Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article undertakes a sustained critical examination of synergic echo as a constitutive force in postcolonial literature and cinema. Drawing on foundational memory studies scholarship — from Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora to Paul Connerton and Astrid Erll — alongside postcolonial theory as articulated by Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Achille Mbembe, the study argues that postcolonial cultural production is fundamentally organised around the politics of remembering and forgetting. Through close readings of canonical and emergent literary texts — including Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat — and cinematic works such as Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, Deepa Mehta's Earth, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, and Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah, the article traces how collective memory operates as a site of contested identity, trauma transmission, subaltern resistance, and counter-hegemonic archive-building. The analysis further attends to the gendered and diasporic dimensions of postcolonial memory, demonstrating that mnemonic processes are never politically innocent. The article concludes that postcolonial literature and cinema constitute what may be termed 'living archives' — dynamic, embodied, and contestatory repositories of memory that resist official nationalist historiography and imperial erasure alike. Keywords: synergic echo, postcolonial literature, postcolonial cinema, trauma, subaltern, counter-memory, archive, diaspora, identity
Institution: Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts and Science
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166450373