Is there a future in Cultural Memory?

The ‘problem’ of cultural memory in America, the historical co-presence of racism, prejudice, and imperialism alongside the narrative of equality, due process, and rugged individualism. These parallel trajectories of exclusion and liberty make it impossible for our nation to “go on” as Cheng points out. The problem of cultural memory finds resonance in Fanon’s notion of the black individual’s imprisonment within a “closed circuit” formed by the inescapable persistence of colonial history. This speaks to that fact that both American white identity and black identity, function through melancholy. Who has the agency in these double binds between exclusion and retention, denial and consumption?

Moreover, How does our previously discussed notion of searching for a future by recognizing and incorporating its emergence from the past and present, function as an answer to our ruthless determination to both forget and affirm out nations racial/political/social history? What role does the future play ( future as progress, future as process, future as the post racial society) within a collective identity that operates melancholically?