Concern with the politics and techno-mnemonic strategies of remembering permeates
a range of disciplines, public debates and epistemic fields. It might be
claimed that only within an extremely narrow, even parochial, definition of
what constitutes memory could one argue that memory-work is not on the colonial
studies agenda. Surely the scholarly study of colonialisms is itself a memory
project, as has been the intensive analytic work on postcolonial subjectivity.
I4 Issues of "memory" have played an increasingly prominent role in how
students of colonialism understand the relationship between the facts of the
colonial archive and ethnographically elicited historical knowledge, between
archival production and the politics of its cons~mpt ion,b'~et ween a particular
set of memory aids-manuscripts, metaphors, bodies and objects-and how
this stored knowledge may be appropriated by formerly colonized populations
for their needs today.