Memory and Complicity

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is the author of Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015) and The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006).

• Table of 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 Metier a 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

"A superb example of a new critical memory studies, Memory and Complicity does not eschew the dark sides of remembering atrocity. Sanyal's exposure of complicity - using World War Two France as a telling example, but applicable beyond this one case - is neither accusatory nor guilt-inducing. Instead, the acknowledgment of complicity becomes an inspiring call to action, change and repair for the future." -- -Marianne Hirsch author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust "Memory and Complicity is a very impressive book. Sanyal is unusually well acquainted with the relevant literature (which is extensive), her arguments are clear and compelling, her writing is unfailingly lucid and accessible, and her scholarship is beyond reproach." -- -Thomas Trezise Princeton University "Memory and Complicity offers a sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written account of the intersecting legacies of genocide and colonialism in postwar France. In this significant and much needed intervention, Sanyal illuminates both the possibilities and dangers of transcultural trauma and memory studies." -- -Michael Rothberg Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization