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1 - My Memories of Our Forgetfulness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2023

Hamid Dabashi
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

This chapter is a detailed recollection of aspects of my birth and upbringing as a platform to think through the theoretical issues of memory and history and amnesia and loss. The dialectic between memory and forgetfulness here becomes the plane of authorial subjection. I explore a detailed exposure of how polyphonic voices become definitive to such recollections. As I recall such flashes of my early childhood, I realize in recounting the memories of our childhood that we are drafting entirely different, imperceptible, otherwise forgetful accounts of history – a history that has in fact not left its traces, as Gramsci had surmised, in us in cognitive and transcendental terms but in entirely fleeting and emotive terms on a plane of immanence that is in need of detection and discovery. Every shared memory, a memory I share and one that, in turn, triggers my readers’ similar memories, initially provokes a social, political, or cultural event beyond the reach of such memories, and as such it becomes a microcosm of something larger, something other than itself. But that is not all that there is to such memories. In fact, such allusions might be an impediment to a much more precious discovery. This triggering may first suggest itself as the social history of childhood, which we eventually lose in our adulthood, but every single such memory is also the microcosm of something other than itself, something other than history, something larger, more immanent, and thus, soon we realize what appears as social history is in fact an emotive history, a worldly history pointing to an ethereality other than itself, marking the moment when the world was being born anew, piece by piece, when we as a child for the first time realized there is a larger world, of which we had little to no awareness, over which we had no control.

Type
Chapter
Information
An Iranian Childhood
Rethinking History and Memory
, pp. 12 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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