758 Saidiya Hartman
and even those of the dead depend on such acts of remembrance. Yet how
best to remember the dead and represent the past is an issue fraught with
difficulty, if not outright contention.
The difficulty posed by the plaque’s injunction to remember is as much
the faith it bespeaks in the redressive capacities of memory, as the con-
fidence it betrays in the founding distinction or break between then and
now. For the distinction between the past and the present founders on the
interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath. How might we
understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not
only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased
happening? The point here is not to deny the abolition of slavery or to assert
the identity or continuity of racism over the course of centuries, but rather
to consider the constitutive nature of loss in the making of the African dias-
pora and the role of grief in transatlantic identification, especially in light
of the plaque’s behest that those returning find their roots, which is second
only to the desire that the dead rest in peace.
I attempt to grapple with these questions by examining the role of tour-
ism as a vehicle of memory, specifically tourist performances at Cape Coast
Castle and Elmina Castle in Ghana and at La Maison de Esclaves on Goree
Island, Senegal, and the ways in which the identifications and longings of
the tourist, the formulas of roots tourism, and the economic needs of Afri-
can states shape, affect, and influence our understanding of slavery and in
concert produce a collective memory of the past.
1
As the plaque intimates, to remember the dead is to mend ruptured
lines of descent and filiation. In this regard, remembrance is entangled with
reclaiming the past, propitiating ancestors, and recovering the origins of the
descendants of this dispersal. To remember slavery is to imagine the past as
the ‘‘fabric of our own experience’’ and seizing hold of it as ‘‘the key to our
identity.’’
2
And the belated return of the African-American tourist is fraught
with these issues. The fixation on roots reveals the centrality of identity not
only to the transactions of tourism, but in staging the encounter with the
past. Identification and bereavement are inextricably linked in this instance;
since the roots we are encouraged to recover presuppose the rupture of the
transatlantic slave trade and the natal alienation and kinlessness of enslave-
ment. Put differently, the issues of loss and our identification with the dead
are central to both the work of mourning and the political imagination of the
African diaspora.
3
And, for this reason, grief is a central term in the political
vocabulary of the diaspora.
