Between transnational and postcolonial: mnemonic dynamics in Mémoires d’outre-mer

Abstract

The article situates Mémoires d’outre-mer in current debates about lieux de mémoire, and in particular about the ways in which the concept elaborated by Pierre Nora is increasingly scrutinized in the light of its silences relating to colonial memory. Ferrier focuses on realms of memory such as the Mahajanga cemetery around which much of his text is constructed, but also engages directly with one of the subjects of Nora’s collection, the school textbook Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, in order to open up a discussion of contemporary memory practices in contemporary France. He argues that French memory is often limited to national boundaries, and that any internal diversity is regulated, sanitized, hierarchized, with France’s status as a transculturated, “travelling” culture denied in the process. The novel is a creative reaction to this mnemonic tendency, with the work situated at the intersection of the transnational and postcolonial, two concepts that are far from being synonymous but are nevertheless closely related throughout the text.