Placing Memories: Which Histories Are (De-)Thematized at Memory Sites in Ghana and Brazil?

Between Alamo (Texas, USA), Chichen Itzá (Yucatán, Mexico) and the thematization of slavery in (a planned) Disneyland: Michel-Rolph Trouillot often takes a concrete historical site as point of departure for his arguments on “power and the production of history”. He concludes that “in order to engage” him, history “could not just be The Past. It had to be someone's past” (2015: 142). And Michael Rothberg has emphasized that “sites of memory do not remember by themselves – they require the active agency of individuals and publics” (2010: 8).

Following these strands of thought – emphasizing that memory sites need people to attribute meaning to them in the present – I will present different memory sites in Ghana and Brazil that address the history of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. The paper is based on fieldwork and analyses carried out under the project “Individual and collective memories of slavery and the slave trade: A contrastive comparison of different communities, generations and groupings in Ghana and Brazil” (funded by the German Research Foundation, 2022-2025). I will discuss the following questions: Who is addressed by the respective site? Who is in charge of the narrative? And – often related to the former two questions – which parts of the history are (de-)thematized at this site?

• Rothberg, Michael. 2010. “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Noeuds de Mémoire.” Yale French Studies (118/119): 3–12.
• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.