Abstract
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the role of collective memory in ethno-national projects. In addition, there has been an expansion of research utilising memory work and auto/biographical methods, which have been particularly effective in the writing of feminists of colour. The paper is prompted by a return to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’ that it uses as a starting point to explore the relationships between competing accounts of ‘private’ memories of racialisation that come from mixed-race siblings growing up in a mainly white town. Drawing on interviews, the paper uses familial narratives and their individual telling, to show how sense is made of divergent experiences and memories of childhood and teenage in 1960s and 1970s Britain. The paper shows how narrative accounts are often negotiated through multiple senses, revealing them as both imagined and recalled, contested and negotiated. The paper considers the strengths and limitations of narrative analysis in understanding the relationship between individual and collective memories at both national and familial levels. It argues that the ways in which the social and personal memories are connected in the processes of subjectivation are unstable and opaque, and can only ever be partially known through the process of narrativisation.
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Notes
I use the term ‘subjectivation’ as used in Butler's work on subjection, following Foucault, in which she suggests that ‘No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or undergoing “subjectivation” ’ (Butler, 1997: 11). This term is often used inter-changeably with ‘subjectification’. The latter term appears in some places in the text, in keeping with its use by other authors cited.
We did not know any of my father's family and had a few close family members on my mother's maternal side with whom we had contact.
From interviews conducted in 1995.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers for their really helpful comments on the paper. I would also like to thank Carrie Friese, Sarah Franklin, and Ilina Singh for comments on an early draft.
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Ali, S. the sense of memory. Fem Rev 100, 88–105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.71
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.71