fund for victims of the Nazi terror who lost money in Swiss banks, to the 1988 Civil Liberties Act on the basis of which the US government compensated Japanese Americans for wrongful internment during World War II, to the renewal of a movement for reparations for slavery in the African Americas.15 On the other hand, there are the "newer" reparatory claims for repair to victims of catastrophic violence perpetrated by Cold War authoritarian regimes; these-from Argentina to South Africa (and now, importantly, including Grenada)-often derive their justificatory rationale from truth and reconciliation processes.16 And in all these spaces of debate, notably, justice is inseparable from memory practices, and that domain of memory is framed by a deliberate focus on historical trauma.17 Now, Nora has been much-and I think, rightly-criticized for the conserving elegiac tone of his project, the atmosphere of melancholy despair, perhaps, over the postcolonial fragmentation of the secular republican identity of contemporary France. The magnificent closing sentences of his preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins-in which he alludes to the proximity of the world around him and to the fact that were he writing in another time and place it would have been a different but not better book-are nothing if not a profound meditation on the disjunctive temporalities of generational memory.27) So far as I am concerned, then, these interviews are critical dialogical engagements not because they aim to demonstrate the shortcomings of my now aging interlocutors, the poverty of their particular ways of understanding their pasts (indeed, I have no interest in this style of criticism), but because they aim to reconstruct the "frameworks" (as Halbwachs might say) of their memories in such a way as to help us take the measure of ours. Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), in significant part a critique of Caruth's work; Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).