Learning to Reconoc(eR): Rememorying as Collectively Engaged Literary Praxis

• In Event: Rememorying With Picture Books in the Formation of New Diasporic Literary and Anticolonial Caribbean Knowledges

Abstract

In this presentation, we will engage participants in a conversation on (re)memories as theory for decolonial literary interpretation. We seek the complexity and nuance of our collective/individual experiences (Tuana, 2017), discussing how we engaged with (re)memories related to our positionalities as Caribbean brothers and sisters who experienced literary orphanhood as we engaged in a process we call Reconoc(eR). We then invite participants to reflect on their own moments of reconocimiento through their previous engagements with texts. We will engage in this practice with participants in the service of epistemic justice, to assert our capacity as knowers within our intersecting gendered, racialized, marginalized identities as we (re)produce, (re)engage, and (re)member in service of decoloniality and healing collectively through texts.
At the heart of our work is Rhee’s (2020) concept of (re)memory, which entails a process of both forgetting and remembering at once; “Rememory is fluid with the past, present, and future…The remembering and the forgetting allow a different kind of thinking and enacting research, perhaps more bold and open to different possibilities” (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 406). Bharucha (2021) adds that “a re-memory is not just self-discovery, it is bigger in dimension. It moves outside the minds of the persons who are ‘re-membering’ and assumes an almost physical shape out there in the world. Re-memory can also refer to shared traumas such as slavery…or indentured labour…. Re-memory can thus be related to not just the private but to public or even national spaces” (pp. 149).
For us, our (re)memories stem from the stories, experiences, and individual/collective traumas experienced by our ancestors, brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, and ourselves. We encounter these (re)memories through our engagement with Afrocaribbean children’s picture books, crossing spatial, historical, and time boundaries as we read texts and see images that encompass physical (re)memories and force us to break with normalized forms of racialized, colonial literary engagement (Morrison, 1993). This process of (re)memory creates possibilities to remember what we know and how we know collectively as we re-member, or put ourselves together (Yu et al., 2022).
From engaging in the process of (re)memory, we began to Reconoc(eR). The word Reconoc(eR), a palindrome that nos provoca, brings out or triggers in us a particular way of naming, reengaging and producing stories about the past, present and future, reflecting the multiple directions and ways in which our collective process of sense making and sensing nos invita (invite us) to move across time, realities, geographies, languages, and identities. It is through this process of Reconoc(eR) that we will engage participants in dialogue and action, inviting them to disrupt conditions of invisibility and impossibility stemming from coloniality, imperialism, and white supremacy. We argue literature that sustains transnational ties between the Caribbean and the diaspora through children and youth literature and literacies can evoke (re)memories that provoke readers to Reconoc(eR), to name, reengage and produce stories to put ourselves together and heal.

Author

• Astrid Nicholl Sambolín Morales, Kent State University
  Presenting Author