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Chapter 2 investigates in some depth Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “tertiary memory” and its implications for the industrial production of temporal objects, such as films and music. Two case studies explore Stiegler’s assertion that cinema and life converge in the temporality of consciousness, whereby the remembrance of past events—involving a process of montage akin to post-production in creating movies—is rendered as a temporal object with the help of music. The first example is Omar Naïm’s The Final Cut (2004), a sci-fi drama and critique of commercial memory that revolves around a brain implant capable of recording every sensory impression in a person’s life. After a person’s death, the complete footage is reviewed by a cutter who eliminates unsavory episodes using music to suture uplifting moments into an uplifting “rememory” video of for friends and family. The second example from Federico Fellini’s semi-documentary Intervista (1987) in which Anita Ekberg and Marcello Marcello Mastroianni watch their younger selves in clips from La dolce vita (1960). Amid the continuous stream of interlocking music from both films, the actors reliving the past in the present amplifies their experience of a paradoxical “future anterior” (Roland Barthes) which both defies and defers to death.

Working on the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), must have heightened Doris Lessing's interest in the question of how to narrate the past. In Lessing's note to her 2001 novel, The Sweetest Dream, she explained that she was not writing a third volume of her autobiography ‘because of possible hurt to vulnerable people’. In her writing in this period, Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory, revising the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognising racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Toni Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. This chapter discusses Lessing's use of particular conceptions of the city and the home as a means of exploring connections between race, nation and identity.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel whose chief aim is, in her own words, to “rememory” slavery despite the obvious implication that it is better to forget it. Slavery and its aftermath is perhaps the closest thing to the Shoah in United States history. In her foreword to the Vintage International Edition of Beloved (2004) Morrison writes about the attempt to make the slave experience an intimate one, and in the process of doing so, she states, it creates a violence in the quietude of everyday life, keeping the memory of enslavement and its inherent involvement of suffering, alive. The reading of Beloved surprisingly creates a useful and even indispensable means of understanding the mechanisms that govern our present-day world of “terrorists,” the War on Terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cyberspace, and global tele-techno-military-capitalism. In turn, this moving story creates a sense of responsibility to avoid any future emergences of this memory of slavery.

Using a psychoanalytic framework and an artful deployment of Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” Claudine Raynaud draws on memory as “the return of the repressed” in Beloved. She argues that the staging of the workings of memory is akin to phantasm and that Morrison’s “rememory” can be read as a “the narrative of a fable”—or “fabulation”—that figures the return of the repressed Whether bumping into to a rememory that belongs to someone else, or the haunting of a house by a phantasm that re-presents the traumatic (or catatonic) memory of the infanticide, Raynaud links the “geological metaphor” (of literary archeology) of a spatially-oriented “myth of memory” to “the metaphoric process at work in Black American literature.” In a third movement that concentrates on the color of memory, she shows how repression is described as a mise en abyme of remembering: Sethe cannot remember the workings of memory. (140 words)

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an antirealist trope, premised on the supernatural irruption of the past in the present—achieves this by imagining an alternative history of slavery. Yet a complete picture of these novels requires an account of the way that Morrison structures rememory—quite remarkably and with palpable historical reservations—as a Catholic sacrament. The chapter therefore addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Morrison (who identifies as Catholic), but never does it imply that her religious vision is uncritical or pure. Rather, it suggests that the sacramental aspects of rememory are in constant tension with the sharp critique of Catholicism evident in both novels. That critique builds upon the sociological study of slave religion that Orlando Patterson developed in Slavery and Social Death, particularly his pioneering claim that “the special version of Protestantism” which arose in the American South as slave religion was, in key respects, theologically “identical” to Catholicism.

This chapter examines the manifestation of the concepts of memory and ancestral presence in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. It analyzes the main character Sethe and ways in which the ancestor, as memory, works in consonance with African iconography, and ritual to engender psychic wholeness. It suggests that Morrison's inscriptions physically re-creates the tight packing of bodies in the holds of ships that brought Africans as captives to America, with their arms crossed, knees drawn up. It also highlights the importance of ritual re-enactment in Sethe's process of revision, rememory and remembrance of the ancestor.

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.