Memory and melancholia in the garden of tropical agronomy

Abstract

This article traces the processes of celebrating, forgetting, and reimagining the French Empire at the garden of tropical agronomy in Nogent-sur-Marne. Drawing from archival research, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and site observation, I consider why ruination has endured despite ongoing attempts to restore the site, and what is at stake in remembering the garden anew. Drawing from theories of national memory and postcolonial theory, I conceptualize the garden as a site of melancholia. Its ruination continues as a consequence of state bureaucracy, the role of the military, and its physical form. Sites of melancholia, I argue, present contested, multivocal, palimpsestic narratives that challenge national memory in two ways: first, by disrupting the relationship between past and present, and second, by foregrounding the racialized violence of the imperial project that gave rise to the contemporary nation. By unsettling the temporal and spatial idea of the nation, sites of melancholia pose a fundamental challenge to any cohesive narrative of national identity.

Make It Till You Break It: Toward a Typology of De‐Commemoration

“…Originating in a period in which states needed to consolidate themselves as communities (Anderson 1991) and forge a unitary national identity, archetypal architectural collective memory was mainly expressed through material commemoration in the form of “tangible, monolithic, recognizable, permanent, literally carved in stone” (Olick 2013:89). Unique historical emphasis was thus given to national and physical characteristics of official commemoration sites in public spaces, among them street names (Azaryahu 1996, 2021; Pinchevski and Torgovnik 2002), museums (Katriel 1997; Klein 2020; Noy 2015; Tinsley 2019), historical parks (Loughran et al. 2018), and cemeteries (Azaryahu 1995; Gabowitsch 2016; Guttel 2017; McElya 2016; Ozouf 1998), not to mention monuments, statues, and memorials that commemorate historical figures and events that were considered most important to the nation (Ben‐Amos 1993, 2000; Minta 2009).…”