The postcolonial novel: history and memory

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.053

51 - The postcolonial novel: history and memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

C. Innes

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

Implicit in the category “postcolonial” is a concern with the event of colonialism, its consequences, and the representation of both. Consequently, for many postcolonial writers history is the crucible out of which their fiction is fashioned. They respond not only to written histories in terms of content and narrative form, but also to concepts of history. Their novels counterpose memory and history, and myth and history. The opposition between memory and history also involves an attempt to create – or re-create – a collective memory that will be the source of a collective national identity – an imagined community.

In counterposing history and memory, I draw on distinctions that the French historian Pierre Nora delineates in his Realms of Memory:

The acceleration of history: let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase … Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.

Writing about changes in contemporary European society, especially France, caused by rapid advances in technology, the disappearance of agrarian culture, and the impact of globalization, Nora discerns:

an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear – these indicate a rupture of equilibrium … a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn.

(285, Nora's italics)

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 823 - 839

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.053 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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