Welcome to Morrison’s Re/Memory: A Material Recollection of a Collective Mental Landscape, a Griot Institute project at Bucknell University.
Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory, first introduced in her novel Beloved, captures the influence of the past, both physical and in feeling, on the present. Morrison interacts with and utilizes the past in her writing to comment and reflect on the present moment. What she reveals through this process is a past that retains physicality and maintains a material influence in the present. In keeping with Morrison’s method, this project investigates the transitory liminal contexts of space and place wherein the past and present communicate, conflict, and converge. In these contexts, the linearity of time crumbles, revealing the wounds of the past that are still gaping.
This project website will serialize Re/Memory research, publishing content on various facets of the overarching Morrison concept. The research aims to discover how the present responds to the past, focusing on the presence of colonial and racial histories in the physical and mental landscapes of our present day. We will look at local and global places that have retained a historical memory that interacts with or evades our present collective consciousness, from Antiguan sugar mills refurbished with new purposes to land and labor acknowledgments.
Within these material landmarks are haunted histories waiting to be recognized and remembered. In utilizing Morrison’s concept of rememory, the goal of this project is to recover the historical contexts of our modern spaces and their lasting influence, both conscious and unconscious, on the present.
The Re/Memory research project is created and run by Griot Institute Intern Ryleigh Roberts, a second-year graduate student in Literary Studies at Bucknell University.
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