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Commemoration and Counter-Memory: ‘The Genocide Series’

ABSTRACT At the end of his monumental work Lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora finds himself baffled by the paradox that the critical work of counter-memory has been overtaken by the obsession with commemoration. This paper will explore this paradox, and bring an analysis of new critical literary work to bear on the demand for commemoration. Firstly, I will show Nora's elided premise – namely the correspondence of the structure of narrative with the logic national imaginings – in order then to spell out the consequences of the disintegrating framework of the nation for memory and testimony organised in narrative form. It is only on this basis, I would contend, that we can understand the way in which lieux of memory come to the fore as and at new historiographically disconnected sites that inform a social rather than historical consciousness. I will then attempt to investigate new ‘writerly’ work pertaining to testimony of genocide in the Central African region, in which narrative is de-structured, and places/sites attain a critical organising role. Finally, I will analyse a story by South African writer Ivan Vladislavić, ‘Curiouser’, which, through its own aesthetic reflexivity, critically elucidates and exceeds the implications of mediated memorial spatialisations for ‘genocide-tourism’.