Mnemopoetics: Memory and Slavery in African-American Drama

From its very beginning, African American drama has borne witness to the creative power of the slaves to maintain their human dignity as well as to fashion a complex culture of survival. If the memory of slavery has always been at the heart of the African American theatrical tradition, it is the way in which it is processed and inscribed that has developed and is still changing. Through the close reading and socio-historical analysis of eight plays from 1939 to 1996, the author seeks to unravel the fluctuating patterns in the shaping of the theatrical memory of slavery long after its abolition. To do so, she defines the concept and practice of mnemopoetics as the making of memory through imagination as well as the critical approaches that decipher and interpret cultural productions of memory. As a constellation of processes akin to the fluidity of memory, mnemopoetics blends creative representation and critical exploration to suggest that the cultural creation of memory necessarily entails a self-reflexive involvement with its own interpretation. If slavery embodies the deep, foundational memory of America, African American drama represents the open, communal space where it becomes possible to convert the irretrievable nature of a vicarious past into the redeeming function of a collective memory.

The Author: After graduating from Liège University in 1995, Valérie Bada started her doctoral research at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American at Harvard University under a Belgian American Educational Foundation and Francqui Fellowship. She worked as an assistant on the Du Bois Slave Trade Database project under the supervision of Prof. David Eltis. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Liège in 2003 thanks to a Junior fellowship from the National Fund for Scientific Research - Belgium (FNRS) and has been working as a FNRS post-doctoral researcher since 2005.