ABSTRACT
This chapter narrates the historical 'Westernisation' of heritage memory and the challenges made to this discourse as it is confronted by an 'othering' identified as an 'Africanist turn'. It has subversive attitudes toward 'reading' literary texts and a preoccupation with oral and memorising practices. Underpinning the chapter is a need to apprehend more clearly 'heritage memory' as a 'performative moment', a space of uncanny encounter with ancestors and as a destabiliser of temporalities. These ways of addressing Derrida's 'testimony of memory' in turn allow us to move beyond Classical traditions of Aristotelian memory concepts, Platonic theories of repetition, and an accompanying Kantian cosmopolitics. Derrida's critical strategy of 'taking on a tradition' begins with an insistence on the 'duties' and 'responsibilities' of intellectuals and practitioners to de-construct the 'heritage' by returning to the 'testimony of memory' and to 'origins' and 'founding concepts'.
