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Autre Publication Scientifique Année : 2014

"Archives, Memory and 'Traces'. The Use of the Archives as Telling 'Something of the Past'

Christine Chivallon

Résumé

This paper seeks to question the status of archives as well as their epistemological and ontological possibilities in testifying on 'something of the past'. It develops a reflection that combines the results of an anthropological research that was done in Martinique on the memory of slavery, with the theoretical contributions of the Martiniquan writer, Édouard Glissant and the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur. Each one of them, using different means, offers to consider memory as the matrix of a historical condition. The 'traces' of living memory supplant the documents of archives by their capacity to give access to the marks that past and present events make on memorial expressions today. The descendants of insurgents, the protagonists of an anticolonial uprising that took place in Martinique in the 19th century, and who were the major characters of the research on the memory of slavery, make it possible to question these concepts in the situated field of memorial practices. Their experience is an indication of a memory attached to the "souvenirs" (memories) of the founding setting of violence, just as much as it shows how the access to archives gives the latter a new lease of life filled with subjectivity and emotions that it ought to isolate.
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Dates et versions

halshs-01071993 , version 1 (07-10-2014)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-01071993 , version 1

Citer

Christine Chivallon. "Archives, Memory and 'Traces'. The Use of the Archives as Telling 'Something of the Past'. 2014, 16 p. ⟨halshs-01071993⟩
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