Literary Remembrance as Resistance: Memory, Gender, and Archive in Oyeyemi's Parasol Against the Axe

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jor.2025.397138.2663

چکیده

This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague as a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. Drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters— constitutes an ethical mode of witnessing that resists narrative closure, insisting instead on the value of inhabiting unresolved historical absences as part of feminist remembrance. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure.

کلیدواژه‌ها

موضوعات

عنوان مقاله [English]

Literary Remembrance as Resistance: Memory, Gender, and Archive in Oyeyemi's Parasol Against the Axe

نویسندگان [English]

  • Sajjad Gheytasi
  • Eran Rajabi
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran
چکیده [English]

This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague as a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. Drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters— constitutes an ethical mode of witnessing that resists narrative closure, insisting instead on the value of inhabiting unresolved historical absences as part of feminist remembrance. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • Helen Oyeyemi
  • cultural memory
  • feminist archival theory
  • historiographic metafiction
  • palimpsest

مراجع

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پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
دوره 31، شماره 2
خرداد 1405
صفحه 227-246

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