small axe 26 June 2008 p 4562 ISSN 0799-0537

Black Memory versus State

Memory: Notes toward a Method
Michael Hanchard
ABSTRACT: In addition to providing some conceptual and theoretical cues from fction, 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
Te 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 specic examples and phenomena asso-
ciated with, or characterized as, black memory, but also concepts, theoretical propositions,
and critical insights fundamental to memorys denition, description, and classication. 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 Carnegies charge to me, an examination of the archaeologies of black memory
entails an elaboration of the distinction between the specics of black memory, the empiri-
cal and documentary evidence of its manifestations in various forms, and the more broadly
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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 arming its existence and practices. I am more interested
in describing and interpreting the ways in which black memory has been deployed for dierent,
sometimes competing and adversarial purposes. Not just individuals and collectivities but states
and economies utilize and manipulate representations and perspectives of collective memory
and its prospects for purposes other than memory: prot, nationalism, and assimilation.
We might consider and conceptualize black memory as horizontally constituted, with its
archaeological deposits strewn across several time zones and territories. State memory (like
most forms of state expression), on the other hand, is vertically constituted. National-state
memory and black memory are not co-terminus. Black memory, as I will suggest below, is
often at odds with state memory.
From the inception of the nation-state system, national-states have undertaken projects
to inculcate and socialize citizens to conceive of themselves in nationalif not in territorial
terms, as citizens and sovereigns. Tese nationalizing projects involve the creation and main-
tenance of symbols, rituals, public gestures, rhetoric, and language used to invoke a notion
of national belonging among the national populace. At the same time other, non-national
symbols and ritual practices often pervade national societies and populaces, whether in the
form of religion, ethno-national, or putatively racial distinctions. Tese non-national ritual
practices often symbolize coincidentif not competingmodes of allegiance shared among
select members of a national community.
As a mode of collective memory, forms and representations of black memory persist both
inside and outside the parameters of state-constituted national histories. Te process of selec-
tion of national heroes in places such as Ghana, Jamaica, the United States, and Brazil, and
the inclusion of black actors and symbols of national patriotism after protracted struggles for
recognition, helps underscore the tensions between territorially nationalist symbols and non-
territorial rituals within black-life worlds. Afro-Modern political actors and their constituents
in these and other locales have deployed symbols and rituals of national and transnational
black imaginaries in the absence of state sanction and support. Te tensions between state
and popular memory in the discourses of transnational black politics also help underscore
the role of forgetting in national-state projects that seek to emphasize national unity, and the
dogged projection of memory by nonstate actors seeking to keep alive the histories and peoples
repressed or denied by the state.
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Te evolution of a properly national consciousness, nurtured and massaged by states,
also involves acts of forgetting, but the forgetting is of a dierent order. It has been the task
of nationalist movements, the states they propagate and regimes they uphold, to provide a
narrative of national identity, heroism, indeed history, to be retold time and again, in the
institutions of socialization (schools, churches, public forums) and in the public speech of
representatives of state, if not the public speech of individuals among the national-popular.
For, while the people in a particular national society can have many, often competing, versions
of the national narrative, a national-state can only have one narrative about the nations origins,
founding, and maintenance, without appearing contradictory, feeble, and indecisive. In this
sense, states, particularly those states at early stages of the formation of a national citizenry,
are both collectors and manufacturers of collective memory. Rarely are states primary-source
material for representations of collective memory.
Parameters of Black Memory
In order to identify the parameters of black memory, one would have to rst dene its param-
eters and in so doing, distinguish memory from other forms of reection and discernment.
Collective memory in particular provides a means for peoples to distinguish themselves from
other peoples, an a priori consideration before moving specically to the prospect and prac-
tice of black memory. Embedded in any form of collective memory are questions that are
symptomatic of the human condition more generally. Who are we as a people? How did we
come about? What denes us as distinct from others? Does a collective memory, particularly
memories of subordination, provide people with a set of moral obligations? To the extent to
which any form of memory could be characterized as black, what are the specic attributes
or characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of memory?
If we consider black memory as the phenomena of a collectivity rather than the practice
of an isolated and disparate array of individuals, then an ensemble of themesrather than
an ensemble of personal experiencesprovide the broad parameters and contours of black
memory. Racism, slavery, reparations, nationalism and anticolonial struggle, and migration
could be identied as some of the constitutive themes of black memory. We should also
immediately recognize, however, that some of these themes, particularly nationalism and anti-
colonial struggle, are not exclusive to black memory (more on this particular point below).
Yet at the same time we would have to qualify and account for the ways in which indi-
vidual memories help constitute an articulation of collective experience. Tis articulation is
evidenced not only in language but in artifacts, events, institutions and practices which, when
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organized into visual, textual, or aural representation, help tell a story that arranges seemingly
disparate signs and symbols into a coherent narrative, thus giving the ensemble of signs and
symbols a meaning larger than their isolated representations: a slave castle is more than a castle,
a body hanging at the end of a noose is more than the image of a murdered man or woman.
Te extent to which individual experiences with racisms, for example, are part of a col-
lective memory, suggests that the distinction between individual and collective memory is not
so hard and fast. Te actual constitution of memory, the cognitive distillation of objects and
experiences in a recollection, is in some crucial ways a social rather than an entirely individual
exercise. Te social and socialized character of memory is evidenced by its very currency
in daily life, by its mediation via institutions and regimes, in public display and ceremony
ranging from a national anthem to a hymn of religious worship.
Nevertheless, the limits of extrapolating from individual to collective memory are found
in the fact that the actual horizon of individual memory is limited by a lifetime. As a conse-
quence, no individual person, black or otherwise, could at this point in the twentieth century
have personal experience with the actual institution of racial slavery. Yet remembrances and
accounts of slavery recorded in taped or written interviews, personal statements, biography,
autobiography, historiography, or journalism has helped form (and inform) a collective
memory. Subsequent generations of people who incorporate these representations of black
memory as their experiences introduces a tension not only between memory and history but
in the very comprehension of collective memory itself, in our understanding of collective
memory in epistemological terms. Is the idea and practice of collective memory related solely
to what people actually experience, or is it related to the experiences of other places, peoples,
and eras that a people have no direct experience with? If the second part of the question is
regarded as true, should we distinguish between a collective memory and the appropriation
of memory forms and symbols for purposes other then remembering?
In this sense, not just memory but memorialization is part of a larger political project,
underscoring the relationship between memory and representation. Here, we come upon
one of the ulterior motives of black memory, to make claims in contemporary life about
the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices. Black memory has mostly
served the purpose of keeping visible the actual or imagined experiences of black peoples that
would have been otherwise forgotten or neglected, and in this manner black memory can
be characterized as a collectively instantiated process, distinct from the personal memories of
individual black persons.
Tere is already an ample literature on the commodication of objects characterized as
either African American, Black, Afrocentric, Rastafarian, or African that reveal how
the panoply of textiles, primary materials, manufacturing sites, traders, and consumers exceed
the boundaries of a single, isolated descriptor. In addition to providing some conceptual and
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theoretical cues from various literatures and authors that treat the subject of memory, I would
like to make some observations about the need to distinguish among various deployments of
black memory, deployments that reveal not unity and sameness but dierence, particularly
the distinction between statist and nonstatist forms of memory.
Memory, Forgetting, Amnesia, History
Akwaaba, Welcome, welcome home my brother, the boy no more than nine years old said
to me as I made my way down a small incline toward the entrance to Elmina Castle, Cape
Coast, Ghana, in 2000. It is good to see you back to trace your history, because you wont
know where you are going if you dont know where you come from. I have heard variations
on this line too many times to remember in multiple locales in the black world (Ghana,
Brazil, and Jamaica, among others). Tat it came from the lips of a little boy in Ghana, who
had certainly surmised perhaps from my size and gait that I was from the United States, was
particularly laden with signicance. Since my parents are both black Jamaicans, there is a high
probability that at least one of my ancestors actually did pass through Elmina at some point
in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. But it is also highly unlikely that either Cape Coast
or Elmina could have ever been more than an infernal hell-hole for the unfortunate souls
huddled in its dark, dank holding pens. It could not have been home. And since I had lived
in either Jamaica or Ghana for no more than three months at a time on several occasions over
forty-odd years, neither Ghana, Cape Coast, nor Elmina was home for me either. Yet I fully
understood what he meant.
I recall this incident not to provide some facile travelogue like anecdote about a trip to one
of the sites most visited by foreigners in all of West Africa but to unpack the range of logics this
one encounter revealed. Tere is the kid himself, trying to eke out or supplement his living by
appealing to tourists for money. Tis sort of hustle is certainly not peculiar to Elmina, Ghana,
or to the objects of black memory, and can be found in places as disparate as the immediate
circumference of the Eiel Tower, the Red Fort in Old Dehli, India, or Checkpoint Charlie
where the Berlin Wall once stood. Tis part of black memory is already packaged for public
distribution, circulation, and consumption. International tourism and national governments
in the Americas and Africa have taken advantage of this fact.
Te young boys appeal, however, was distinctive: his association of home, Africa, his-
tory, and Elmina in his conversation with me revealed his understanding of the likelihood that
this particular chain of associations would appeal to me. Te condent, engaging manner in
Haile Garimas lm 1. Sankofa (1993) addresses some of these issues in the contours of collective black memory.
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which he appealed for money as he walked alongside me suggested that this was not the rst
time that he had given this particular performance. Te postcards (sent by other, previous
visitors to the castle) he showed to my companion and me also suggested that his performance
varied by visitor. Set against the backdrop of the castle and its immediate environs, providing
what could be characterized as a context of diaspora, with which he was obviously familiar,
this performance was undertaken as one that would appeal to those he identied as black
Americans.
Tere are those who might consider this encounter an example of collective black
memory, but I am not among them. Instead, such encounters seem to reveal the ways in
which representations of memory, rather than memory itself, can be deployed for multiple
purposes.
Forgetting is inextricably bound up with memory. For Nietzsche, forgetting is neces-
sary in order for people to live beyond the burdens and impasses of past traumas. Nietzsche
also suggests that memory has a moral component, providing people with a sense of future,
collective purpose. As we know from psychoanalysis, forgetting is not merely an individuals
incapacity to recall a date, fact, or incident; it can also be a practice of refusal. Te psycho-
logical refusal or inability to recall events that occurred in ones life often enables a person to
avoid moments of unpleasantness or humiliation that, if dwelled upon, might paralyze the
individual, hampering their ability to organize a narrative of their individual life that enables
them to move forward. Tis non- or anti-recollection is in fact a recognition of an events
occurrence, and, in psychological terms, its eect on individual memory and consciousness
may lie elsewhere, in the unconscious, or in behaviors and acts not immediately attributable
to present conditions and circumstances.
In the section of Imagined Community entitled Te Biography of Nations, Benedict
Anderson writes that all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with
them characteristic amnesias. In this section of the nal chapter of the now classic book,
Anderson draws parallels between the antinomies within individual consciousness, the ten-
sions between memory and forgetting, and those of national consciousness. As with modern
persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its
implications of continuity, yet of forgetting the experience of this continuity . . . engenders the
need for a narrative of identity. While there are several key components of Andersons argu-
ment that I do not believe apply to Afro-Modern nationalism or transnationalism, the tension
between memory and forgetting is certainly worthy of investigation. Memory and forgetting
Benedict Anderson, 2. Imagined Community: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso,
1983), 2045.
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serve to mark the strategic sameness and ontological distinctions among Afro-Modern states,
nations, and their political actors. Forgetting allows a collectivity of peoplebe they national
or diaspora peoplesthe opportunity to marginalize traumatic or even joyous experiences.
Te scholarly literature on memory considers it an unreliable source as a chronicle of
history, whether that of an individual or a society as a whole. David Lowenthal distinguishes
memory from history in the following way: Memory and history are processes of insight; each
involves components of the other, and their boundaries are shadowy. Yet memory and history
are normally and justiably distinguished; memory is inescapable and prima-facie indubitable;
history is contingent and empirically testable. What memory and history share, however, is
a process of selection in determining what is important out of a range of possible incidents,
phenomena, and occurrences. To be sure, an important event for an individual may not reach
the importance threshold for a national-state. But both require, whether implicitly or explic-
itly, an emphasis placed upon some events and not others, a criterion of selection. Human
memory can recall a range of experiences signicant and banal, of world-historical signicance
or, conversely, signicant only to those who remember them. Tus, in the Jewish case, the
motto Never forget signies challenge and paradox as much as it signies a directive: just
what, precisely, are Jews to not forgetholocausts in their entirety, or acts or incidents more
generally emblematic of a specic holocaust? Tus, representations of a collective experience,
and collective memory, are not one and the same.
In the case of black memory, as well as those of other groups with histories of subordina-
tion, popular memory often serves to sustain recollections that eventually make their way into
an historical record. Te popular memory of subordinated collectivities often belies what his-
tory, as written by dominant actors and their apologists, leaves out. One example, from David
Maceys magisterial biography of Frantz Fanon, recounts the crucial role of popular memory in
Algerian anticolonial struggles to underscore Frances violent repression of Algerian resistance
during Frances conquest of Constantine in 1845. Te memory of Algerians who attempted
to escape the violence by hiding in caves and being smoked out like foxes during the fall of
Constantine was not forgotten by local inhabitants a full one hundred years after the event.
Macey writes: In a largely pre-literate society with a strong oral culture, one hundred years
is not a long time. Te memory of the pre-colonial period was preserved. Mothers still told
their children stories of the warriors who had resisted the French and, according to Fanon,
such tales began to be told more and more after the armed struggle began.
David Lowenthal, 3. Te Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187.
David Macey, 4. Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), 476.
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Te telling and retelling of stories is critical to the development of a collective memory, the
ability to transmit information about the past and the dead to the realm of the living. While
many of the details may not be, in the words of Lowenthal, empirically testable, collective
memory often serves another important normative function: to remind those collectivities
of the choices each generation must make when faced with the unbearable weight of racial
and national oppressionaccede or quit, ght or negotiate, just as their forbearers did. In
the absence of a written history, memory may serve as a bulwark against the erasure, neglect,
or elision of a memory as a potential source and opportunity for history. Documentation of
collective memory might preserve the possibility that such memories wend their way into
historical narrative at some later date. Tis also increases the possibility that, with the passage
of time, the transformers of a specic memory into historical form will not be members of
the community from which that memory was spawned.
Yet, the example of collective memory from the Algerian Revolution also underscores
the need to carefully ferret out national memory from black memory. Fanons description of
French colonial racism and the brutality meted out to Algerians from the mid-nineteenth
century onward suggests, among other things, that the Arabs of the Magreb might have black
memories of their own, tied to French racism and otherness, but such memories are equally,
if not more so, national and anticolonial.
The Time of States, States of Time
One of the socializing functions of national-states, is the collection, dispensing, and ultimately
transformation of specicbut nonetheless popularmemories into national memories. Part
of the process of transformation of a popular memory, particularly one tied to acts of deance,
conict, and mass struggle, is to project imagery of reconciliation and the prioritization of
national/cultural unity over racial/ethnic distinctions. Whether it is the French governments
recognition of the abolition of French racial slavery as a moment of assimilation, the US
governments transformation of Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday into a national holiday, or
the transformation of Zumbi (the last leader of the republic of Palmares) in Brazil from outlaw
into national hero, the incorporation of outlierif not outlawicons of popular memory
requires some degree of temporal distancing from actual moments of conict between state
interests and the interests of peoples, individuals, and organizations who were mobilized to
confront the state. Te vanquished, once viewed as dangerous, are transformed into totemic
Ibid., 41. 5.
Edward M. Bruner and Victor W. Turner, eds., 6. Te Anthropology of Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1986).
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gures of wisdom, sagacity, and prescience. Once-despised ideas become popular. A state that
honors a once-marginalized and feared subject or citizen is simultaneously acknowledging that,
in hindsight, a prior regime or series of regimes might have erred in the fundamental exclu-
sion and marginalization of a particular gure or event in the national past. In rehabilitating
marginalized and excluded gures and events, states are not rehabilitating the past but, instead,
the pasts representation in national-state narrative.
Tis is why, for example, actorswhether Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, or Kwame Nkru-
mahcan serve as popular icons in national-state symbology despite the fact that each
individual at one point in time was considered a threat to the integrity of the national com-
munity. Nkrumah can be lauded in national independence commemoration celebrations as
a prototypical genius in the development of a Pan-Africanist foreign policy, while his turn
toward authoritarianism evidenced in the edicts of preventive detention that led to the impris-
onment of several other competing national heroes such as Lamptey and Danquah. Martin
Luther King Jr., now canonized and commodied in ocial national lore, was, as we all know,
hounded by the intelligence and surveillance components of the US government during the
nal years of his too-short life.
Archaeology as Methodology
Archaeologies require archaeologists. Te archaeologist of black memory could also be
described as a more expansive type of archivist, those collectors of posters, pamphlets, broad-
sheets, and newspaper clippings, or of 45s and 12-inch underground classics whose circulation
does not extend beyond the dance oor and the DJs cratesall items of limited exposure
that still generate their own traces, circuits, and routes of black memory. But it must also be
remembered here that archives and their guardians are highly selective, idiosyncratic (though
nonetheless systematic) ways of classifying information and knowledge of objects. Archivists
of black memory track down a speech here, an unmixed song there, call for reunions of activ-
ists, organizers, agitators, and cadres. Tey seek to recreate a sound or a feeling of yesteryear,
resuscitate a waning political tendency or form of political mobilization. In the process these
chroniclers mark the distance between past and present, not only in epochal and temporal
terms but in terms of style, taste, judgment, ideological conicts, and dispositions. Te modes
More broadly comparative examples are the totemic images of the so-called American Indian in the United States, 7.
the indigenous Maori of New Zealand, or the aboriginal peoples of Australia. Each provides iconographic evidence
of the constitutive force of politics and ideology in the transformation of literal conquest into symbolic rehabilita-
tion. Tese iconographic, symbolic transformations and outcomes are not natural, but are shaped, made by
institutions of power and their representatives, presidents, prime ministers, regimes, and states.
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of evaluation that go into such determinations may operate independently of dominant trends
and concerns of the day, whether found in popular culture and academic historiography. For
those accustomed to having their range of aesthetic tastes, political dispositions, and aspira-
tions for the future ignored, the impulse to collect, amass, and organize objects as a means of
preserving particular representations and remembrances may be intensied. Tis also pries
open the door to history, insofar as those tendencies viewed as unimportant or worse yet non-
existent in a particular place and era may resurface in historical form in another era. Walter
Benjamin writes that the chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major
and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost for history. . . . Only for a redeemed mankind has its past become
citable in all its moments.
Benjamins obliteration of the distinction between major and minor events is a doubly
interpretive move: the rst distinction is made in providing a threshold of judgment for his-
tory, the second in the suggestion that there can be dierent interpretations of what deserves
chronicling. Over time, events neglected or perceived as minor by a dominant historiographic
tradition can be reinterpreted as major, such as the Haitian Revolution, Paul Bogles Rebellion,
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the date of the death of Zumbi.
Yet Benjamins claim that only with a redeemed mankind does the past become citable
in all its moments ultimately resonates with a notion of history as a totality, as the total rep-
resentation of humanity, life, and living. Gramsci and Benjamin, two of the most critically
astute philosophers in the Marxist tradition, advocated a more resolute historicism as a way
to combat both bourgeois and nationalist histories that focused exclusively on the winners
of the early twentieth century (fascism and capital, empires and the bourgeoisie, nationalism),
a history that situated the proletariat, the peasants, the downtrodden, and the members of
small weak nations as important if not fundamental makers of modernity. Try as one might,
even in the absence of the distinction between minor and major events, neither history nor
memory can reproduce or record actual life in its totality. Not even the materialist history that
Benjamin or Gramsci would advocatewhat Gramsci refers to as an absolute historicism,
the absolute secularization and earthliness of thought and absolute humanism of historyis
exempt from this limitation.
Walter Benjamin, 8. Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 246.
For a discussion of how the image of Zumbi came to symbolize the Republic of Palmares and the national day of 9.
black consciousness in Brazil, and ultimately came to be one of Brazils six national heroes with an accompanying
national holiday, see the interview with Afro-Brazilian activist Oliveira Silveira on the transformation of Zumbi
from black symbol to national symbol. In Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Pereira, Historias Do Movimento Negro
No Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2007).
Antonio Gramsci, 10. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Georey Nowell Smith,
(New York: International Publishers, 1971), 465.
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In this respect at least, memory shares with history the space between the documentation
of events, practices, and presences in visual and literary form, and life itself, which eludes total
capture; the gestures, speeches, modes of dress, acts of solidarity and betrayal, furtive projects,
and open conicts are lost if not recuperated and documented in either memory or history.
At the same time, the shared limitations of memory and history also lead to the recognition
of the futility of attempting to capture the past, of actually experiencing the times, places, and
peoples no longer present. Which is why many memorializations of black collective experi-
ence in the form of heritage sites museums and ceremonies often veer (at least in my view)
into kitschneither memory nor historywhen curators, performers, and custodians seek
to actually reproduce, to feel what some of their ancestors felt: in the holding pen of Elmina,
for example, or at a slave auction site in Pelourinho, Brazil, or in lower Manhattan. In these
instances, history can actually serve to temper the attitudes of those who deploy representa-
tions of memory for such purposes. Just as the totality of life and human experience cannot be
encompassed in either collective memory or history, neither can the totality of life experiences
of black peoples be ingested, documented, and somehow recorded by any single individual.
What people experience are fragments, snapshots of lives either in motion or no longer in
motion.
In cases of kitsch or near-kitsch, a reference is confused with a lived-in occurrence. Nei-
ther history nor collective memory can be reduced to feeling, since the range of emotions one
can experience in gazing upon an image of racist violence, for example, can be experienced
in other settings by other peoples living under dierent circumstances. Social activists as
curators or guardians of the past often achieve the impossible, but sometimes the impossible
is simply impossible. Only in lm or ction, or perhaps the telluric, can the dimensions of
space and time be traversed in such a way as to enable those living in one era to actually rub
shoulders with those of another era long gone. In this respect, Haile Gerimas lm Sankofa
shares a ctive device rst deployed in literature in the writings of H. G. Wells (among others):
a time machine that enables people to visit and inhabit the past but as a livedrather than
recountedexperience. Yet it is precisely because the past is unalterable that black social activ-
ists, in attempts to recreate a past, sometime engage in hubris similar to the hubris of states:
by representing the past, one might be able to change it, alter its consequences in the present,
and at minimum, represent the past in the present.
Photography and cinema, and their attendant literatures of criticism, help us better com-
prehend the respective frontiers of life and representation in memory. In some instances, visual
technologies (camcorders, photography, and, literally, motion pictures) can actually shape and
impact events as they happen. In other cases, however, technologies of visual apprehension
are merely grim witnesses, as in the case of the police beating of Rodney King. Visual culture
more generally, however, confronts the immediate limits of representation in ways in which
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other documentary practices do not. Te Adventure of a Photographer, a short story by Italo
Calvino, precisely identies the boundary between life and representation, a boundary with
traces across all attempts to record the past in history or memory. Te central character in this
story, Antonino Paraggi, develops an interest in photography that becomes an obsession. His
girlfriend, Bice, becomes the object of his obsession. From the outset, Antonino is skeptical
about photographys ability to capture the totality of life, or even the totality of moments. In
his frustration he expresses:
For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes, . . . the only coherent
way to act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the instant he opens his eyes in the morn-
ing to when he goes to sleep. Tis is the only way that the rolls of exposed lm will represent a
faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I would see this
thing through, even if it meant losing my mind.
He does, and so he does.
By way of parallel, we can consider the evaluative process of the chroniclers of black
memory (and not just historians), the selective criterion of judgment by which those chroni-
clers themselves determine what is and is not of value for remembrance. What does one save
as a memento from a civil rights march? A ower, a recorded speech, a printed program of
the days events, or a recording of the intense negotiations before a march over who should
speak rst? Ones location in a crowd or status in an organization may determine what access,
if any, an individual might have to certain deliberations, proceedings, or program copies. As
part of temporal distancing, historians may only come later, after it is determined, with the
passage of time, that posterity rather than secrecy will preserve the memory of a happening,
activity, or organization.
Diaspora, Nation, Memory, History
Te struggle for representation and incorporation of black memory forms in the ocial archive
and memory of the national-state can be found across national societies, in societies where those
categorized as black are in a numerical minority as well as in those societies where either (a) the
majority population is considered a black population (Jamaica); (b) ethnicity, rather than race,
is the predominant social category and organizing principle (Ghana); or (c) racism and racial
inequality coexist with a long-standing national ideology of a prejudice against prejudice, the
denial of the existence of racial discrimination and categorization (Brazil and France).
Italo Calvino, Te Adventure of a Photographer, in 11. Dicult Loves, trans. William Weaver, Archibold Colquhoun,
and Peggy Wright (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 224.
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Te national-state has some distinct advantages in the forging and maintenance of an
ocial history. As most students of nationalism, particularly those focused on the cultural and
symbolic dimensions of national(ist) representation, have noted, states utilize museums, cur-
rency, postage, holidays, and commemorative occasions to remind their citizens of their virtual
rather than literal connectedness. In the case of the United States, US African Americans who
appear on postage stamps, receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, or compete in beauty
pageants such as Miss America, serve to mark their symbolic status as subjects, either living
or dead, in the ocial portrait of the nation. To be sure, the majority of the black individuals
depicted on a rst-class postage stamp in the United States, for example, would not have been
chosen were it not for US African Americans advocating for the inclusion of black iconogra-
phy. Images of people other than Europeans wereand arenoticeably absent in the iconic
images developed during and immediately after the nations founding.
One of the rst symbolic consequences for US African Americans at the nations founding
is the complete absence of their portraits, symbols, in the projection of national-state imagery.
Neither the ag, anthem, nor currency hint at the presence of US African Americans or Mexi-
can Americans within the territorial connes of the nation. Te lone Native American image
rests on a ve-cent piece, now rarely viewed in circulation, much like the fate of the remain-
ing indigenous peoples in the country as a whole. Ironically, the currency of the Confederate
South and many southern states depicted black laborers engaged in tasks ranging from picking
and lifting cotton, loading sugar cane, leading cattle, working on wharf docks, and laboring
in elds. Images of a heavily muscled black woman hauling a basket overowing with cotton
was used on twenty-one dierent currencies issued in various Southern states, thus compress-
ing the realities of enforced toil, gender, and racism in the image of a black womans body.
Tese images were often juxtaposed against depictions ranging from George Washington to
white overseers to Moneta (the Roman goddess of money) as well as several other white female
images: an implicit if unwitting ensemble portrait of the political economy of the south, if
not the entire nation, combining working-class whites, enslaved blacks, and the white elites
who proted from their toil.
Taken together, national symbols and iconography, memorials, and commemorations
provide an opportunity for citizens and subjects of a polity to revisit the national past without
actually having to relive it. Commemorative events memorializing a happening, phenomena,
or institution in a nations history provide opportunities for at least three distinct types of
national reection: (1) how a commemorative event is actually celebrated over time; (2) how
See John W. Joness exhibit Confederate Currency: Te Color of Money; Depictions of Slavery in Confederate 12.
and Southern States Currency, original acrylic on canvas paintings inspired by slave images on currency, www.
colorsofmoney.com.
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the event is perceived by citizens and subjects, and how national perception may change over
time; which leads to reection on (3) what distinctions there are between a nations epochs
and its larger history. Without a state to protect, much less symbolically project, its interests,
the absence of black iconography in foundational symbols in the United States has had the
consequence of the absence of reection, in two related but distinct meanings of the word.
US African Americans would not see themselves reected in the imagery of the nation; the
white nation, in turn, would not reect on the absence of black imagery until well into the
late twentieth century.
In the case of Jamaica, the trajectory of nationalist, anticolonial mobilization, inde-
pendence, nation-state consolidation, and the emergence of organized political parties and
executive/administrative/legislative structures, resembles many postcolonial regimes in Africa,
Asia, and the Caribbean after World War II, particularly those formerly administered by the
British Empire. As Anthony Bogues has noted, the Jamaican nationalist project in its statist-
sovereign form was led by Creole elites. Norman Manley, father of Michael Manley, was a key
architect of Jamaican statist-nationalism. For Bogues, Manleys vision of politics privileged
institutional forms of the state and government as the markers of political modernity. . . .
Organized politics became essentially the constitutional process of transferring political power
from the colonial elite to a democratic majority. Boguess description of Jamaican Creole
nationalism has echoes of Benedict Andersons characterization of Creole nationalism in
the second edition of Imagined Communities, wherein all the national-states and societies of
the New World are creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language
and common descent with those against whom they fought coupled with an aversion to the
incorporation of the laboring classes into the sphere of organized politics and civic participa-
tion. One of the enduring tensions in Jamaican postcolonial national politics and national
culture is that between the national credo, Out of Many, One People, and the reality that
the overwhelming majority of the Jamaican populace are black peoples. Like Brazil and several
other New World societies, the ocial state ideology of national amalgamation is belied by
historical legacies of colonial, racial/chromatic hierarchies that helped structure the relations
between colonizer, colonized, and their ospring.
One striking feature of Jamaican post-independence politics in this regard is the rec-
ognition and acknowledgement of the majority populations role in the social, cultural, and
economic development of the island, rst as colony, second as national sovereign. Tis meant
the inculcation of imagery, whether in the form of Edna Manleys sculptures of black bodies
Anthony Bogues, Politics, Nation, and PostColony: Caribbean Inections, 13. Small Axe, no. 11 (March 2002): 5.
Anderson, 14. Imagined Communities, 47.
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engaged in labor, Louise Bennetts systematic scholarly treatment and performance of Jamai-
can Creole, or Rex Nettlefords development of a national dance theater based on Jamaican
folklore, religious, and musical practices. Te incorporation, representation and projection of
symbols of blackness as national symbols would be crucial in the transformation of popular,
horizontally focused representations of blackness in Jamaican popular culture into verti-
cal, nation-statist imagery and iconographies, as will be detailed below, while at the same
time eliding the fact that the brunt of Jamaican poverty, misery, and violence is borne by its
majority black masses.
As Bogues and others have noted, the multiple forms of Jamaican nationalismstatist
and antistatist, territorially nationalist and diasporic internationalisthave often been at odds
in the Jamaican context. Take, for example, a 1968 speech given by Norman W. Manley
then leader of the Peoples National Party (at the time out of power)to commemorate the
Marcus Garvey Prize for peace and human rights awarded posthumously to Martin Luther
King Jr. Manley compared remarks made by King during a visit to Jamaica with comments
made by another great American Negro, Paul Robeson, noting that each expressed feeling
fully in his humanity in Jamaica: Ladies and gentlemen, there could be no prouder words
said by a foreigner, and a black man, of my country than those words. . . . Tese things mean
that here in our country we have achieved an atmosphere that an outsider can feel, which
expresses the underlying fact that we do not make colour a dominant of our way of life or of
our thinking. Such words express respect and admiration for Robeson and King, as well
as for Jamaican national society and culture, while at the same time introducing the prospect
of a non-Jamaican black man as a foreigner. Tis distinction is consistent with a territorially
nationalist consciousness, wherein citizenship and locality, not phenotype, are part of the crite-
rion of membership in the national-territorial community. Such distinctions would also place
Manley at a remove from the more diasporic, extra-territorial nationalisms of Rastafarians and
Garveyites, with their less territorially specic, more descent- and oppression-oriented idea of
a community of black peoples not dened by national territory or national-state. Moreover,
the implicit reproduction of the national-state motto (We do not make colour a dominant of
our way of life or of our thinking) ignores the possibility that King may have felt at home
in Jamaica (to the extent to which he actually did) because he was among a black populace
led by an elite that was, at least in ideological and statecraft terms, far more sympathetic to
his politics and subject position as a black person than the US state and its majority national
population.
Norman W. Manley, 15. Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 19381968, ed. Rex Nettleford
(New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971), 35253.
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At stake here are both strategic and ontological claims to national and extra-national
community. Manleys simultaneous embrace of two of the most well-known stalwarts for civil
rights and racial equality from the United States was at the same time a moment of alienation
prompted by the recognition that, after all, a black Jamaican is one thing, a light-skinned
Jamaican quite another, and a black American something altogether dierent still. Embedded
here, as I will explore below, are competing ideas of imagining community both inside and
outside the territorial space of Jamaica. In an interview I conducted with Douglas Manley,
surviving son of Norman Manley and older brother of Michael Manley, he recounted how
one of the familys domestic servants, a proud Garveyite, once chastised his father (Norman
Manley) for speaking ill of Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association activities in
Jamaica and elsewhere. Douglas Manley told me how this moment helped begin a slow, grudg-
ing recognition of Garveys importance to segments of the black masses who overwhelmingly
constitute Jamaicas suerers. Te perspectival dierences between the domestic servant in
the Manley household and Norman Manley himself also point to the dierent ways in which
elements of the Jamaican national-popular and the Jamaican elite imagined their communities.
For many Garveyites, the combination of white supremacist logics, empire and colonialism,
Christianity, and race pride combined to inform a sense of community that often alternated
between ethical, political, and messianic and religious valences. Tis sense of community that
informed Bedwardism, Garveyism, Rastafarianism, and other nonstatist visions of solidarity
in Jamaica would not frame the dierences between King, Robeson, and Manley as national
distinctions.
Here we also encounter the circuitous, highly personalized routes undertaken by Afro-
Modern political actors to publicize, promote discussion and distribute information about
the plight and condition of specic black populations, in the absence of state sanction. Ana-
lytically, the distinction between horizontal and vertical representations of black memory is
useful in considering the depiction of Marcus Garvey as national-state hero in Jamaica. How
else does one make sense of Garvey as a representative icon of a transnational black subject,
once scorned and ridiculed in Jamaican society, subsequently incorporated in the nationalist
and Pan-Africanist iconography of a Pan-Africanist regime in Ghana, and nally a national
hero in the land of his birth?
Another example from the United States allows us to measure the critical ideological
distance between a popular, collective black memory and the statist aims of a government that
sought to repress and deny the visual representation of violence against US African Americans,
can be found in the murder of Emmitt Till, the Chicago youth who was tortured and killed
in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman and then bragging about it. Te murder of
Emmett Till in 1995 and the dissemination of his badly disgured, tortured body in a death
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pose captured by Jet magazine, provided an opportunity for the transgression of a norm of
silence and repression before the violence of white supremacy. Te pictures of Emmett Till
in many ways galvanized and marked many black people in the United States and elsewhere,
reminding them, in the elegant phrase of Adam Green, that what dened black people as a
people was not color but the long memory of pain and outrage. As Green notes, what was
striking about this particular archival representation was that none of the white newspapers
or magazines would print the photos from Tills funeral, which revealed through an open
casket Tills brutally distorted face. Tus, Jet magazine became (as it often had during much
of its existence) a chronicler of both black memory and black historyevents large and small,
weddings, celebrities, job appointments and the murder of Emmett Till.
Conclusion
Whether dened as diasporic or national subjects, Afro-Modern political actors and their
constituencies forged a sense of themselves not only in relation to each other but in relation
to a world of nation-states, as well as the colonies and empires that preceded those nation-
states, and in some cases, overlapped with them. While it has become chic in some circles to
write and speak of diaspora populationsAfrica, African descended, or otherwiseas com-
munities dened by their traversal of boundaries, their seemingly borderless character, these
same populations are nevertheless informed in some very critical and fundamental ways by
the forces and consequences of nationalism.
Black memories and national memories do overlap, but they are not one and the same.
All the crossing of boundaries in the world, or even the presumption of a common, collective
memory, does not elide the fact that the archaeologies of black memory are multiple, distinct,
and constituted by and within dierence. Te states national memory, with its reliance on
symbols and foundational narratives, serves to project a beginning and future to the nation,
a people with no end in sight, even amid the daily births and deaths of its citizens. Horizon-
tal accounts of memory in the popular imagination, however, with references to unpleasant
events either within the territorial parameters of the nation or even outside its boundaries, can
serve to disrupt the relatively seamless narrative of national time. Te national-state invariably
has a centralizing, rationalizing mission in the domain of culture, as in the domains of the
economy and of politics. A popular archive and memory is only partially rendered, if at all,
Adam Green, 16. Selling the Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 199. See also Elizabeth Alexanders
thoughtful considerations of memory, community, and voice, in Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007).
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in the selections of the archive of the national-state. Popular memory and archive are often
more discontinuous, sometimes exceeding the purview and boundaries of the national-states
eorts to frame and contain the archive of national memory.
A states eorts to project, internally and externally, a sense of national community
through symbols, rituals, and practices is paradigmatic of what Hobsbawm and Benedict
Anderson refer to as ocial nationalism, or nationalism from abovein Andersons descrip-
tion, an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened with mar-
ginalization or exclusion from an emerging national community. As David Telen has
written, Memory, private and individual, as much as collective and cultural, is constructed,
not reproduced. . . . Tis construction is not made in isolation but in conversations with others
that occur in the contexts of community, broader politics, and social dynamics. In conclu-
sion, we could also add that memory, particularly that steeped in the connes of a territorial
nationalism, complicates our understanding of an Africana diaspora, Pan-Africanism, and
black nationalism, no matter how hard we try to erase the boundariesreal and imagined
upon which territorial nationalisms are based. Te tensions between state memory and black
memory are worthy of further exploration.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Neil Roberts, David Scott, and Krista Tompson for their helpful comments on an
earlier version of this essay.
Anderson, 17. Imagined Communities, 101.
David Telen, Memory and American History, 18. Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1119.