Five Years and Count(er)ing: Memoir after Memoir. Issue 1 (April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bugeja, Norbert
• Is Part Of: CounterText. Volume 6:Issue 1(2020:Apr.)
• Page Start: 26
• Page End: 32
• Publication Date: 2020-04
• Subjects: memoir -- Bardo National Museum -- Postcolonial Springs -- reformism -- memory -- Arab uprisings -- Tunisia; English literature -- 21st century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Culture -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; 820.9
• DOI: 10.3366/count.2020.0180
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2056-4406

Abstract

Abstract : In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs ) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of 'articulacy-in-difficulty' active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.