Title: Remembering Marley : a portrayal of the reggae superstar in Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 1, pp. [167]-184
Extent
[167]-184
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-1-10
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/138674
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The article reads Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) as an example of a literary text functioning as a public memorial. For the Jamaican society, a cult figure whose image is well established in cultural memory and perpetuated through acts of remembrance is Bob Marley. Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, which revolves around an attempted assassination of Marley in December 1976 and its socio-political context, builds a composite picture of the singer, interweaving fragments of numerous interior monologues of the novel's characters-narrators. The scattered information passed to the reader via the opinions of diverse personae, shows Marley as a person, artist and symbol. James's book may be recognized as an agent of remembrance, implanting in its readers a certain vision of past events and Marley's legacy, especially if we recognize the text's strategies to transmit memories and, following Ann Rigney, view the novel as a "portable textual monument".
References
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[4] Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[5] Cooper, Carolyn (1995) Noises in the Blood. Orality, Gender, and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
[6] Coser, Lewis A. (1992) Introduction: Maurice Halwachs 1877–1945. In: Halbwachs, Maurice (ed.) On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–34.
[7] Crewe, Jonathan (1999) Recalling Adamastor: Literature as cultural memory in 'White' South Africa". In: Bal, Mieke, Crewe, Jonathan and Spitzer, Leo (eds.) Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 75–86.
[8] Douglas, Edward Te Kohu and Ian Boxill (2012) The lantern and the light. Rastafari in Aotearoa (New Zealand). In: Barnett, Michael (ed). Rastafari in the New Millennium: A Rastafari Reader. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 35–65.
[9] Erll, Astrid (2011) Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[10] Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney (2006) Literature and the production of cultural memory: Introduction. European Journal of English Studies 10(2), 111–115. | DOI 10.1080/13825570600753394
[11] Goldman, Vivien (2006) Dread, beat and blood. The Guardian, 16 July 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jul/16/urban.worldmusic. Accessed on 26 Oct. 2016.
[12] Goody, Jack (1993) The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[13] Halbwachs, Maurice (2007) The collective memory. [trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter]. In: Rossington, Michael and Anne Whitehead (eds) Theories of Memory: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 139–143.
[14] Havelock, Erick A. (1986) The Muse Learns to Write. Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
[15] Higgins, Dalton (2010) Fatherhood 4.0. iDad Applications Across Cultures. Toronto: Insomniac Press. http://www.bobmarley.com/history
[16] Huyssen, Andreas (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London and New York: Routledge.
[17] Huyssen, Andreas (2000) Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia. Public Culture 12(1), 21–38.
[18] James, Marlon (2015) A Brief History of Seven Killings. London: Oneworld Publications.
[19] Landsberg, Alison (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
[20] Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel (2000) Dangerous memories, underdevelopment and the Bible in the colonial Caribbean experience. In Gossai, Hemchand and Nathaniel S. Murrell (eds.) Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave, 9–35.
[21] Ong, Walter J. (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge.
[22] Rigney, Ann (2004) Portable monuments: Literature, cultural memory and the case of Jeanie Deans. Poetics Today 25(2), 361–396. | DOI 10.1215/03335372-25-2-361
[23] Salewicz, Chris (2010) Bob Marley.The Untold Story. London: Harper Collins.
[24] Wainwright, Elaine M. (2010) Introduction. In: Culbertson, Philip and Elaine M. Wainwright (eds.) The Bible in/and Popular Culture. A Creative Encounter. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1–9.
[25] White, Timothy (2006) Catch a Fire. The Life of Bob Marley. London, New York, Sydney: Omnibus Press.
[26] Whitehead, Anne (2009) Memory. London and New York: Routledge.
[27] Winter, Jay (2001) The memory boom in contemporary historical studies. Raritan 21(1), 52–66.