ABSTRACT
This chapter juxtaposes the political autobiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela alongside Jacques Derrida’s analysis of archives (Archive Fever) in order to argue that the monumentalizing effects of political autobiographies and archive projects, constructed to memorialize, concurrently produce the conditions for a kind of historical forgetting that has consequences for the present and future. Recognizing the tendency of the nation-state to forget its historical origins, the essay asks readers to see, in the transnational links between slavery, Jim Crow, Apartheid, the presidencies of both Obama and Mandela, and the rise of racism today, the politics of memory as organized amnesia.
