| This dissertation is an attempt to refine as a theoretical tool Pierre Nora's notion of les lieux de memoire, or "the sites of memory." Because they bridge gaps between cultural studies, history, and literary theory, such sites challenge more traditional ways of thinking about history and memory. The idea of the site of memory is compelling because it offers a way of exploring the sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing playfulness of memory, a play that has at root a relatively familiar slippage from memory to place, from events rooted in our experiences of time to those expressed as experiences in space. Site/sight: where we put it, how we see it (or the myriad ways we see without seeing---hauntings, specters, and uncanny repetitions); site/cite: where we find it (the dig site, the grave, the Middle Passage), how we express it, or how loss informs or structures experience---citationality.;It is in the name of the site of memory that some fear haunted houses and others lament never having received their forty-acres, or that still others are compelled to cite the dead or to site space in the name of transformational politics. It is in the interest of a site of memory that Langston Hughes could attempt to displace the trauma of the Middle Passage through an enunciatory invocation of immortal rivers, or that his contemporary, Countee Cullen, could find in such invocations an occasion for melancholy. It is as an evocation of a site of memory that Toni Morrison could transform history into a ghost, or that Jean Toomer, with Cane, could memorialize his sense of the South's passing. With such examples in mind, Event Horizons offers illustrations of how haunting, displacement, and ghostliness are endemic to modern African American literature. |
