The Persistence of Memory

McCarter opens with Salvador Dali's 1931 painting and the curatorial language that has grown up around its soft watches, then uses the canvas as a way into a larger argument about memory and time. The essay moves through Proust (and the two English titles of his novel), the memory arts of classical rhetoric, Donna Haraway on scientific storytelling, and Foucault's subjugated knowledges, asking what memory can do that reason and official history cannot.

The core claim is that memory, though ideologically charged like everything else, is charged differently: it has not been passed through the machinery that certifies something as fact, and so it can push back against the state's version of the past. Drawing on Marx, Benedict Anderson's imagined communities and Paulo Freire, McCarter argues that a collective memory is the first step toward a history for any oppressed group, and toward action.

It is a long, footnoted piece in the journal's critical-essay strand, posted in July 2019 and tagged for the 2020 issue.

William Matthew McCarter has published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and Midwestern Gothic, and is the author of the academic book Homo Redneckus: On Being Not White in America.