Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Overlaying Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies, Rothberg (English, U. of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign) reconstructs relations between at least three primary archives that span transnational cultural spaces. He reads formations of black Atlantic and French-Algerian contact zones across and through diasporic Jewish history in order to revise thinking about collective memory and its relation to group identity. Among his topics are Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism at the limits of eurocentrism; Holocaust, memory and the color line with W. E. B. Du Bois in Warsaw; and the October 1961 massacre of demonstrating Algerians by Paris police as a site of Holocaust memory. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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.
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.