Intersectional Cultural Memory as Memory Activism in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise

Cultural memory concerns the question of how we remember, and cultural memory studies examines the collective frames and cultural narratives that shape our individual remembering. This article examines the potential of intersectionality as a mode of cultural and collective remembering in Michelle Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise (1993) and suggests that the novel is an attempt to rewrite US cultural memory, and particularly the history of the US Civil War, from a memory activist perspective. This article argues that Cliff’s novel presents a narrative process that complements documented and foundational US cultural memory frames. While intersectionality has been gainful in the exploration of identities and social structures, this article specifically seeks the analytic potentiality of the application of intersectional cultural memory studies at a symbolic level. Free Enterprise offers an intersectional rewriting of the history of slavery and the US Civil War by centering the powerful activism of women, people of color, disabled people, and queer people, turning the reimagining of US cultural memory into memory activism.