Collective Memory in the Diaspora as Represented in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips and Small Island by Andrea Levy

The current study seeks to investigate how Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips and Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy engage with what is known today as postcolonial counter-discourse to show how colonialism, slavery and racism shape the collective memory of African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora. It is also significant to understand how such a process allows both writers to use tangible or intangible forms of collective memory as tools in representing, reassessing and documenting the diaspora history from the perspective of the oppressed other. Moreover, a chance will be given to understand how they abrogate/dismantle essentialist hegemonic Western assumptions through collective forms of remembrance in multicultural contexts. In that sense, the analysis will draw on the concept of collective memory as defined by Maurice Halbuach, Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt's description of memory as a powerful agent of change and Pierre Nora's sites of memory to explore how the diaspora characters remember or deal with their colonial past and its aftermath beyond their national borders. The study concludes that the process of memory recovery and transmission from one diasporic generation to the other, as representative subjects of multiple movements and dwellings, resulted in acquiring problematic senses of belonging due, in large part, to the pervasiveness of ethnic and racial oppression in the new world. At this stage, each diasporic member would consider such traumatic social environments as their premise to define and select what should be remembered or forgotten from a past marked with constant transformations. This selectivity is triggered by their impossible return to a place once called home in their collective diasporic consciousness.