Screen Memory - Department of English

South Africa, the writer Njabulo Ndebele was hopeful that “the
narratives of memory” which are brought forth will help establish
a more truthful understanding of the history of apartheid.
The dynamics and therapeutics of counter-memory are most
brilliantly presented by Toni Morrison in her slavery novel,
Beloved, as it works to create new national memory, to provide
(quoting Catherine Hall) its share of the “‘memory work’ which
which needs to be done so that African Americans and white
Americans can recover the history of slavery and understand its
foundational place in the construction of the United States”
(31). In the novel, the black community is scattered by
suffering, so “disremembered and unaccounted for,” that the story
to be passed on “is not a story to pass on”; if it is not re-
remembered, Morrison suggests, “it will haunt and disrupt
contemporary society” (Morrison 274-5 and Hall 31).
Truth and reconciliation hearings like those in South Africa
have also been held in Chile and Serbia. And these line up with
current philosophical interest in the ethics of memory: memory as
an act of justice, because, as Christa Wolf says in her memoir, A
Model Childhood, “memory is not a solid block fitted into our
brain once and for all; rather, perhaps–-if big words are
permitted–-a repeated moral act”(143).. In his Ethics of Memory,
Avishai Margolit considers the inscription in our ethical code of
an absolute obligation to remember. Regarding the Holocaust,
Margolit asks if we also have an obligation to forgive and if
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