ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a posthuman paradigm for queer memory. It starts by showing that most available models for conceptualizing memory, whether in the queer temporalities tradition or in memory studies (notions such as post-, prosthetic, or multidirectional memory) take for granted the self-contained humanness of the subject of memory but do not consider memory processes where recalling is trans-corporeal, trans-subjective, distributed, and intricately intertwined in its material and technological contexts. In order to be able to imagine such forms of memory, the chapter proposes a model based on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of system (in Difference and Repetition) and José Muñoz’s concept of “the brown commons.” It then applies the notion of a “brown memory commons” to the analysis of a number of recent films and multi-media works where memory features prominently (Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6, Jenni Olsons’s The Joy of Life, Wu Tsang’s Wildness, and Aimar Pérez Galí’s Touching Blues) in order to show the productivity of the model and its aptness for rethinking the politics of memory in a horizon of radical hybridity and post-human interconnectedness.
