Narrating Memory: Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë and André Brink and the New Slave Narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe reiterations of narratives of enslavement may be, to invoke Jacque Derrida's term, the hauntological, in which “the thing that represents the demise of something also signals its continuation in a different form.” Ian Baucom argues that repetition and accumulation, not progress, defines a modern philosophy of history. Similarly, Arlene Keizer sees contemporary black subjectivity formed through the post-memonics of slavery. Toni Morrison's concept of rememory physicalizes remembering and cultural memory, necessitating an interrogation of the institution and materiality of slavery. While much of the attention on neo-slave narratives have focused on texts from the United States, the reconstructed slave narratives South African texts of André Brink, Yvette Christiansë, and Rayda Jacobs suggest that we investigate how we construct our memories and to what political and aesthetic purposes they are put. More important, perhaps, than the localness of a neo-slave narrative is that it reminds us, of the effects of globalization and the intertwining of systems of banking, transit, manufacture, and agriculture for example that define local conditions and the localness and intimacy of oppression.