Remembering Jonestown through the camp and the postcolony: A multidirectional reading of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise

Abstract

This article explores the contribution of Fred D’Aguiar’s 2014 novel Children of Paradise to the conflicted memorialization of the 1978 Jonestown tragedy, where over 900 American citizens lost their lives in the Amazonian interior of Guyana. It argues that in his fictional revisitation of the massacre, D’Aguiar explores Jonestown as a multidirectional site of memory. By placing the tragedy in a historical and conceptual continuum that encompasses different forms of subjugation, including colonialism and its legacy in the post-independence Caribbean, but also totalitarianism and Nazi rule, the author gives Jonestown a global resonance that enlarges its significance, challenges understandings of it as a historical anomaly and enhances the humanity of its victims, revealing linkages between seemingly disparate developments and memories. The discussion draws on the theoretical insights provided by Michael Rothberg, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others.