The weight of memory: Memory frictions in contemporary literature, a review

Resumen

Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature is a valuable contribution to memory studies that calls for a transformation of trauma studies from those with a focus on Euro-American events to a different kind where the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture is considered. As María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, the volume’s editors, indicate in the introduction, this is a book about “the frictions and tensions of remembering and forgetting in contemporary memory studies” (7). The compilation also raises questions on the possible forthcoming representations of such memory (6-7).

The volume is composed of fourteen chapters divided into 4 parts that, according to Robert Eaglestone, deal with the relationship between memory and politics, memory and trauma, and in a more subtle way, memory and ethics, following the postcolonial debate on memory studies (277). The authors discussed in the volume are from diverse countries and cultures, amongst them Native American, Australian, Burmese American, Cuban American, South Korean American, US American, British, Irish and African American. To study the texts the contributors apply a plurality of critical perspectives such as ethics, postcolonial studies, space theories, narratology, feminism, gender studies, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, etc. Finally, the issues the volume explores in relation to “‘memory’” are of very different natures, from history to identity, religion, justice,grief, mourning, vulnerability, melancholia, etc., which have all recently become themes of critical interest.