ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how Robertson negotiates the shared border between history and fiction, with literature becoming a key medium through which historical memory is recovered and interpreted. The chapter stands at the cross section of a number of important literary currents. Graeme Macdonald considers the recovery of the memory of colonial slavery in Joseph Knight to form part of a stream in which modern Scottish writers mount a historically informed critique of Scotland's current neo-imperial role in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Knight, like Wedderburn, struggles to retain the memories that constitute his life story. This struggle to secure a personal narrative serves as a fitting conclusion for this volume, which has analysed the processes of collective memory and amnesia that form the national stories that we feed ourselves and suggested new ones that might free our histories for future flowerings.
