ON THE REGISTERS OF CARIBBEAN MEMORY OF SLAVERY1

Abstract

From discourses elicited by the presence of a slave cemetery in Guadeloupe, the author distinguishes various registers of memory that offer a framework for understanding Caribbean identities. The absence of a meta-discourse is not seen as a vacuum or as a lack which would indicate the weakness of the collective ethos. Rather, it is interpreted through the multiplicity of narratives which replaces the Grand Narrative. This interpretation leads to a more empirically-informed constructivism trying to approach ‘mutiplicity’ on the basis of an account of what could be a multiple textual matrix. In time, this capacity to create several narratives is analyzed in relationship to a particular experience of power relations that has produced an alert critical consciousness which refuses to grant a meta-narrative any centrality and tends to create a multiply-segmented collectivity.

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