A Street Named Bissette: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Cent-Cinquantenaire of the Abolition of Slavery in Martinique (1848-1998)

In a confused way, he felt that the truth was located somewhere between the rather unrealistic radicalism of those who pushed the “it’s a black thing” argument and the ecumenicalism, itself rather impracticable, of those who made a case for the “little homeland of Martinique” and the “big homeland of France.” But how to find a name for this in-between condition? What term to assign it?

—Raphael Confiant, L’archet du colonel

Rather than being evidence of the breakdown of logic, or of low-grade hypocrisy, our ability to hold contrary opinions, to be of “two minds,” is really a practical solution to the difficulties of dealing with complex environments. It is a mark of our flexibility and evidence of our multiplicity that we accept new ideas without evicting our old “tenants.”

—Christopher Dewdney, Last Flesh

As the millennium comes to a close, our postmodern age turns back with an obsessively nostalgic longing to a past that might anchor its endless semiotic and cultural drift in something solid that does not melt into air. Fredric Jameson’s now canonical denunciation of this compulsive reinscription of the past, “the insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode,”¹ is shared by many. The Mexican cultural critic Néstor Garc�a Canclini speaks, for instance, of how the desire for commemoration is a “compensatory practice” especially suited for an “epoch in which we doubt the benefits of modernity, [and in which] temptations mount for a return to some past that we imagine to be more tolerable.”² Positing the negative, if dangerously seductive, powers of this nostalgic “colonization” and associating it with such things as the bad faith of postmodernism or the puerile lure of cultural essentialism, these critics nonetheless also take for granted the need to establish a relationship to the past that would be free of nostalgia. We see this need expressed in Jameson’s definition of nostalgia, for instance, when he characterizes it as “an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way” (21). Nostalgia thus diverts us from a positive and active experience of history—from what I will here be calling memory. We need (such critics argue) to retrieve and secure a real sense of the past precisely in order to combat its nostalgic simulacra; thus, for instance, Garc�a Canclini hastens to add that pointing out the “compensatory” dimension of commemorations is not to deny “the need for commemorative ceremonies of founding events, which are indispensable for giving density and historical roots to the contemporary experience of any group” (112). The critique of nostalgia thus grounds itself in an appeal to the apparently “indispensable” need for historicity, for “historical roots.”

The opposition between nostalgia and memory is absolutely central to recent theorists of Atlantic identity, who pitilessly critique false representations of and affiliations with the past while at the same time holding out the possibility—and the “need”—for a truer remembering of that past. Paul Gilroy, in his seminal The Black Atlantic, vociferates loudly against nostalgic recuperations of the past, the “ornate conceptions of African antiquity,” the “mystical and ruthlessly positive notion of Africa” put forward by Afrocentrics; he berates “the active reinvention of the rituals and rites of lost African traditions,”³ in the same way that Jameson accusingly points his finger at various manifestations of the “nostalgia mode.” Against such illusions, Gilroy adopts a genealogical perspective that “striv[es] to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilising flux of the post-contemporary world” (101). And yet, despite its...