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Dead Men on the Beach.
Chris Healy, Cultural Studies, Department of English, University of Melbourne
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c.healy@english.unimelb.edu.au
This paper examines two distinctive attempts at producing a cinematic mnemonics of colonialism in Jim Jamusch's Dead Man and Michael Riley's Empire . My argument is that these films productively elaborate and explore the repertoire available for postcolonial remembrance. Dead Man and Empire are significant in this paper for two reasons. Firstly, as cinema, these artefacts lead us away from understanding memory as a thing or a reified entity and toward considering remembering as multiply mediated processes constitutive of experience. Second, they direct us to postcolonialism as a problematic which, precisely because it has been an aporia at the heart of Europe, provides a significant resource to think beyond the historicism that underpins so much thinking about memory.
