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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Forgetful Remembering: A Colonial Life in the Congo |
Author: | Fabian, Johannes |
Year: | 2003 |
Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
Volume: | 73 |
Issue: | 4 |
Pages: | 489-504 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) |
Subjects: | urban history oral history History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3556776 |
Abstract: | Social memory, cultural memory, culture as memory, and memory as culture, landscape and memory, places of memory, regimes of memory - all these have been prominent topics in cultural studies, also in anthropology; in this work, attention is usually paid to remembering. Based on several prior inquiries into popular historiography and local regimes of memory, this paper is an attempt to include forgetting in a model of 'memory work'. What this entails is shown with ethnographic evidence, the recording of a conversation made in Lubumbashi (Congo/Zaire) in 1986 with one of the African pioneers in the history of the town, Baba Ngoie-Nday Léon. The text in French and Swahili, accompanied by an English translation, is accessible at www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca. As far as its form is concerned, the text is a hybrid: it hovers between the genres of interview, conversation and narrative. This particular instance of an ethnography of memory work makes the interplay between remembering and forgetting visible in its textual shape. Bibliogr., notes, sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |