Memory and Complicity : Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance / Debarati Sanyal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sanyal, Debarati, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature.

Colonies in motion pictures.

Colonies in literature.

French fiction--French-speaking countries--History and criticism.

French fiction.

French fiction--History and criticism.

France--Intellectual life.

France.

French-speaking countries--Intellectual life.

French-speaking countries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect based discourses of trauma, shame and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work?As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

1. A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

2. Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus

3. Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay

4. Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre

5. Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

6. Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal

Afterword

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-331) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780823265480

082326548X

9780823266722

0823266729

9780823265510

082326551X

9780823265503

0823265501

OCLC:

904033583