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Our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history.
-Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse
Memory has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary historiography. Sparked by the atrocities of the Holocaust and intimately bound up with the concept of trauma, memory studies has gained increasing prominence in many intellectual circles and is particularly useful when considering postcolonial issues. A number of key commemorative dates over the past two decades have set the scene for a re-visioning of French and francophone history: 1992 was the 500th anniversary of the new world's "discovery" by Christopher Columbus; 1998 was the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe; 2004 was the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Declaration of Independence; and 2006 marked sixty years since Martinique and Guadeloupe became part of metropolitan France as overseas departments. French Caribbean writers have been vital to the public activities associated with remembrance of slavery, and yet their work has been little studied in the anglophone world. This article will focus on Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant's contribution to memory studies through his combined role as theoretician (in works such as his 2007 publication Mémoires des esclavages) and practician (in his role of establishing a national memorial center in Paris). While many critics have focused on Glissant's influence on postcolonial studies, this article will assess his importance in the burgeoning field of cultural memory.
Much has been written on the role of cultural memory in the construction of a society's identity and particularly on the way in which "memory" is linked to the present. Mieke Bal, for example, argues that cultural memorization is "an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed, even as it continues to shape the future."1 Richard Terdiman phrases it more directly: "Memory is the present past."2 Theorists have emphasized the constructed nature of memory, arguing, for example, that the past "is a position"3 and that "cultural recall is not merely something of which you happen to be a bearer but something that you actually perform."4 In the case of Glissant, this performative aspect is highly relevant given his crucial role as both theoretician and practitioner of "Caribbean memory." Glissant has...