Multidirectional memory : remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization

✍ Scribed by Rothberg, Michael

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 379
• Series: Cultural memory in the present
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. In particular, Multidirectional Memory highlights how ongoing processes of decolonization and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.

Rothberg engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers, including Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, Charlotte Delbo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marguerite Duras, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and William Gardner Smith.

✦ Table of Contents

Content: Introduction : theorizing multidirectional memory in a transnational age --
Boomerang effects : bare life, trauma, and the colonial turn in Holocaust studies --
At the limits of Eurocentrism : Hannah Arendt's The origins of totalitarianism --
"Un choc en retour": Aimé Césaire's discourses on colonialism and genocide --
Migrations of memory : ruins, ghettos, diasporas --
W.E.B. Du Bois in Warsaw : Holocaust memory and the color line --
Anachronistic aesthetics : André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips on the ruins of memory --
Truth, torture, testimony : Holocaust memory during the Algerian War --
The work of testimony in the age of decolonization : Chronicle of a summer and the emergence of the Holocaust survivor --
The counterpublic witness : Charlotte Delbo's Les belles lettres --
October 17, 1961 : a site of Holocaust memory? --
A tale of three ghettos : race, gender, and "universality" after October 17, 1961 --
Hidden children : the ethics of multigenerational memory after 1961 --
Epilogue : multidirectional memory in an age of occupations.

✦ Subjects

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Historiography. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. Decolonization -- Historiography. Decolonization in literature. Collective memory. Collective memory in literature. HISTORY / Europe / Western Historiography. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) in literature.