Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization / Edition 1

by Michael Rothberg

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804762182
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2009
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	824,482
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age 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 33

3 "Un Choc en Retour": Aimé Césaire's Discourses on Colonialism and Genocide 66

Part II Migrations of Memory: Ruins, Ghettos, Diasporas

4 W. E. B. Du Bois in Warsaw: Holocaust Memory and the Color Line 111

5 Anachronistic Aesthetics: André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips on the Ruins of Memory 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 175

7 The Counterpublic Witness: Charlotte Delbo's Les belles lettres 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 227

9 Hidden Children: The Ethics of Multigenerational Memory After 1961 267

Epilogue: Multidirectional Memory in an Age of Occupations 309

Notes 315

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

"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."

H-Net Reviews - Laura Levitt

"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)."

Berkeley - Debarati Sanyal

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

Illinois State University - Jonathan Druker

"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)."

Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies - Anne Whitehead

"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!"

Columbia University - Andreas Huyssen

"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)."—Anne Whitehead, Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies


"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."—Laura Levitt, H-Net Reviews


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


"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)."—Debarati Sanyal, University of California, Berkeley


"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!"—Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University

From the Publisher