Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa

Continuous Pasts by Sakiru Adebayo explores the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa, arguing that the past is not merely present but survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and secondary and transgenerational witnesses. It contends that the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors, and that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 196 pages
Publication date: 30 June 2023
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

In his book Continuous Pasts, author Sakiru Adebayo explores the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies in Africa, resonating in silences and memorials and continuing even in experiences and structures of migration. Adebayo argues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa invites critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity. The past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book contends that the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. In most cases in Africa, the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors. The book argues that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa recalibrate discourses of futurity, solidarity, responsibility, justice, survival, and reconciliation. It also contends that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory. Each text analyzed in the book provides an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can 'remember together' using what the author describes as an 'African memory work'.

Weight: 332g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472056231