Multidirectional Memory : Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Michael Rothberg

ISBN 10: 080476218X / ISBN 13: 9780804762182

Published by Stanford University Press Jun 2009, 2009

About this Item

Neuware - 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.

Seller Inventory # 9780804762182

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Multidirectional Memory : Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
• Publisher: Stanford University Press Jun 2009
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080476218X
• ISBN 13: 9780804762182
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 230W x 151H x 29D millimeters 230 millimeters width by 151 millimeters height by 29 millimeters depth
• Weight: 601 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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).