A Multidisciplinary Inquiry through the Dumas Archive

Abstract

This monograph investigates a phenomenon that is presently unfolding in the world and that the human sciences do not yet have a complete view of: the systematic, multi vectorial, and continuing erasure of Afro descended and other racialized historical actors from the official memory of Western nation states. The phenomenon is real, observable, and measurable in archives, school curricula, public space, and digital retrieval systems. Yet none of the disciplines that touch it, historiography, sociology, anthropology, critical race studies, memory studies, and archival science, has produced a unified, predictive account of how erasure operates, how it survives its own exposure, and how late reparative gestures, such as the 2002 Panthéonization of Alexandre Dumas, interact with the very mechanisms they purport to correct.