Melville and memory: Dark tourism, the carceral state, and radical pasts

The essay is mixture of first-person narrative, academic history and review, and essay-style analysis concerning the transnational elements of the Quebec separatist movement during the 1960s–1970s. The piece argues for greater attention to the dynamics of historical memory and narrative as a battleground in radical politics. It focuses on the case of Sam Melville a left-wing militant during the late 1960s who went on a bombing campaign in New York City before being imprisoned at Attica and murdered by the state during the squashing of the Attica Prison Riots in 1971. Melville, I argue, is a vanishing mediator in the story of the partnership between the Black Power insurgency in the United States and the Quebecois separatist and socialist insurgency in Canada, represented by the infrastructural bombings of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) between 1963 and 1972. Remarkably, Melville was taught how to make bombs by two Quebecois militants and fugitives who sought refuge with him in New York City through Black Panther Party connections. This story is a window into the history of transnational connections between leftwing movements during the 1960s and 1970s, but also how the security state-imposed techniques to fracture and silo narrative and historical memory.