ABSTRACT
The fact that narratives of self require the construction and enactment of histories condensed around “collective memories” and centering questions of identity and privileging identity politics, suggests that “[t]ime, history, and memory become qualitatively different concepts in a world where electronic mass communication is possible.”1 In consideration of the ways spatially and temporally located subjectivities have been translated into narratives of self in community, it is helpful to look to Paul Virilio’s concept of the tele-topological space of mediated images. However, rather than simply decrying identity politics writ large, we can to formulate critical questions that highlight both the delimiting dangers and the social urgency inherent to political positions grounded in narratives of historical (re)memory like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Mario Van Peebles’ Panther and Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa. In the next chapter, we will begin the detranslation-retranslation process by examining these films, looking closely for the possibilities they produce and the limitations they impose. For now, however, we will explore how the critical approaches taken up thus far raise questions about African-American practices of historical reconstruction as a form of historical (re)memory and intrapsychic retranslation. More particularly, the power these visual narratives wield in the formation of
identity calls attention to the implications that obtain from the fact that one’s narrativized images of self “figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious.”
