| Contents |
Introduction -- Chapter One: A Soccer Match in Auschwitz : Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies -- From Primo Levi's Gray Zone to Giorgio Agamben's Shame -- Traumatic Complicity -- From Paradigm to Figure : Rereading the Gray Zone as Allegory -- Chapter Two: Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus -- Figural Contagion and Historical cordon sanitaire : The Plague -- Memory and Migration : Reenvisioning Algeria -- Concentrationary Circulations : Le Métier à tisser and Night and Fog -- Figure as Archive : Reading The Fall with Auschwitz and Algeria -- History's Endless Cry : Allegory Unbound in The Fall -- Chapter Three: Auschwitz as Allegory : From Night and Fog to Guantanamo Bay -- An Aesthetics of Complicity -- Allegory, Ruins, and History -- The Transcultural Politics of Concentrationary Memory -- Colonial Countermemories : Night and Fog in Thiaroye -- Coda: From Postwar France to Guantanamo Bay -- Chapter Four: Crabwalk History : Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre -- Chapter 5: Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones -- Memory's Manufacture : The "Complicity Effect" of a Perpetrator's Testimony -- Itineraries of Trauma and Tourism -- Imperial Lanscapes : Intersections of Colonialism and Genocide -- Chapter Six: Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror : Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal -- Urban Palimpsests and the Claims of Memory in Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg -- Against Identification : Bad Education, Trauma, and Citizenship -- Holocaust Memory, Gray Zones and the War on Terror : Boualem Sansal's Le Village de l'Allemand -- Afterword. |
| Scope and content |
"Discusses the transcultural uses of Holocaust memory in literature, cinema and theory in the French-speaking world from the postwar years to contemporary times. Examines the political force and ethical perils of complicity and practices of historical remembrance"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Scope and content |
"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"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| LCCN | 2014040668 |
| ISBN | 9780823265473 hardcover alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 0823265471 hardcover alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 9780823265480 paper alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 082326548X paper alkaline paper |
