Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Michael Rothberg

Published by Stanford University Press 2009

Multidirectional Memory

Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Michael Rothberg

In the series Cultural Memory in the Present

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804783330

Overview
Contents

About this book

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.

Author / Editor information

Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000).

Reviews

Jonathan Druker:
"Ground-breaking book . . . Thanks to Rothberg, we are able to engage more thoughtfully with our knotted past— and with our tangled future, too."

Laura Levitt:
"The book fleshes out a powerful genealogy for multidirectional memory as well as a more sustained account of how, more specifically, Holocaust memory and colonial memory come together in France around the legacy of the Algerian War."

Anne Whitehead:
"Rothberg's study is published in the prestigious 'Cultural Memory in the Present' series, and will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on memory studies and related fields . . . [I]t is to be hoped that Multidirectional Memory will inspire further recuperation of 'forgotten' works, and accompanying reassessments of the political entanglements of writers positions (and positionings)."

Debarati Sanyal, University of California:
"Multidirectional Memory is a pathbreaking work of interdisciplinary scholarship that will reconfigure the fields of Holocaust Studies and post-colonial theory. Rothberg's powerful study of the relations between Holocaust memory and decolonization illuminates the 'multidirectional' orientation of collective memory through half a century of transnational cultural production in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and North Africa (with an emphasis on postwar France)."

Andreas Huyssen:
"This is the first book to take up the transnational and cross-disciplinary politics of memory in ways adequate to the difficulties and pitfalls of the topic. In its readings of theoretical and literary texts primarily from the 1950s and 1960s, it confronts the Holocaust with decolonization, successfully questioning the 'color line' separating these two discourses today. Deft in argument and subtle in its analyses, Rothberg's book provides an exciting new direction for memory studies in the humanities and in social thought. A compelling read!"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
1. Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Boomerang Effects: Bare Life, Trauma, and the Colonial Turn in Holocaust Studies
2. At the Limits of Eurocentrism: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. “Un Choc en Retour”: Aimé Césaire’s Discourses on Colonialism and Genocide Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
Part II. Migrations of Memory: Ruins, Ghettos, Diasporas
4. W. E. B. Du Bois in Warsaw: Holocaust Memory and the Color Line Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5. Anachronistic Aesthetics: André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips on the Ruins of Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Part III. Truth, Torture, Testimony: Holocaust Memory During the Algerian War
6. The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
7. The Counterpublic Witness: Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Part IV. October 17, 1961: A Site of Holocaust Memory?
8. A Tale of Three Ghettos: Race, Gender, and “Universality” After October 17, 1961 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
9. Hidden Children: The Ethics of Multigenerational Memory After 1961 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Epilogue: Multidirectional Memory in an Age of Occupations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	315
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 408
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 10

eBook

Published: June 15, 2009
ISBN: 9780804783330