“Different Men in Strange Times”: The Creation of Cultural Memory in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues

Utilizing Jan Assmann’s conceptualization of “cultural memory” as a critical tool, this essay explores the ways in which John A. Williams’s novel Clifford’s Blues serves as an iteration of the sociocultural phenomenon. It examines how Williams uses elements from slave narratives, letters, the journal, and music forms to reimagine the life of African American and gay jazz pianist Clifford Pepperidge after the expatriate is forced into the Dachau concentration camp during WWII. It asserts that Williams’s fictional creation of cultural memory through his novel critically documents an otherwise historically unacknowledged African diaspora of violence.