Palimpsestic Memory

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of palimpsestic memory, which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Max Silvermanis Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He has written on cultural memory, representations of the Holocaust, post-colonial theory and cultures, and immigration, race and nation in France. His recent publications includeConcentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnaiss Night and Fog, co-edited with Griselda Pollock (Berghahn Books, 2011).

Introduction: Staging Memory as Palimpsest

Chapter 1. The Politics and Poetics of Memory

1.1 The Concentrationary Universe and Total Domination
1.2 The Politics of Memory: Between the Holocaust and Colonialism
1.3 The Poetics of Memory
1.4 Interconnecting Memories

Chapter 2. Concentrationary Memory

2.1 Fearful Imagination
2.2 Alain ResnaissNuit et brouillard
2.3 Mémoire-monde

Chapter 3. Anti-colonialism Revisited

3.1 Frantz Fanon:Peau noire masques blancs
3.2 Mohammed Dib:Qui se souvient de la mer
3.3 Assia Djebar:Femmes dAlger dans leur appartement

Chapter 4. Colonial Hauntings of the Holocaust Imaginary

4.1 Charlotte Delbo:Auschwitz et après
4.2 Georges Perec:W ou le souvenir denfance
4.3 Patrick Modiano:Dora Bruder

Chapter 5. The Memory of the Image

5.1 Jean-Luc Godard:Histoire(s) du cinéma
5.2 Michael Haneke:Caché
5.3 Un montage qui ne sépare rien

Chapter 6. Memory Traces

6.1 Hélène Cixouss Pieds nus and Jacques DerridasLe Monolinguisme de lautre, ou le prothèse de lorigine
6.2 Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi:Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne

Chapter 7. Cosmopolitical Memory

Bibliography
Index