“(Re)envisioning the African Diaspora: Historical Memory and Cross-fertilization in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone.”

Nemata Blyden, “(Re)envisioning the African Diaspora: Historical Memory and Cross-fertilization in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone,” in Paradoxes of History and Memory in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone, ed. Sylvia Ojukutu-Macauley and Ismail Rashid (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 59-76."This anthology reflects the complex processes in the production of historical knowledge and memory about Sierra Leone and its diaspora since the 1960s. The processes, while emblematic of experiences in other parts of Africa, contain their own distinctive features. The fragments of these memories are etched in the psyche, bodies, and practices of Africans in Africa and other global landscapes; and, on the other hand, are embedded in the various discourses and historical narratives about the continent and its peoples. Even though Africans have reframed these discourses and narratives to reclaim and re-center their own worldviews, agency, and experiences since independence they remained, until recently, heavily sedimented with Western colonialist and racialist ideas and frameworks. This anthology engages and interrogates the differing frameworks that have informed the different practices—professional as well as popular–of retelling the Sierra Leonean past."