Towards a Black Cultural Memory

Abstract

The article explores how Black people in Belgium have sought meaningful engagement with their history, culture, and identity to create a shared cultural memory, and vice versa: how Black people’s engagement with a shared cultural memory has formed a collective, Afro-diasporic identity and culture. To illustrate how Black identities take shape beyond personal histories, cultures, and memories, I conceptualize a memory framework called Black Cultural Memory (BCM), giving insight into Black people’s interconnected identity constructing/maintaining embodied culture, and shed light on how social media, memory and Black people’s lives interact by discussing how cultural memory is shaped, sharpened and inquired through Black people’s contemporary digital engagement. Examining the memory practices and discoursers of Belgian Renaissance, New Awoken African Generation, and #BLMbelgium, I illustrate how digital platforms helped these initiatives to shape and distribute notions of collective blackness, which ultimately connects them to a global Afro-diaspora culture.