This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they
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and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street
cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed
into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial
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cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such
a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs -
Kristeva’s genotext and phenotext; Freud’s melancholy and
mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy - I demonstrate that this
ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a
cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.
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