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a global art scene. Mntambo defines herself as existing between several worlds, and yet refuses to be located in one particular identity. Her "figures" are the result of a process of casting the hide over molds of her own body and her mother's body. They carry visible traces of the artist's process: of nicks, incisions, marks made by the strings that attached them to molds, and of the time taken to dry. The material itself remembers the shape of a body that remains necessarily absent. In this article I will explore the idea of m e m o ry within the contemporary discourse of African art as a possible rubric for the work of interpretation . On one hand I set out to demonstrate how readings of art objects, both contemporary and precolonial, based on "memory" attempt to speak outside of a strictly semiotic approach that more often than not takes its cues from an anthropological desire to fit work into the framework of a single cultural identity.2 On the other hand, I will show how ideas of "memory" across cultures are often inherently tied to materiality, thus providing a way of approaching the particular materiality of Mntambo's practice, in terms of both process and medium. Memory as Practice The return of memory to critical fashion seems in many ways particular to recent books on "African" art, whether concerning the contemporary or that which falls somewhere between anthropological and art object. Their definitions of memory are shot through with the idea of memory not as fixed, but as fluid, contingent, and performed. In their book Memory—Luba Art and the Making of History, Mary and Allen Roberts note: "Memory is not passive . . . [r]ather memory is a dynamic social process of recuperation, reconfiguration and outright invention."3 In their introduction to Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, editors Lambek and Antze argue that memory is a practice intrinsically linked to identity, history, and culture by the very metaphors that describe it. I would argue that from the earliest Western treatises on art of memory, these metaphors tie memory to materiality, process, and erasure. Frances Yates shows that mnemonic devices of ancient rhetoricians seek to preserve memory for the purpose of oration through an association of images and places, or loci.4 The metaphor becomes telling when the art of memory is likened to an "inner writing," where the places of memory "are like wax tablets which remain when what is written on them has been effaced and are ready to be written on again."5 Much of our modern scientific understanding of memory is outside of this classical sense of rhetorical art, medicalized by Freudian psychoanalysis. However, even Freud's own writing is complicated by several notions of memory.6 Freud's Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad considers memory as that mental mechanism that mediates the transfer of sense experience from perception to consciousness, from where it finally enters the unconscious. Once again he employs an analogy to writing and erasure. The Mystic Writing Pad is a slab of "dark brown resin or wax over which is laid a thin transparent sheet consisting of two layers, the upper a transparent piece of celluloid , the lower a thin translucent waxed paper." Using a stylus, one is able to make marks resembling "writing" or "drawing" where the wax paper sticks to the bottom layer. These are just as easily erased by simply lifting the sheet again. What is important about this object, which has recurred in various contemporary if more synthetic imitations , is that while the "surface of the Mystic pad is clear of writing . . . it is easy to discover that a permanent trace of what was written is retained on the wax slab."7 In both instances, classical rhetorical and Modern psychoanalytic, memory is described in terms of something physical, whether a "trace" or a "place," attributed with permanence, yet subject to inevitable erasure. While these physical attributes of memory remain at the level of analogy, what is interesting is that they begin to engage the idea of memory as intrinsically tied to materiality and process. The Material of Memory In his chapter titled "Medium...

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