Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Rothberg, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080476218X ISBN 13: 9780804762182

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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).

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).

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MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY

Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of DecolonizationBy Michael Rothberg

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6218-2

Contents

List of Illustrations........................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..............................................................................................................................xiii1 Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age...................................................................12 At the Limits of Eurocentrism: Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.............................................................333 "Un Choc en Retour": Aimé Césaire's Discourses on Colonialism and Genocide......................................................664 W. E. B. Du Bois in Warsaw: Holocaust Memory and the Color Line...........................................................................1115 Anachronistic Aesthetics: André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips on the Ruins of Memory...............................................1356 The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor.....................1757 The Counterpublic Witness: Charlotte Delbo's Les belles lettres...........................................................................1998 A Tale of Three Ghettos: Race, Gender, and "Universality" After October 17, 1961..........................................................2279 Hidden Children: The Ethics of Multigenerational Memory After 1961........................................................................267Epilogue: Multidirectional Memory in an Age of Occupations..................................................................................309Notes........................................................................................................................................315Index........................................................................................................................................365

Chapter One

Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age

Beyond Competitive Memory

In a characteristically provocative essay on the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism in contemporary America, the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels considers the seemingly incompatible legacies of slavery and the Nazi genocide in the United States:

Why is there a federally funded U.S. Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC? ... The difficulty of coming up with a satisfactory answer to this question has produced a certain exasperation among African Americans, memorably expressed by the notorious black racist Khalid Muhammad when, in the wake of a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he told an audience at Howard University on 3 April 1994 that "the black holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-called Jew Holocaust. You say you lost six million. We question that, but ... we lost 600 million. Schindler's List," as Muhammad put it, "is really a swindler's list." The force of these remarks consists not in the absurd Holocaust denial but in the point—made precisely by his visit to the Holocaust Museum—that commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews on the Mall was in fact another kind of Holocaust denial. Why should what the Germans did to the Jews be treated as a crucial event in American history, especially when, given the absence of any commemoration of American racism on the Mall, what Americans did to Black people is not?

In this passage Michaels takes up one of the most agonizing problems of contemporary multicultural societies: how to think about the relationship between different social groups' histories of victimization. This problem, as Michaels recognizes, also fundamentally concerns collective memory, the relationship that such groups establish between their past and their present circumstances. A series of questions central to this book emerges at this point: What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue?

Michaels's stance toward his example in his essay on anti-Semitism and racism is somewhat cagey; he acknowledges Muhammad's racism and the "absurd" nature of his Holocaust denial, yet he seems simultaneously to embrace a fundamental feature of Muhammad's argument. Like Muhammad, Michaels implies that collective memory obeys a logic of scarcity: if a Holocaust Museum sits on the Mall in Washington (or just off of it, as is the actual case), then Holocaust memory must literally be crowding the memory of African American history out of the public space of American collective consciousness. There are plenty of legitimate ways to engage critically with the fact and function of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there is certainly a great need to engage with the ongoing fact of American racism, but Michaels's argument begs some important questions: Does collective memory really work like real-estate development? Must the claims of memory always be calculated according to their relevance for national history? Is "commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews" really a form of "Holocaust denial"?

Although few people would put the matter in such controversial terms, many other commentators, both inside and outside the academy, share the understanding of memory and identity articulated by Michaels. This study is motivated by a sense of the urgency of the vexing issues that Michaels raises, but it challenges the widely held ideas about the nature of collective memory and its links to group identity that undergird Michaels's provocations. Like Michaels and, indeed, Muhammad, many people assume that the public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource and that the interaction of different collective memories within that sphere takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence. Because many of these same commentators also believe that a direct line runs between remembrance of the past and the formation of identity in the present, they understand the articulation of the past in collective memory as a struggle for recognition in which there can only be winners and losers, a struggle that is thus closely allied with the potential for deadly violence. While there can be no doubt that many manifestations of contemporary violence, including war and genocide, are in part the product of resentful memories and conflicting views of the past, I argue that the conceptual framework through which commentators and ordinary citizens have addressed the relationship between memory, identity, and violence is flawed. Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources-I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative. This shift in perspective allows us to see that while Muhammad and Michaels both speak of Holocaust memory as if it blocks memory of slavery and colonialism from...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 080476218X
• ISBN 13: 9780804762182
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 379
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland