Description
Book SynopsisArgues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa depicts the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, and continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration.
Trade ReviewWinner: 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism “
Continuous Pasts offers a much-needed Africa-centered contribution to memory and trauma studies from a literary perspective, and Adebayo is just the scholar to make such a contribution. As the book reveals, he has a near encyclopedic knowledge of recent approaches to trauma and memory as well as a broad knowledge of African literature, history, culture, and criticism. This is the book we’ve been waiting for!”—Michael Rothberg, author of
The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and PerpetratorsTable of Contents
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Introduction:The Past is Full of Ruptures
- 0.1 Memories of Conflict and Conflicts of Memory in Post-Colonial Africa
- 0.2 Postcolonial Memory Studies
- 0.3 Frictions of Memory
- 0.4 Fiction of Memory in Post-Conflict Africa
- 0.5 Outline of the Book
Chapter 1: The Past is a Contested Territory: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Postmemory Fiction
- 1.1 The Shadow of Biafra
- 1.2. Postmemory
- 1.3 Chimamanda Adichie as a Vicarious Witness
- 1.4 Aesthetics of Postmemory in Half of Yellow Sun
- 1.5 Remembering Back and Writing Back: The Nexus Between Postmemory and Postcolonialism in Half of a Yellow Sun
- 1.6 Remediation of Memory
- 1.7 Postmemory and the Possibility of Justice for Biafra
- 1.8 Concatenated Memories, Ancestral Memories
Chapter 2: The Past Continues in Silence: Memory, Complicity and the Post-Conflict Timescapes in The Memory of Love
- 2.1 Reading Silence
- 2.2 A Sense of Something Unspoken: The Memory of Love as Textual Silence
- 2.2 Silence of Trauma
- 2.3 Silence of Oppression
- 2.4 A Culture of Silence
- 2.5 Silent and Silenced Memories
- 2.6 Silence of Complicity
- 2.7 The Post-Conflict Timescapes in The Memory of Love
Chapter 3: The Past Continues in Another Country: African Transnational Memory in a Migratory Setting
- 3.1 Immigrant Melancholia
- 3.2 Memory, Translocalities and Alternative Practices of Belonging in Children of the Revolution
- 3.3 In Search of an African Transnational Memory
Chapter 4: The Past Continues through Subject Positions: Memory, Subjectivity and Secondary Witnessing in The Shadow of Imana
- 4.1 African Transnational Memory and the Rwandan Genocide
- 4.2 Sites and Sutures of Memory: Veronique Tadjo’s Affective Encounters
- 4.3 Memory and Positionality: Intricacies of Secondary Witnessing in The Shadow of Imana
Chapter 5: The Past Continues in the Future
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