African cultural memory in Fred Khumalo’s Touch my blood and its metafictional para-texts

Abstract

This article gleans its momentum from Ronit Frenkel’s palimpsestic observation that the local and the global exist as “coeval discourses of signification in South African transitional literature,” with the intention to push the boundaries set in a recent issue of the Journal of Black Studies that carried a literature-inspired title, “Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” by Zhou Quan. The latter prompted a consideration whether a peculiarly South African literary representation of cultural memory is possible or not, or whether it is monolithic or multiplicitous. Therefore, partly in response, I introduce the transcendent idea of allochthonous memory, taking my cues from Molefi Kete Asante’s Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge where he elucidates that the Afrocentrist “seeks to uncover and use codes, paradigms, symbols, motifs, myths, and circles of discussion that reinforce the centrality of African ideals and values as a valid frame of reference for acquiring and examining data” (p. 6). One such paradigm is Allochthonous memory, which is here defined as a configuration of cultural memory that finds expression in references that are simultaneously intertextual, transnational, transcultural, and ethical.