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ABSTRACT: In addition to providing some conceptual and theoretical cues from fiction, literary and visual criticism, history, and philosophy that treat the subject of memory, this paper provides an outline of a critical method to distinguish among various deployments of black memory. This paper highlights and explores some of the tensions between state and popular memory in the discourses of transnational black politics, as well as in the development and circulation of state sanctioned national history within national societies.
[We] need to distinguish, in talking about memory, between episodes you might call 'in technicolor', which I described because they seemed essential and worthy of record, and the grey material, 'in black and white', the everyday routine.
-Primo Levi, "Words, Memory, and Hope"
Introduction
The Archaeologies of Black Memory project provides an ideal opportunity to consider the parameters and contours of memory in relation to black experiences and life worlds. Such a project thus entails an engagement not only with the specific examples and phenomena associated with, or characterized as, black memory, but also concepts, theoretical propositions, and critical insights fundamental to memory's definition, description, and classification. In so doing, one may better identify and compare black memory in relation to other forms of collective memory, among other peoples, places, and times. As I have understood David Scott and Charles Carnegie's charge to me, an examination of the archaeologies of black memory entails an elaboration of the distinction between the specifics of black memory, the empirical and documentary evidence of its manifestations in various forms, and the more broadly symptomatic challenges associated with identifying black memory generally, as distinct not only from other forms of memory but from history, amnesia, and forgetting.
Most people have memories. Members of subordinated groups have recollections or stories told to them over generations concerning circumstances, people, and institutions that brought them trauma, humiliation, disgrace, violence, and hardship. As such, I am less interested in black memory simply for the sake of affirming its existence and practices. I am more interested in describing and interpreting the ways in which black memory has been deployed for different, sometimes competing and adversarial purposes. Not just individuals and collectivities but states and economies utilize and manipulate representations and perspectives of collective memory and...