Oral History Review Advance Access originally published online on July 3, 2009
Oral History Review 2009 36(2):177-187; doi:10.1093/ohr/ohp039
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Diasporic Memories: Community, Individuality, and Creativity—A Life Stories Perspective
Mary Chamberlain was Professor of Caribbean History at Oxford Brookes University. She was one of the pioneers of oral history, with her study of rural women in England, Fenwomen (1975). Since then she has published widely on women's history, oral history, and, most recently, on twentieth-century Caribbean history, in particular on migration and families. Recent relevant publications include Narratives of Exile and Return (1997, 2004), Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience (2006), and Culture, Migration and Nation: Barbados and Empire 1937–1966 (forthcoming, 2010). She has also edited Caribbean Migration: Globalised Identities (1997), (with Paul Thompson) Narrative and Genre (1997, 2004), and (with Harry Goulbourne) Caribbean Families in Britain and the Transatlantic World (2001). She has held visiting professorships at New York University and the University of the West Indies, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a founding and former principal editor of Memory and Narrative, and has served on a number of advisory and editorial boards, as consultant to the Barbados Government's National Oral History Project (1999), and as a member of the United Kingdom Government's Caribbean Advisory Group (1998–2002). E-mail: marychamberlain{at}blueyonder.co.uk
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Abstract |
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Can we talk of a collective, diasporic memory? I will argue that in the case of the African-Caribbean community, there are distinctive features—such as the need to tell and the need to connect—which suggest that this diasporic memory is framed through identifiable cultural templates, which distinguish it from the memories of migrants.
Keywords: Caribbean, diasporic, memory, shame, slavery