Still, the treatment of memory in colonial studies has developed in relation
to specific political concerns, and thus in particular ways. Some of these, we
would suggest, bypass important insights about the "fragile power" of memory
emerging among those who study it more specifically.17 The storage model,
captured in Locke's metaphor of memory as a "storehouse of ideas," has long
been discredited.l8 Yet those who study the colonial often unwittingly hold to
a variant of it: to memory as a repository of alternative histories and subaltern
truths. We call this variant a "hydraulic model," for it rests on the premise that
memories are housed as discrete stories awaiting an audience, repressed or unrecognized
sources poised to be "tapped