Sakiru Adebayo’s Continuous Pasts and the Challenge of Postcolonizing Memory Studies: Three Musings

Abstract

This article offers three musings on Sakiru Adebayo’s Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, focusing specifically on the challenges and prospects of centering African histories, cultures, and epistemologies in mainstream memory studies. Through a reading of Continuous Pasts, the article contests the marginality of African and Afrodiasporic memory cultures in memory studies, and makes a case for the affordances of “ancestral memory” in articulating a uniquely African and global Black diasporic memory practice.