Memory and melancholia in the garden of tropical agronomy

摘要

This article traces the processes of celebrating, forgetting, and reimagining the French Empire at the garden of tropical agronomy in Nogent-sur-Marne. Drawing from archival research, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and site observation, I consider why ruination has endured despite ongoing attempts to restore the site, and what is at stake in remembering the garden anew. Drawing from theories of national memory and postcolonial theory, I conceptualize the garden as a site of melancholia. Its ruination continues as a consequence of state bureaucracy, the role of the military, and its physical form. Sites of melancholia, I argue, present contested, multivocal, palimpsestic narratives that challenge national memory in two ways: first, by disrupting the relationship between past and present, and second, by foregrounding the racialized violence of the imperial project that gave rise to the contemporary nation. By unsettling the temporal and spatial idea of the nation, sites of melancholia pose a fundamental challenge to any cohesive narrative of national identity.