Continuous Pasts
Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa
(University of Michigan Press, 2023)
FIP 138
In Continuous Pasts, author Sakiru Adebayo claims 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. 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—that is to say, the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book also argues that post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa shows the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. It contends that, 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—and that it is precisely this despairing disposition toward the future that some writers of post-conflict fiction attempt to confront in their works. On the whole, Continuous Pasts shows how 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, in very interesting ways, an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can ‘remember together’ using what the author describes as an African transnational memory framework.
(Description Source: University of Michigan Press)
Author
Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia. Born in Ijebu Igbo, a town in Southwestern Nigeria, Sakiru moved to Ibadan to study at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university. He later moved to Johannesburg, South Africa for his Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) for a year. He is very excited to be a part of the UBC community in the Okanagan Valley.
UBC Library Holdings
How to Purchase this Book
From the Publisher – University of Michigan Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri
Hardcover ISBN: 9780472076239
ePub ISBN: 9780472221196
Paper ISBN: 9780472076239
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