Memory: More Than Recall 129Memory is a way to process information from the physical
environment, and it is a force that draws the world together. Due to the
limitations generated by the medical model, this chapter will explore
memory through the latter lens. Memory will be framed as personal
memory in dialog with a collective memory, both of which bear traces of
power from socio-political structures, cultural narratives and silences, and
ancestral knowledge. Memory is individual and collective, it is personal
and social, it is historical and it is not, it is acknowledged and contested,
and it is stable and fluid. This chapter will propose a different model of
memory through a critical approach that unpacks Western epistemological
assumptions, puts memory back into context, names multiple types of
memory, and finally explores memory as a site of social contestation and
transformation. The first step toward a more inclusive model of memory
requires engaging a critical decolonial framework to unpack
epistemological assumptions in the knowledge.
CRITICAL LENS: DECOLONIALITY
The processes of colonization that happened in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were accompanied by a revolution of thought in the
Western world. Colonization both sprang from these revolutions of thought
and deeply shaped them. The “Age of the Enlightenment” shows a shift
from basing knowledge upon religious beliefs toward basing knowledge
upon science (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). The shift to science was
imbedded with two core assumptions: that knowledge is both universal and
ahistorical. Universality can be seen in the three-phase memory model
where all humans have the same brain, ergo they will remember in the
same manner. Universality was believed to transcend the idiosyncrasies of
context (including history) to a more objective truth. Ahistoricity is present
in the three-stage model by stripping memory of a context. Ahistoricity
made the argument that certain realities were natural and therefore
timeless. Racialization being part of the natural order was the same type of
fact as the sun setting in the west. Racial inequalities did not enter into