Re: membering

Representative:

Ute Fendler Ute.Fendler@uni-bayreuth.de

PI Members:

Ute Fendler, Susanne Mühleisen (University of Bayreuth), Muyiwa Falaiye (University of Lagos), Peter Simatei (Moi University)

Overview

Over the last few years, the struggle over memory and heritage – determining what to remember and celebrate or to forget and condemn – has gained new strength from both within and outside of Africa. On the continent, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement in South Africa (2015); the construction of huge monuments and statues dedicated to Africanness; the (re)naming of bridges, airports and highways after former or present political figures; the constant reshaping of the pantheon of national heroes in many African countries, and the impact of the digital turn on both individual and collective memory regimes have created a new momentum. Elsewhere, debates on the restitution of artefacts, such as the Benin Bronzes (2022), or the renaming of streets in Bordeaux or Berlin have brought tensions inherent in the long-shared colonial history of Africa and Europe to the attention of a wide international public. In terms of the vast field of memory studies related to the African continent and its diasporas, however, this attention is focused on just the tip of the iceberg.

Group or individual memories may corroborate, challenge or complexify narratives and the meanings of artefacts that relate to historical agency and past developments in the process of the collective re/construction of the present and future of groups, nations, continents or the world. These multiplicitous memories must be understood in terms of the relations they establish within and beyond the contexts of heritage, historiography, ethnography, archival practices, musealisation, monumentalism and the arts, among others. Their different epistemological bases; their particular selection, retrieval, transmission and circulation protocols; and the structural positioning of their stakeholders in terms of power relations all speak to multiplicity, relationality, and world-making. A main objective of RS Re:membering is to scrutinise such public memorial expressions, which often co-exist in spaces and times. If this RS had a subtitle, it would be: Memory, archives and living heritage in Africa.

World-making appears for us, then, as a leitmotif, describing both the inner workings and the provisional results of multiple, relational and reflexive processes of re-membering in Africa, calling (further) attention to what is at stake: how convivial or conflicting memorial setups may factor in – or indeed, may more or less lead to – the making of very different worlds and/or the destruction of others. Current practices prioritising memory – practices of recovery, reparationseeking, reclamation and retrieval – have largely enabled and affirmed an understandable moral outrage about past connections between Africa and the Global North. However, an agenda-setting question is: How much might this strong focus deny agency to new relational modes or overlook ameliorative actions aimed at re-membering (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015)? RS Re:membering will thus thematically foreground questions around, for example, memories that generate unacknowledged transformations within African societies – transformations involving living heritage and embodied forms of knowledge transmission that take place far from the institutional realm, such as song, dance, divination and ritual, as well as community-driven archival initiatives and collection-building made possible by the digital turn.

As appropriate to this research, we aim to complement AM’s 2.0 focus on world-making with reflections on memory from the Global South, the work of theorists whose concepts – such as re-existence (Albán, 2017), human incompleteness, conviviality (Nyamnjoh, 2017) and planetary thinking (Spivak, 1999) – offer support for broader reflections on the future of human relations here on Earth. Nyamnjoh defines incompleteness as being open to various ‘competing and complementary processes of social cultivation through practice, performance and experience, without pre-empting or foreclosing particular units of analysis in a world in which the messiness of encounters and relationships frowns on binaries, dichotomies and dualisms’ (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 267). Both Albán and Nyamnjoh insist on the resilient force of multiple practices of knowledge production and transfer, calling for the development of lines of thinking beyond the binary models that are unfit for the analysis of forms of practices (songs, divination, dance, etc.) that do not conform to them.

We propose three areas of inquiry to offer new modes of engagement with memory:

(1) Memory Repositories: Archives, museums and intangible heritage are major sites for the (un)making of memory; for identity-recognition claims in the making; of contestation by subaltern or marginalised groups; and for experiments made possible by the digital turn such as digital repatriation, digital outreach and online community projects. In this area of inquiry, we will also ask how the relevance of museums and archives may be heightened by efforts of community and outreach projects, striving for democratisation and creating equal access.

(2) Memory, Power and Circulations: This area of inquiry will focus on increasing levels of discussion around the archivisation and musealisation of local practices, i.e., per UNESCO World Heritage guidelines, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), Living Heritage and heritagemaking, promoting a critical stance.

(3) Memory, Affect and African Ways of Remembering: This area of inquiry concerns memory constructions which, combined and linked to African ontologies, have methods of transmission that engage the body through forms such as dance, music, song, dream, divination and ritual.