Amnesia and the Nation

Vincent J. Cheng is Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English at the University of Utah, USA.  He is the author of many scholarly articles and books, including Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity; Joyce, Race, and Empire; and Shakespeare and Joyce.  His work addresses the intersections of postcolonial studies, race studies, twentieth-century literature, and contemporary culture.

“Cheng’s thoughtful, meticulously researched, and clearly articulated study has succeeded in bringing into sharp relief all the complexities-virtues and dangers-of both remembering and forgetting.” (Jolanta Wawrzycka, James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 57 (3-4), 2020)

• 1 Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination.- 2 The Nightmare of History and the Burden of the Past.- 3 The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses.- 4 The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration.- 5 Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes.- 6 Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing.- 7 Afterword.