عنوان
پدید آورنده
موضوع
رده
کتابخانه
محل استقرار
LA107072
انگلیسی
Cultural Amnesia, Cultural Nostalgia and False Memory:
[Article]
Africa's Identity Crisis Revisited
Ali A. Mazrui
Leiden
Brill
The point of departure of this article is Ernest Renan's observation that the secret of nation-building is to get one's history wrong. We critically analyze - in the broader and historical context of the encounters between Africans and Europeans - the role of collective memory in its four functions of preservation, selection, elimination and invention. We focus on the first function to examine in depth how positive preservation of memory can become a form of nostalgia and how negative selection by memory can lead to elimination and amnesia. We argue that both nostalgia and amnesia can be forms of "getting one's history wrong" in order to get one's national identity right. We also attempt to show how historical invention can be consolidated into a false memory - placing something in the past which was never there before. The point of departure of this article is Ernest Renan's observation that the secret of nation-building is to get one's history wrong. We critically analyze - in the broader and historical context of the encounters between Africans and Europeans - the role of collective memory in its four functions of preservation, selection, elimination and invention. We focus on the first function to examine in depth how positive preservation of memory can become a form of nostalgia and how negative selection by memory can lead to elimination and amnesia. We argue that both nostalgia and amnesia can be forms of "getting one's history wrong" in order to get one's national identity right. We also attempt to show how historical invention can be consolidated into a false memory - placing something in the past which was never there before.
2013
13-29
African and Asian Studies
12/1-2
1569-2108
African Studies
Asian Studies
collective memory
colonization
General
historical invention
Middle East and Islamic Studies
national identity
national memory
nation-building
Social Sciences
Ali A. Mazrui
10.1163/15692108-12341249
مطالعه متن کتاب p
[Article]
275578
a
Y
