namchard memory

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small axe 26June 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 ction, l iterary and

visual criticism, history, and philosophy that treat the subject of memory, this paper provides anoutline 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 projectprovides 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 specific examples and phenomena asso-

ciated with, or characterized as, black memory, but also concepts, theoretical propositions,

and critical insights fundamental to memorys definition, description, and classification. 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 Scottand Charles Carnegies charge to me, an examination of the archaeologies of black memory

entails an elaboration of the distinction between the specifics of black memory, the empiri-

cal and documentary evidence of its manifestations in various forms, and the more broadly


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46 |SX26Black Memory versus State Memory

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 affirming its existence and practices. I am more interested

in describing and interpreting the ways in which black memory has been deployed for different,

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: profit, 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-stateshave 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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SX26June 2008 Michael Hanchard |47

Te evolution of a properly national consciousness, nurtured and massaged by states,

also involves acts of forgetting, but the forgetting is of a different 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 first define its param-

eters and in so doing, distinguish memory from other forms of reflection and discernment.

Collective memory in particular provides a means for peoples to distinguish themselves from

other peoples, an a priori consideration before moving specifically 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 defines us as distinct from others? Does a collective memory, particularly

memories of subordination, provide people with a set of moral obligations? o the extent towhich any form of memory could be characterized as black, what are the specific 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 identified 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 socialrather 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 theirexperiences 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 memorializationis 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 commodification 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 difference, 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 significance. Since my parents are both black Jamaicans, there is a high

probability that at least one of my ancestors actually didpass 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 oneof 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 Eiffel ower, 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 confident, engaging manner in

Haile Garimas film1. 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 first

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 identified 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 effect 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 final 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: Reflections 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 justifiably 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. o 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 notothers, a criterion of selection. Human

memory can recall a range of experiences significant and banal, of world-historical significance

or, conversely, significant only to those who remember them. Tus, in the Jewish case, the

motto Never forget signifies challenge and paradox as much as it signifies a directive: just

what, precisely, are Jews to notforgetholocausts in their entirety, or acts or incidents more

generally emblematic of a specific 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, fight 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 specific 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 nationalmemory from blackmemory. 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, nationaland anticolonial.

The Time of States, States of Time

One of the socializing functions of national-states, is the collection, dispensing, and ultimately

transformation of specificbut nonetheless popularmemories into national memories. Partof the process of transformation of a popular memory, particularly one tied to acts of defiance,

conflict, 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 conflict between state

interests and the interests of peoples, individuals, and organizations who were mobilized toconfront the state. Te vanquished, once viewed as dangerous, are transformed into totemic

Ibid., 41.5.Edward M. Bruner and Victor W. urner, eds.,6. Te Anthropology of Experience(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1986).


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figures 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 figure or event in the national past. In rehabilitating

marginalized and excluded figures 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 commodified in official national lore, was, as we all know,

hounded by the intelligence and surveillance components of the US government during the

final 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 floor and the DJs cratesall items of limited exposurethat 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 conflicts, 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 evidenceof 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 byinstitutions of power and their representatives, presidents, prime ministers, regimes, and states.


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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 conflicts 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, tofeelwhat 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 different circumstances. Social activists as

curators or guardians of the past often achieve the impossible, but sometimes the impossible

is simply impossible. Only in film or fiction, 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 film Sankofa

shares a fictive device first 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 identifies 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 film 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 flower, a recorded speech, a printed program of

the days events, or a recording of the intense negotiations before a march over who should

speak first? 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 official 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, in11. Difficult 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

official 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 official portrait of the nation. o be sure, the majority of the black individuals

depicted on a first-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 first 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 flag, anthem, nor currency hint at the presence of US African Americans or Mexi-

can Americans within the territorial confines of the nation. Te lone Native American image

rests on a five-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 fields. Images of a heavily muscled black woman hauling a basket overflowing with cotton

was used on twenty-one different 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 profited from their toil.

aken 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 reflection: (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 Confederate12.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 reflection 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 reflection, in two related but distinct meanings of the word.

US African Americans would not see themselves reflected in the imagery of the nation; the

white nation, in turn, would not reflect 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 official 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 offspring.

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, first 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 Inflections,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. ake, 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 specific, more descent- and oppression-oriented idea of

a community of black peoples not defined 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) becausehe 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 asa 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 different 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 sufferers. Te perspectival differences between the domestic servant in

the Manley household and Norman Manley himself also point to the different 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 differences 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 specific 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 finally 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 ill, 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 ill in 1995 and the dissemination of his badly disfigured, tortured body in a death


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pose captured byJet magazine, provided an opportunity for the transgression of a norm of

silence and repression before the violence of white supremacy. Te pictures of Emmett ill

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 defined 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 ills funeral, which revealed through an open

casket ills 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 ill.

Conclusion

Whether defined 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 defined 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, collectivememory, does not elide the fact that the archaeologies of black memory are multiple, distinct,

and constituted by and within difference. 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 Alexandersthoughtful 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

efforts to frame and contain the archive of national memory.

A states efforts 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 official 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 confines 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 History75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1119.


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namchard memory

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