Mal de Arquivo em Linden Hills

Abstract

In this article we examine Gloria Naylor’s novel Linden Hills, articulating the concepts of the neoarchive and the neo-slave narrative with the notion of archive as proposed by Derrida (2001) and developed by other authors (Osborne,1999; Bradley,1999; Johnson, 2014) with whom we seek to dialogue in this space. Linden Hills’s counterdiscursive narrative revisits the past by excavating the palimpsest of forgotten memories, once unidentified or not compiled, thus establishing its relationship to the neo-slave narrative. We argue that the link between the neo-slave narrative and the archive is both concrete and productive, given that it foregrounds non-sanctioned archives as counternarratives to the historical archive (mainly, but not exclusively, that of slavery), through the articulation of history and both personal and collective memory – calling to question, in this way, colonizing documented history and its official guardians.