Abstract
Revised text of a lecture on the relationship between history and memory dedicated to the memory of Raphael Samuel and his book 'Theatres of Memory.' Psychoanalysis has much to contribute to the study of biographical history, but there are particular difficulties associated with the evaluation of unconscious motivations. The last writings of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm moved toward the inscription of remembered personal and family experience within a broader historical framework. The author further examines possible reasons for the apparently anomalous omission by great West Indian historian and thinker C. L. R. James of any analysis of the insurrectionary upheavals that were rocking the Caribbean during the very period when he was writing 'Black Jacobins' (1938), the life of revolutionary slave leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the pamphlet 'A History of Negro Revolt' (1938). The author compares the approach to the problem of historical consciousness adopted by James with that of another West Indian intellectual, George Lamming, and that of Frantz Fanon.