Sakiru Adebayo (University of British Columbia)
November 20, 2023
6pm, Online via Zoom
Online via Zoom
Download the poster here.
Watch the lecture here.
In this talk, I explore the emerging subfield of postcolonial memory studies. I argue that the colonial enterprise is a memory enterprise and that colonialism, among other things, is an attempt at wiping out a people’s memory. It is this coloniality of memory (as well as the ‘colonial mentality’ underlying mainstream memory scholarship) that postcolonial (African) memory narratives attempt to circumvent. Therefore, in this talk, I examine the traces of colonial post-memories and the representations of the subtle and not-so-subtle afterlives of colonialism in postcolonial African memory narratives. Because colonialism is by its very nature transnational, I maintain that postcolonial memory studies is also attuned to a transnational framework. I go as far as showing how the rise of postcolonial studies in academia had an influence on the transnational and transcultural turn in memory studies. I argue that despite the calls to move away from trauma paradigms in memory studies, postcolonial memory is still suffused with the discourse of memory as a discourse of trauma and mourning. Borrowing from Hans Ruin (2019), I argue that postcolonial memory narratives are about being with the dead. And drawing from Christina Sharpe (2016), I argue that the postcolonial memory work is wake work, which is often replete with different kinds of ancestral veneration and anamnestic solidarity with the dead. I argue that the tropes of spectrality and ghostly presences are topical in postcolonial memory discourses and that haunting is, in fact, a constituent element of postcolonial life. In the last part of the talk, I examine the representation of time in postcolonial memory narratives; I submit that the calibration of time in the postcolony is based on a structure of mourning– a time of/in the wake. I conclude that the postcolonial memory work is a form of “remembering back”, an attempt at remembering a past full of colonial ruptures, and a way of navigating a grievous past imbricated in a grieving present.
Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor of African literature in the Department of English, University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2023).