from: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering

the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1-29, notes 315-322.

Introduction: Theorizing
Multidirectional Memory
in a Transnational Age

Beyond Competitive Memory

In a characteristically provocative essay on the relationship between

racism and anti-Semitism in contemporary America, the literary critic
Walter Benn Michaels considers the seemingly incompatible legacies of
slavery and the Nazi genocide,in the United States:
Why is mere a federally funded U.S. Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Wash-
ington, DC? ... The difficulty of coming up with a satisfactory answer to this
question has produced a certain exasperation among African Americans, memo-
rably expressed by the notorious black racist Khalid Muhammad when, in the
wake of a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he told an audience at
Howard University on 3 April 1994 that L(the black holocaust was IOO times worse
than the so-called Jew Holocaust. You say you lost six million. We question that,
but ... we lost 600 million. Schindler's List:' as Muhammad put it, "is realty a
swindler's list." The force of these remarks consists not in the absurd Holocaust
denial but in the point-made precisely by his visit to the Holocaust Museum-
that commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews on the Mall was in fact an-
other kind of Holocaust denial. Why should what the Germans did to the Jews be
treated as a crucial event in American history, especially when, given the absence
2 Introduction Introduction 3

of ?-ny commemoration of American racism on the Mall, what Americans did to assume that the public sphere in which collective memories are articulated
Bl~~k people is not?) is a scarce resource and that the interaction of different collective memories
within that sphere takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence.
In this passage Michaels takes up one of the most agonizing prob~ems ?f
Because many of these same commentators also believe that a direct line
contemporary multicultural societies: how to think about the ~elatlOnshlp
runs between remembrance of the past and the formation 'of identity in the
between different social groups' histories of victimization. ThIs problem,
present, they understand the articulation of the past in collective memory
as Michaels recognizes, also fundamentally concerns collective memory,
as a struggle for recognition in which there can only be winners and losers,
the relationship that such groups establish between their past and. their
a struggle that is thus closely allied with the potential for deadly violence.
present circumstances. A series of questions central to this book emerges
While there can be no doubt that many manifestations of contemporary
at this point: "What happens when different histories confront each other
violence, including war and genocide, are in part the product of resentful
in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others
memories and conflicting views of the past, I argue that the conceptual
from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against
framework through which commentators and ordinary citizens have ad-
memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies, must
dressed the relationship between memory., identity, and violence is flawed.
a competition of victims ensue? . ..
Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive
Michaels's stance toward his example in his essay on antl-SemltlSm
memory~as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resollrces-I suggest that we
and racism is somewhat cagey; he acknowledges Muhammad's racism
consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation,
and the ('absurd)} nature of his Holocaust denial, yet he seems simulta-
cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative. This
neously to embrace a fundamental feature of Muhammad's argumen.t.
shift in perspective allows us to see that while Muhammad and Michaels
Like Muhammad, Michaels implies that collective memory obeys a logic
both speak of Holocaust memory as if it blocks memory of slavery and
of scarcity: if a Holocaust Museum sits on the Mall in Washington (or
colonialism from view (the model of competitive memory), they actually
just off of it, as is the actual case), then Holocaust memory must literal~y
use the presence of widespread Holocaust consciousness as a platform to
be crowding the memory of African American history out of the publIc
articulate a vision of American racism past and present. This interaction
space of American collective consciousness. There are plenty of legitimate
of different historical memories illustrates the productive, intercultural
ways to engage critically with the fact and function of the U.S. Holoca~st
dynamic that I call multidirectional memory.
Memorial Museum, and there is certainly a great need to engage wIth
In focusing on the politics of commemoration, Michaels criticizes
the ongoing fact of American racism, but Michaels's argum~nt begs some
the role memory plays in public discourse about the past and its impact
important questions: Does collective memory really work lIke real-es~ate
on the present. As its title indicates, this book also places memory at the
development? Must the claims of memory always be calc~lated accordm~
center of analysis, although it adopts a less skeptical position toward its
to their relevance for national history? Is "commemoration of the NaZI
object of study than does Michaels. But what is memory? And why does
murder of the Jews" really a form of "Holocaust deniar>?
it feature so prominently in this book? These are crucial questions. that I
Although few people would put the matter in such controversial
will return to below and throughout this study. The literature on memory
terms, many other commentators, both inside and outside the academy,
is enormous and continues to grow at a staggering rate-a growth that has
share the understanding of memory and identity articulated by Michaels.
itself become an object of studyF For now, let me note the useful mini-
This study is motivated by a sense of the urgency of the vexing issues that
malist definition from Richard Terdiman that orients this book: memory
Michaels raises, but it challenges the widely held ideas about the nature of
is the past made present. The notion of a "making present" has two im-
collective memory and its links to group identity that undergird Michaels's
portant corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon,
provocations. Like Michaels and, indeed, Muhammad, many people
4 Introduction Introduction 5
something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present; elements of alterity and forms of commonality with others. OUf relation-
and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or ship to the past does partially determine who we are in the present, but
action. 3 As Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche write, "Memory [is] a sym- never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or
bolic representation of the past embedded in social action"; it is "a set of even unwanted consequences bind us to those whom we consider
pracrices and interventions."4 Multidirectional Memory considers a series other. When the productive, intercultural dynamic of multidirectional
of interventions through which social actors bring multiple traumatic memory is explicitly claimed, as it is in many of the cases I discuss in this
pasts intO a heterogeneous and changing post-World War II present. book, it has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions
Concerned simultaneously with individual and collective memory, this of justice.
book focuses on both agents and sites of memory, and especially on their The understanding of collective remembrance that I put forward
interaction within specific historical and political contexts of struggle and in Multidirectional Memory challenges the basic tenets and assumptions
contestation. Making memory the focus of this work allows me to synthe- of much current thinking on collective memory and group identity.
size concerns about history, representation, biography, memorialization, Fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is a notion of the
and politics that motivate many scholars working in cultural studies.) Not public sphere as a pregiven, limited space in which already-established
stricdy separable from .either history or representation, memory nonethe- groups engage in a life-and-death struggle. In contrast, pursuing mem-
less captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side and ory's multidirect10nality encourages us to think 9£ the public sphere as
the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past. a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate es-
In both its individual and collective versions, memory is closely tablished positions but actually come into being rh1'Ough the iT dialogical
aligned with identity, one of the most contested terms in contemporary interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are
debate. What is the relation between memory and identity? As readers open to continual reconstruction. Equally fundamental to the concep-
familiar with the writings of Walter Benn Michaels will know, his pur- tion of competitive memory is the notion that the boundaries of memory
pose in propounding an implicit theory of competitive memory is not parallel boundaries of group identity, as we've seen with Michaels and
in any way to valorize memory or collective identity. Indeed, much of Muhammad. As I struggle to achieve recognition of my memories and
Michaels's work has offered a thoroughgoing critique of both memory and my identity, I necessarily exclude the memories and identities of others.
identity and what he sees as the straight line that connects them in mu- Openness to memory's multidirectionality puts this last assumption into
tual confirmation. This attitude certainly differentiates him from Khalid question as well. Memories are not owned by groups-nor are g1'OUpS
Muhammad, who enters the arena of competitive memory in order to "owned" by memories. Rathe~, the borders of memory and identity are
stake out a claim for a militant black identity. My perspective differs from jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a
both of these polarized positions. Unlike Michaels, I don't see all claims borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign
of memory or identity as necessarily tainted; instead, I see such claims as or distant. Memory's_ anachronistic quality-its bringing of now
necessary and inevitable. But unlike Muhammad, I reject the notion that and then" here and there-is actually the source of its powerful creativity,
1
identities and memories are pure and authentic-that there is a "we and ' its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones. Finally,
a "you" that would definitively differentiate, say, black and Jewish identi- those who understand memory as a form of competition see only winners
ties and black and Jewish relations to the past. I from both of these and losers in the struggle for collective articulation and recognition. But
positions because I two central assumptions that they share: that attention to memory's multidirectionality suggests a more supple social
a straight line runs from memory to identity and that the only kinds of logic. The struggle for recognition is fundamentally unstable and subject
memories and identities that are therefore possible are ones that exclude to ongoing reversal, as Hegel recognized with his famous "Master/Slave
6 Introduction Introduction 7

dialectic": today's "losers" may turn out to be tomorrow's "winners," and which I return below). I also demonstrate the more surprising and seldom
«winning" may entail learning from and adopting the rhetoric and images acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in rela-
of the other. Generally speaking, moreover, the examples of multidirec- tion to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. Here,
tional memory explored here are much too ambivalent and heterogeneous we can observe that Michaels's and Muhammad's staging df Holocaust
to reduce too quickly to questions of winning and losing-which is not memory in competition with the memory of slavery, colonialism, and rac-
to say that there is little at stake in articulations of collective memory, for ism is also not accidental. As a series of case studies treating intellectuals
quite the contrary is true. and artists ranging from Hannah Arendt and W. E. B. Ou Bois to French
In order to J.cmonstrate the stakes of the past in the present, anticolonial activists and experimental documentarians will demonstrate,
Multidirectional Memory takes remembrance of the Holocaust as its para- early Holocaust memory emerged in dialogue with the dynamic transfor-
digmatic object of concern. Michaels's and Muhammad's choice to stage mations and multifaceted struggles that define the era of decolonization.
the problem of the stakes of memory and identity in relation to the Nazi The period between I945 and 1962 contains both the rise of consciousness
genocide of European Jews is not accidental. Indeed} there is probably no of the Holocaust as an unprecedented form of modern genocide and the
other single event that encapsulates the struggles for recognition that ac~ coming to national consciousness and political independence of many of
company collective memory in such a condensed and global form. While, the subjects of European colonialism. B This book argues that far from
as historians have demonstrated in multiple national contexts, public being an arbitrary conjunction of two separate histories, this observation
Holocaust memory only emerged belatedly as a widespread collective form, about the early postwar period contains an important .insight into the
the last half-century· has seen such memory move toward the center of dynamics of coI1ecrive memory and the struggles over recognition and
consciousness in many Western European, North American, and Middle collective identity that continue to haunt contemporary, pluralistic societ-
Eastern societies-and significant inroads have been made throughout the ies. The fact that today the Holocaust is frequently set against global his-
rest of the world as well~he spread of Holocaust memory and conscious~ tories of racism, slavery, and colonialism in an ugly contest of comparative
ness across the globe sets the stage for and illustrates perfectly the multidi~ victimization-as is the case in Muhammad's infamous speech and in the
rectional dynamic I draw attention to throughout this book? I argue that pronouncements of many «defenders" of the Holocaust's uniqueness-is
far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive part of a refusal to recognize ,the earlier conjunction of these histories that
struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global I explore in Multidirectional Memory. But the ordinarily unacknowledged
scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories-some of them history of cross-referencing that characterizes the period of decolonization
predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, continues to this day and constitutes a precondition of contemporary dis-
such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) or the genocide in course. The virulence-on all sides-of so much discussion of race, geno-
Bosnia during the 1990S. Because of the Holocaust's salience to the rela- cide, and memory has to do, in other words, partly with the rhetorical and
tionship of collective memory, group identity, and violence, an exploration cultural intimacy of seemingly opposed traditions of remembrance.
of its ongoing public evocation in multiple national contexts stands as the
central example of this book's exploration of multidirectional memory.
From Uniqueness to Multidirectionality
But multidirectional memory, as its name implies, is not simply a
one-way street; its exploration necessitates the comparative approach I
One of the major stumbling blocks to a recognition of the interac-
adopt here. My argument is not only that the Holocaust has enabled the
tions that take place among collective memories is the belief that one's
articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it
own history, culture, and identity are «a separate and unique thing," to
has been declared «unique" among human-perpetrated horrors (a point to
adopt a phrase that W. E. B. Ou Bois uses critically and that I discuss
8 Introduction Introduction 9
further in Chapter 4. This is especially true when it comes to thinking specificity of the Nazi genocide (as of all events), separating it off from
about the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Along with its «centering" other histories of collective violence-and even from history as such-is
in public consciousness in the last decades, the Holocaust has come to intellectually and politically dangerous. The dangers of the uniqueness
be understood in the popular imagination, especially in Europe, Israel, discourse are that it potentially creates a hierarchy of suffering (which is
and North America, as a unique, sui generis event. In its extremity, it is morally offensive) and removes that suffering from the field of historical
sometimes even defined as only marginally connected to the course of agency (which is both morally and intellectually suspect).H This critique J
human history. Thus, Elie Wiesel' has written that "the Holocaust tran- of uniqueness discourse undergirds Michaels's and Muhammad's com-
scends history," and Claude Lanzmann has claimed that "there is an un- plaints about the place of the Holocaust in U.S. public culture.
breachable discrepancy" between any of the Holocaust's possible histori~ Despite their obvious intellectual and political differences, however,
cal causes and the ultimate unfolding of the events.9 Even arguments for many proponents and critics of uniqueness share the model I'm calling
uniqueness grounded in history sometimes tend toward ahistorical hyper- competitive memory: that is, both groups tend to understand memory
bole. In an essay that seeks to differentiate rhe Nazi genocide from "the of the Holocaust as taking part in a zero-sum game of competition with
case of the Native Americans," "the famine in the Ukraine" under Stalin, the memory of other histories. Thus, on the one hand, the proponents
and "the Armenian tragedy," Steven Katz argues that the "historically and of uniqueness assiduously search out and refute all attempts to compare
phenomenologically unique" character of the Holocaust ensures that the or analogize the Holocaust in order to preserve, memory of the Shoah
Nazi genocide will differ from «(every case said to be comparable to» it. 1O from its dilution or relativizadon. Deborah Lipstadt, one of the leading
Initially, asserting the uniqueness of the Holocaust served to counter the scholars studying Holocaust denial, suggests links between those who
relative public silence about the specificity of the Nazi genocide of Jews in relativize the Holocaust through comparison and analogy and those who
the early postwar period that many historians of memory and students of deny its very existence; both groups, she argues, blur the "boundaries be-
historiography have described. Such assertions thus played a crucial role in tween fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor."12 Blurring
fostering understanding of the genocide and generating acknowledgment is also the concern of literary critic Richard Golsan. In a discussion of
and study of its horrific parriculal'ities and traumatic legacies. Although the trial of Maurice Papon, a French police secretary-general during the
one of my purposes in Multidirectional Memory is to complicate this view Vichy period who will playa key role in this book, GoIsan worries that
of the early years of silence by drawing attention to articulations of Holo- comparison between French complicity in the deportation of Jews and
caust memory that have remained absent from the standard corpus, I cer- French persecution of Algerians during decolonization, which Papon was
tainly agree that in the first postwar decades there was a necessity to asser- also involved in, "could only deflect the focus from the Vichy past and,
tions of the Holocaust's specificity. more significant, blur the specificity of the Final Solurion."13 On the other
But, even if understanding of that specificity has not become uni- hand, critics of uniqueness or of the politics of Holocaust memory often
versal today (and what historical understanding ever does?), by the time argue, as do Michael and Muhammad, that the ever-increasing interest
Wiesel, Lanzmann, and Katz were writing, acceptance of the uniqueness in the Nazi genocide distracts from the consideration of other historical
of the Holocaust was widespread. At the same time that this understand- tragedies. For instance, in his study of the creation of the U.S. Holocaust
ing of the Nazi genocide emerged, and in direct response to it} intellectu- Memorial Museum, Edward T. Linenthal expresses a concern that "of-
als interested in indigenous} minority, and colonial histories challenged ficial Holocaust memory may also function as a 'comfortable horrible'
the uniqueness of the Holocaust and fostered research into other histories memory, allowing Americans to reassure themselves that they are engag-
of extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Many of these lat- ing profound events, all the while ignoring more indigestible events that
ter intellectuals have argued that) while it is essential to understand the threaten Americans' sense of themselves more than the Holocaust."14 In
IO Introduction Introduction II

one of the more extreme versions of this argument, David Stannard asserts model functions something like what Michel Foucault, in the introduc-
that the uniqueness argument «willingly provides a screen behind which tion to his History ofSexuality, calls «the repressive hypothesis." Foucault
opportunistic governments today attempt to conceal their own past and argues that the popular notion of sexual prohibition in the Victorian age
ongoing genocidal actions."15 should not be made "into the basic and constitutive element" in a history
There is, of course, some truth in both of these views. Relativization of sexuality because "negative elements" were "only component parts that
and banalization of the Holocaust do take place, although perhaps more have a local and tactical role" within a larger incitement and dissemina-
frequently at the hands of a culture industry that seeks to exploit its cur- tion of discourses on sexuality.19 Similarly, I would argue that the negative
rency than among marginal or oppositional intellectuals and activists. elements of the competitive memory hypothesis are only component parts
Conversely, undue stress on the singularity of the Holocaust at the ex- of a larger dissemination of memory discourses.
pense of its similarities with other events can block recognition of past An overly rigid focus on memory competition distracts from other
as well as present genocides, if not generally with the full intentionality ways of thinking about the relation between histories and their memorial
implied by Stannard. The fact of such a blockage of recognition is one of legacies. Ultimately, memory is not a zero-sum game. 20 Instead of memory
the lessons of Samantha Power's convincing study :4 Problem from Hell': competition, I have proposed the concept of multidirectional memory,
In summing up her account of American response to the threat and actu- which is meant to draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take
ality of genocide in the twentieth century, Power writes that "perversely, place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.
Americas public awareness of the Holocaust often seemed to set the bar Thinking in terms of multidirectional memory helps explain the spiraling
for concern so high we were able to tell ourselves that contemporary interactions that characterize the politics of memory-the fact, borne out
genocides were not measuring Up."16 Memory competition does exist and by Muhammad's reference to the «black holocaust," that the use of
sometimes overrides other possibilities for thinking about the relation be- Holocaust as a metaphor or analogy for other events and histories has
tween different histories. emerged precisely because the Holocaust is widely thought of as a unique
The existence of such contradictory and intractable positions on the and uniquely terrible form of political violence. 21 Assertions of uniqueness
uniqueness of the Holocaust suggests that the controversy is not an em~ thus actually produce further metaphorical and analogical appropriations
pirical, historical one. Rather, as Fredric Jameson has argued with respect (which, in turn, prompt further assertions of uniqueness). However, such
to the related and more general issue of historical periodlzation, such con- moments coexist with complex acts of solidarity in which historical mem-
troversies always tUfn on the deployment of narratives, and not on facts ory serves as a medium for the creation of new communal and political
that can be objectively adjudicated: "The decision as to whether one faces identities. It is often difficult ro tell whether a given act of memory is more
a break or a continuity-whether the present is to be seen as a historical ,likely to produce competition or mutual understanding-sometlmes both
odginality or as the simple prolongation of more of the same under differ- seem to happen simultaneously. A model of multidirectional memory
ent sheep's clothing-is nor an empirically justifiable or philosophically allows for the perception of the power differentials that tend to duster
arguable one, since it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the around memory competition, but it also locates that competition within
perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated."I? If the place a larger spiral of memory discourse in which even hostile invocations of
and status of the Holocaust is not determined purely through recourse to
the historical archive, as Jameson's argument implies, then getting beyond
memory can provide vehicles for further, countervailing commemorative
acts. The model of multidirectional memory posits collective memory
J
deadlock characteristic of the uniqueness debates requires thinking as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and
about the work of memory and representation-the consequential arenas acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together di-
in which narrative acts shape understanding. IS The competitive memory verse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites. While I hold that understanding
12 Introduction Introduction I3

memory as multidirectional is ultimately preferable to models of compe- particular> he asks why «the content of some people's earliest memories
tition, exclusivity, and exceptionality, I also consider cases in this book consists of everyday impressions that are of no consequence and could not
where memory's multidirectionality functions in the interests of violence have affected the child emotionally, but were nonetheless noted in copious
or exclusion instead of solidarity. detail ... whereas other, roughly contemporaneous events are not remem-
bered, even though the parents testify that the child was profoundly af-
fected by them at the time."25 Pursuing networks of associations between
Rethinking Screen Memory the particularities of a memory and other events in an individual's life,
Freud determines that the banal memory of the everyday is in fact a screen
Some critics targeting the Holocaust's alleged domination of the
memory, "one that owes its value as a memory not to its intrinsic content,
spheres of collective memory adopt a psychoanalytic terminology and de-
but to the relation obtaining between this content and some other, which
scribe remembrance of the Holocaust as.a "screen memory" (Deckerin-
has been suppressed) ("Screen" 19). Despite its apparent innocence, screen
nerung). According to this Freud-inspired argument, memory of the Holo-
memory stands in or substitutes for a more disturbing or painful memory
caust doesn't simply compete with that of other pasts, but provides (as the
that it displaces from consciousness. (Note that the screen memory is at
arguments of Linenthal and Stannard alluded to above suggest) a greater
some level authentic, according to Freud; it is not a mere fantasy.) The
level of «comfort" than confrontation with more «local" problems would
mechanism of screen memory thus illustrates cQncretely how a kind of
allow. Thus, in a sophisticated version of this argument, film scholar Mir-
forgetting accompanies acts of remembrance, but this kind of forgetting
iam Hansen speculates that "the popular American fascination with the
is subject to recalL 26
Holocaust may function as a 'screen memory' in the Freudian sense, cov-
As Freud clarifies in "On Childhood Memories and Screen
ering up a traumatic event-another traumatic event-that cannot be ap-
Memories," a chapter in The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life) the content
proached directly.... The displaced referents ... may extend to eve~ts
of the screen memory has a variety of "temporal relarion[sJ" with "the sub-
as distant as the genocide of Native Americans or as recent as the VIet-
ject it has screened out." He distinguishes between "retrospecrive/' "antici-
nam War."22 While Hansen's argument echoes Michaels's, her emphasis
patory," and "simultaneous" screen memories in order to clarify that the
on displacement-as opposed simply to silencing-opens up a potential-
content of a screen memory can be formed by projections from repressed
ly more productive approach to the relation between different traumat-
memories that happened after, before, or at the same time as the remem-
ic events. Multidirectional Memory incorporates psychoanalytic insights,
bered events. 27 Noting the temporal complexity that Freud finds in child-
such as Hansen's, but my reading of Freud shows that his understanding
hood memories (and pointing out that the memories at stake in ('Screen
of screen memory approximates the multidirectional model I develop here
Memories" are probably Freud's own), Hugh Haughton writes that "the
rather than the model of competition: the displacement that takes place
notion of the 'screen' or 'cover' becomes increasingly many-layered and
in scree.I1 memory (indeed, in all memory) functions as much to open up
multidirectional."28 The English translation of Deckerinnerungen (literal-
lines of communication with the past as to close them ofE 23
ly, «cover memories") as «screen memories" is thus apt, if not literal, since
Memory is, as Freud recognized, primarily an associative process
such memories do encapsulate two notions of the «screen": they serve both
that works through displacement and substitution; it is fundamentally
as a barrier between consciousness and the unconscious, and as a site of
and structurally multidirectionat even though powerful forces are always
projection for unconscious fantasies, fears, and desires, which can then be
trying to shape it according to more or rigid psychic or ideological
decoded. Consequently, screen memory is, in my terminology, multidirec-
parameters. 24 In the 1899 essay "Screen Memories" and again a decade
tional not only because it stands at the center of a potentially complex set
later in The Psychopathology of Everyday Lift, Freud tries to understand
of temporal relations, but also-and perhaps more importantly-because
why some memories from childhood are preserved and some are not. In
14 Introduction Introduction 15
it both hides and reveals that which has been suppressed. The example Halbwachs and the tradition that has emerged from him, all memories are
of screen memory-which as with so many concepts in Freud begins simultaneously individual and collective: whjle individual subjects are the
as a special case but ends up seeming to encompass almost all acts of necessary locus of the act of remembrance, those individuals are imbued
remembrance-suggests the limits of the model of memory as competi- with frameworks common to the collectives in which they live. 30 The
tion. While screen memory might be understood as involving a conflict of frameworks of memory function something like. language-they provide
memories, it ultimately more closely resembles a remapping of memory in a shared medium within which alone individuals can remember or articu~
which li~ks between memories are formed and then redistributed between late themselves. The philosopher Avishai Margalit's distinction between
the conscious and unconscious. To be sure, the truths of memory are often two forms of collective memory, common and shared, helps clarify further
in tension with the truths of history; as with many of the multidirectional how memory operares beyond the individual: '~ common memory ... is
exchanges that r. consider here, the «motives" of screen memory are "far an aggregate notion. It aggregates the memories of all those people who
removed from the aim of historical fidelity)} (Freud) ('Screen" 2I). Yet both remember a certain episode which each of them experienced individu-
screen memories and multidirectional memories provide access to truths ally.... A shared memory, on the other hand, is not a simple aggregate
nonetheless, truths that produce insight about individual and collective of individual memories. It requires communication. A shared memory
processes of meaning-making. Thinking about screen memories and mul- integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember
tidirectional memories as less "pathological" than "normal" proves to the episode ... into one version.... Shared memQry is built on a division
a boon to 29 Awareness of the inevitability of displacement of mnemonic labor."31 The memory at stake in multidirectional memory,
and substitution in acts of remembrance points toward rhe need both and indeed in most collective memory today, resembles Margalit's shared
to acknowledge the conflicts that subtend memory and work toward a memory. When we talk about collective Holocaust memory or about col-
rearticulation of historical relatedness beyond paradigms of uniqueness. lective memories of colonialism and decolonization, we are talking pri-
If multidirectional memory functions at the level of the collective as marily about shared memory, memory that may have been initiated by
screen memory does at the level of the individual, there remain obvious individuals but rhat has been mediated through networks of communica-
difficulties with moving from Freud's model to a discussion of the inter- tion) institutions of the state, and the social groupings of civil society.
section of memories of the Holocaust and colonialism. First, while screen In contemporary societies, mediascapes of all kinds playa predomi-
memory is individual and biographical, multidirectional memory, as I nant role in the construction of the memory. frameworks described by
use it, is primarily collective and historical, although it is never divorced Halbwachs. While global media technologies make possible a new kind of
from individuals and their biographies either. Additionally, while screen common memory, via the creation of global media events that aU might
memory replaces a disturbing memory with a more comforting, everyday witness simultaneously, (he lack of an Archimedean point of reference
scene, the multidirectional memory explored here frequently juxtaposes ensures that even memory of such events (like the attacks of September II)
two or more disturbing memories and disrupts everyday settings. These 20m) will ultimately more closely resemble shared memory with its divi-
are important distinctions, but further reflection also helps to modulate sion of labor and calibration of different perspectives. Both Halbwachs
the apparent starkness of the differences between screen and multidirec- and Margalit) however, seem to overestimate the degree to which collec-
tional memories. tive memory will converge into "one version." Multidirectional memory
Lees take these difficulties one at a time, beginning with the ques- is collective memory insofar as it is formed within social frameworks; it is
tion of what we mean by collective memory. The work of the French soci- shared memory insofar as it is formed within mediascapes that entail "a
ologist Maurice Halbwachs is crucial here since it helps to down the division of mnemonic labor." Yet the concept of multidirectional mem-
commonsense opposition between individual and collective memory. For ory differs from both of others because it highlights the inevitable
16 Introduction Introduction 17

displacements and contingencies that mark all remembrance. Collective the memory of traumatic events is at stake. The same holds true for collec-
memory is multilayered both because it is highly mediated and because tive memory. When we look at collective memory historically, one thing
individuals and groups play an active role in rearticulating memory, if we notice is how unevenly-and sometimes unexpectedly-it develops.
never with complete consciousness or unimpeded agency. Competitive Memories of particular events come and go and sometimes take on a sur-
scenarios can derive from these restless rearticulations, but so can visions prising importance long after the materiality of the events remembered
that construct solidarity out of the specificities, overlaps, and echoes of has faded from view. An important epistemological in considering
different historical experiences. memory as multidirectional instead of as competitive is the insight, devel-
The other difference between screen memory and multidirectional oped here through historical case studies, that the emergence of memories
memory concerns the question of the affective of the memories at into the public often takes place through triggers that may at first seem
issue. For Freud, screen memories stand in for and distract from something irrelevant or even unseemly. Thus, to give a concrete example that will
disturbing-either a traumatic event or an illicit, unacknowledged desire. prove significant for this book, the practice of torture seems like an un-
As we have seen above} many critics think that memories of the Holocaust likely trigger for Holocaust memory-for how could a practice as wide-
function this way, at least in places like the contemporary United States spread, if repellant, as torture conjure up the extremity of genocide? But
that are temporally and spatially far removed from the events of the Nazi in France during the Algerian War of Independence 'many observers un-
period. What is odd about the case of Holocaust memory, however, is derstood the French state's widespread use of extr.ajudicial violence as just
that such memory hardly seems innocent or comforting. And yet, as the such a reawakening of the past. As I discuss in Chapters 6 and 7, some sur-
concept of screen memory reveals, the content of a memory has no in~ vivors of the Nazi camps, such as the Austrian/Belgian writer Jean Amery,
trinsic meaning but takes on meaning precisely in relationship to other even cite the discussion of torture as one of the impetuses for their own
memories in a network of associations. My interest in multidirectional public articulation of Holocaust memory. But this is not the end of the sto-
memory takes off from this insight to complicate assumptions about what ry. For a practice that triggered memory of Nazism at one moment could
in memory is {(innocent" and what is "disturbing," about what serves as later serve as a trigger in France for memory of the Algerian War itself-
a necessary screen for the projection of memories and what as a barrier to a war that had for almost four decades seemed to be blocked from view
remembrance. Looking at particular cases leads me to conclude (in the even, as, in its wake, Holocaust consciousness experienced an incredible
spirit of Ffeud, but sometimes with opposite results) that one cannot know growth. Thus, the turn of the millennium in France (and elsewhere) has
in advance how the articulation of a memory will function; nor can one seen renewed debates about torture} renewed interest in the connections
even be sure that it will function only in one way. The concept of multidi- between the Holocaust and the Algerian War, and a sense-expressed in
rectional memory holds memory open to these different possibilities, but Michael Haneke's film Cache, among other places-that post-9hI poli-
does not subscribe to a simple pluralism, either. While a given. memory cies in the United States echo older histories of imperial and fascist vio-
rarely functions in a single way or means only one thing, all articulations lence. 32 It is precisely that convoluted, sometimes historically unjustified,
of memory are not equal; powerful social, political, and psychic forces back-and-forth movement of seemingly distant collective memories in and
articulate themselves in every act of remembrance. out of public consciousness that I qualify as memory's multidirectionality.
As these examples, which will be pursued at much greater length later in
this book, begin to suggest, thinking of memory as multidirectional in-
On Comparison and Justice stead of competitive does not entail dispensing with a nodon of the urgen-
cy of memory, with its life-and-death stakes. Rather, these examples alert
Because of the complex psychic demands that Freud identified, in-
us to the need for a form of comparative thihking that, like memory itsel£
dividual memory emerges and recedes in fits and starts-especially when
is not afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicity and era.
 Introduction Introduction

shift in the conceptualization of memory from competition to lines of sight-and not simply as reproducing already given entities that
multidirectionality that this book advocates has methodological implica- either are or are not "like" other already given entities.
tions for comparative thinking and study. A central methodological prob- Emphasizing the dimension of imagination involved in acts of re-
lem and opportunity concerns the constitution of the archive for compar- membrance should not lead to assumptions of memory's insubstantiality.
ative work. Far from being situated-either physically or discursively-in Remembrance and imagination are material forces as well as fundamen-
any single institution or site, the archive of multidirectional memory is tally human ones. They cannot be wished away, nor, I believe, should
irreducibly transversal; it cuts across genres, national contexts, periods, they be. Despite the plentiful evidence of violence and willed oblivion
and cultural traditions. Because dominant ways of thinking (such as com- that can accompany hegemonic (and sometimes even subaltern) acts
petitive memory) have refused to acknowledge the multidirectional flows of remembrance-and despite this book's predominantly dark subject
of influence and articulation that collective memory activates, the com- matter-Multidirectional Memory has been written under the sign of op-
parative critic must first constitute the archive by forging links between timism. Because the structures of individual and collective memory are
dispersed documents. As this book demonstrates, there is no shortage of multidirectional, they prove difficult to contain in the molds of exclu-
cross-referencing between the legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism, sivist identities. If memory is as susceptible as any other human faculty
but many of those moments of contact occur in marginalized texts or in to abuse-and here again Muhammad's speech serves as a convenient
marginal moments of well-known texts. The evidence is there, but the example, although only one of many-this study seeks to emphasize how
archive must be constructed with the help of the change in vision made memory is at least as often a spur to unexpected acts of empathy and
possible by a new kind of comparative thinking. The greatest threat to the solidarity; indeed multidirectional memory is often the very grounds on
visibility of this marginalized archive of Holocaust memory in the age of which people construct and act upon visions of justice.
decolonization is the kind of zero':sum thinking that underwrites the logic A theory of multidirectional memory can help us in the task of ~'re~
of competitive memory. The greatest hope for a new comparatism lies in framing justice in a globalizing world," to cite the title of a relevant essay
opening up the separate containers of memory and identity that buttress by political philosopher Nancy Fraser. 35 Fraser argues that today's debates
competitive thinking and becoming aware of the mutual constitution and aboUt justice-which she defines as ttparity of participation') (73)-need to
ongoing transformation of the objects of comparison. 33 Too often com- move beyond the "Keynesian-Westphalian frame" that has defined them
parison is understood as "equation"-the Holocaust cannot compared for most of the post-World War II era. By this she means that the accelera-
to any other histOry, the story goes, because it is unlike them all. This tion of globalization creates injustices that a previously taken-for-granted
project takes dissimilarity for granted, since no two events are ever alike, nation-state framework based on a national citizenry can no longer solve
and then focuses its intellectual energy on investigating what it means to (if it ever could). For Fraser) drawing attention to the way capitalism, mi-
invoke connections nonetheless. 34 The logic of comparison explored here grations, and other transnational forces break the nation-state frame also
does not stand or fall on connections that can be empirically validated for brings into view a third dimension of justice beyond economic redistribu-
historical accuracy; nor can we ensure that all such connections will be tion and cultural recognition that theorists need to account for, a dimen-
politically palatable to all concerned parties. Rather, a certain bracketing sion she associates with questions of political representation: "Whether
of empirical history and an openness to the possibility of strange political the issue is distribution or recognition, disputes that used to focus exclu-
bedfellows are necessary in order for the imaginative links between differ- sivelyon the question of what is owed as a matter of justice to community
ent histories and social groups to come into view; these imaginative links members now turn quickly into disputes about who should count as a
are the substance of multidirectional memory. Comparison, like memory, member and which is the relevant community. Not just the 'whar> but also
should be thought of as productive-as producing new objects and new the 'who' is up for grabs" (72). Additionally, addressing the issue of
20 Introduction Introduction 21

subjects or "who~) of justice entails, Fraser argues, thinking about the pro- exceptions that proved the rule" (69-70). Multidirectional Memory focuses
cedures or "how') of justice (84). The matters of "who" and "how" point on just such exceptional views and makes visible a countertradition that
toward what she calls "meta~political" issues concerning the "framing" of not only foregrounds unexpected resonance between the Holocaust and
disputes over justice. Framing entails decisions about who is permitted to colonialism but also can provide resources for the rethinking of justice. In
claim the right to speak about issues of injustice affecting them. In a glo- addition to moving the logic of recognition beyond identitarian competi-
balizing world, in which transnational factors (such as flows of capital and tion, the theory of multidirectional memory and the countertradition it
ecological degradation) coexist with or even predominate over national helps expose can contribute to what Fraser calls "the politics of framing'):
factors, debates about framing become unavoidable elements of a quest for «Focused on the issues of who counts as a subject of justice, and what is
justice. As Fraser sums up the political force of her argument, "Struggles the appropriate frame, the politics of framing comprises efforts to estab-
for justice in a globalizing world cannot succeed unless go hand in lish and consolidate, to contest and revise, the authoritative division of
hand with struggles for meta-political democracy. ... [N]o redistribution political space" (80). A work of scholarship does not intervene direcdy
or recognition without representation') (85-86). in the materiality of political space, although many of the intellectuals I
As my opening example of Michaels and Muhammad illustrates, address were actively involved in political struggle. Rather, I undertake an
debates about collective memory and group identity are primarily strug- archaeology of the comparative imagination in the hopes that document-
gles over injustices of recognition, over whose history and culture will ing these earlier attempts to reconceptualize the subjects of justice can
be recognized. Such injustices are real, but the rethinking of the relation inspire our present and future projects to remake political space.
between memory and identity can contribute to a rethinking of cultural
recognition beyond zero-sum logic. J6 Fraser helps us see that part of the
Argument and Outline of the Book
problem may lie in the assumed nation-state framing of the problem of
recognition, although she also recognizes, as I do, that the nation remains
In Multidirectional Memory, I put forward arguments that are theo-
a significant player in questions of recognition, redistribution, and politi-
retical, historical, and-in a world not yet from colonialism or geno-
cal representation. Despite Michaels's and Muhammad's desire to fix the
cide-inevitably political. Let me reprise them while also outlining the
memory wars co the landscape of the Mall in Washington, the articula-
scope and trajectory of the book. At the level of theory, I rethink the
tions of culrural recognition and collective memory I consider in this book conceptualization of collective memory in multicultural and transnation-
do not remain tied to the fetishized sites of the state-which doesn't mean al contexts. Fully cognizant of the differentials of access and power that
that they ignore the salience of state spaces either. Such articulations also mark the public sphere, I nevertheless provide a framework that draws at~
allow us to supplement Fraser's account. 37 tention to the inevitable dialogical exchange between memory traditions
In Multidirectional Memory I reveal how memory of the Nazi geno- and keeps open the possibility of a more just future of memory. I identi-
cide and struggles for decolonization have persistently broken the frame the misrecognition of collective memory as a zero-sum game-instead
of the nation-state during the entire period of Keynesian-Westphalian of an open-ended field of articulation and struggle-as one of the stum-
dominance. Fraser admits that there have been exceptions in the post- bling blocks for a more inclusive renarration of the history of memory and
war period to the framing of justice on the terrain of the nation-state, a harnessing of the legacies of violence in the interests of a more egalitar-
but she doesn't consider in a substantive way what such exceptions might ian Several of the chapters of Multidirectional Memory also suggest
contribute to reframing justice: "Occasionally, famines and genocides the need to think outside the universal/particular opposition that marks
galvanized public opinion across borders. And some cosmopolitans and much discussion of the politics of identity and cultural difference. Many
anti-imperialists sought to promulgate globalist views. But were of the writers, intellectuals, and activists considered here point us instead
22 Introduction Introduction 23

toward a multidirectional ethics that combines the capacious open-end- migrants in comemporary Europe. 39 Even if the histories of Jews and for-
edness' of the universal with the concrete, situational demands of the par- merly colonized peoples significantly, Europe's ambivalent memo-
ticular. An ethics of multidirectional memory involves creating fidelity ry of the Nazi genocide has left traces that inflect policies and discussions
(in the sense given that term by Alain Badiou's Ethics) with the multiple concerning race, religion, nationalism, and citizenship today. Attention
events and historical legacies that define any situation. 38 A politics built on to the history of Jews on the continent can serve as a timely warning
that ethical foundation will require a notion of transnational, comparative nor to homogenize conceptions of Europe on ethnic, racial, or religious
justice can negotiate conflicting and sometimes mutually exclusive grounds-a tendency that has understandably played an important role
demands made on unstable and shifting terrain. in postcolonial critique but is now more frequently associated with con-
At the historical level, Multidirectional Memory uncovers a mar- servative (and increasingly liberal!) perspectives within Europe. While
ginalized tradition that has implications both for Holocaust studies and minority and postcolonial critique has had a tendency sharply to distin-
postcolonial studies-and can serve to stimulate the kinds of ethical and guish Jews from postcolonial subjects on the grounds of Jews' presumed y.
political thinking I call for here. Drawing on this tradition of Jewish and "whiteness"-a tradition that harks back ro founding texts by Cesaire
non-Jewish writers, artists, and political figures, I renarrate the received and Fanon and is based on a somewhat ahistorical understanding-the
history of Holocaust memory. I demonstrate,~t, that the early postwar tradition uncovered here draws attention to possibilities for solidarity as
period is richer and more complex than earlier studies, with their stress on well as distinction. Shared histories of racism, spatial segregation, geno-
a period of silence and repression that lasts until around the time of the cide, diasporic displacement, cultural destruction, and-perhaps most
Eichmann trial in 1961, have allowed. Shifting attention to unexpected important-savvy and creative resistance to hegemonic demands provide
texts, such as the writings of Du Bois on the Holocaust, or underexplored the grounds for new forms of collectivity that would not ignore equally
contexts, such as Andre Schwarz-Bart's engagement with the Caribbean powerful histories of division and difference.
diaspora, reveals both more Holocaust remembrance than we've been led Multidirectional Memory consists of four sections of two chap-
to expect in this era and markedly more comparative forms of memory ters each and addresses more than a half-century of cultural history in
than would come to predominate in later decades. My renarration of this Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and North Africa. It begins with
early postwar period reveals, additionally, that the emergence of collec- the observation that some of the earliest responses to the Nazi genocide
tive memory of the Nazi genocide in the 19505 and 19605 takes place in placed it on a conceptual continuum with colonialism and antiblack rac-
a punctual dialogue with ongoing processes of decolonization and civil ism. Part I, «(Boomerang Effects: Bare Life, Trauma, and the Colonial
rights struggle and modes of coming to terms with colonialism, slav- Turn in Holocaust Studies," considers the figures through which such
ery, and racism. events and reading texts from the late 1940S to connections were made in two influential works from the beginning of
the beginning of the twenty-first century, I make the case for a 'n.r'cr_'cP ... '1""V"l the 19505: Hannah Arendt's attempt to read the history of Nazi terror back
minoritarian tradition of (( decolonized» Holocaust memory. through imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Chapter 2) and (\ ~ S:-I)
This new approach to Holocaust memory has implications, in turn, Aime Cesaire's understanding of Nazism as the return of the colonial
for those concerned primarily with the varied experience of decolol1ization repressed in his polemical pamphlet Discourse on Colonialism (Chapter tt'if'l.')
and the aftermaths of colonialism. Postcolonial studies can learn from the 3). Arendt's notion of the '~boomerang effect" and Cesaire's "choc en re-
history of Jews and anti-Semitism in Europe in a number of ways. In par- tour" (translated as ((boomerang effect," but more literally a backlash or
ticular, the experience of Jewish difference within modern Europe-and reverse shock) both describe the unexpected debt of totalitarianism to co-
the frequently violent reaction Jews confronted-foreshadows many of the lonialism, although the two writers approach these links from different
debates and problems faced by postcolonial societies and by postcolonial directions and with significantly different political assumptions. Despite
24 Introduction Introduction

presciently drawing detailed connections between two now seemingly projects of Schwarz-Bart and Phillips, which bring together that which
separate histories, Arendt proves unable to elude discourses of the hu- is supposed to be apart. Although forms of anachronism constitute
man, the progressive, and the universal that remain complicit with the different types of "error" when perceived from a historicist perspective,
violence she is trying to explain. While Arendt remains at the limits of they can also be powerfully subversive and demystifying in the ways that
Eurocentrism, Cesaire aims his polemic specifically against European self- they expose the ideological assumptions of historicist categorization, as
understanding. Drawing on multiple intellectual and cultural traditions, novels such as Schwarz-Bares A Woman Named Solitude and Phillips's
Cesaire uses the choc en retour to expose the multidirectional ripple effects Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood demonstrate. While Schwarz-
of extreme violence. While focused especially on European disavowal of Bart struggles-and might ultimately be seen to fail-tO find a literary
colonial atrocities, Cesaite also exposes how an inability to come t~ terms form for the anachronistic juxtaposition of black and Jewish histories,
with Nazism inflects late colonial discourse. Cesaire's Discourse, along Phillips employs fragmentation and intertextuality in order to develop
with his student Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, helps us to forge an aesthetic premised on nonappropriative hospitality to histories of the
a multidirectional trauma theory that accounts for the of colo- other. Both writers, however, continue the attempt by Du Bois to think
nialism and genocide, although investment in a certain version of Marxist through colonialism's and genocide's disruptions of space and time, and,
theory and the of anticolonial struggle sometimes impair his in different manners, they reflect on possibilities for resistance to the lega-
attention to the specificity of the Nazi genocide. . cies of those disruptions.
Part II, ((Migrations of Memory: Ruins, Ghettos, Diasporas/' con- The historical resistance to Nazi occupation and European colonial-
tinues the consideration of the early postwar period and adds attention ism lies at the heart of Part III, '(Truth, Torture, Testimony: Holocaust
to the spaces and places of memory's movements. Two writers who suc- Memory During the Algerian War/' and Part IV, "October 17, 1961: A Site
cessfully negotiate the multidirectional perspective opened up by Arendt of Holocaust Memory?" Here I focus intensely on metropolitan anticolo-
and Cesaire bookend this section: W. E. B. Du Bois and Caryl Phillips. nial resistance during the late stages of the Algerian War of Independence.
In between, I discuss the more ambivalent case of Andre Schwarz-Bart. Part III explores how the resonance between the violence of decoloniza-
In Chapter 4, Du Bois's visit to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, don and that of the Nazi genocide created a multidirectional network of
which reflected on in a 1952 article, becomes the occasion for modeling memory that facilitated the emergence of survivor testimony as a powerful
multidirectional memory. Placing ('The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto" genre for exposing both forms of violence. At the very moment when the
within the larger context ofDu Bois's thinking about Nazism, race, Israeli state was staging survivor testimony in the Eichmann trial, Jean
and resistance, I demonstrate how, against the backdrop of the cold war Rouch and Edgar lviorin set out to experiment with documentary form by
and continued segregation in the United States, Du Bois rearticulates his producing what they called "cinema verite." Their documentary, Chronicle
concept of" double consciousness" to incorporate the experiences of other of Summer, the topic of Chapter 6, turns out to feature testimony by a
minority groups. In particular, his powerful response to the ruins of the Holocaust survivor at its center and juxtaposes that testimony with discus-
ghetto and to Nathan Rapopores much-maligned Ghetto Monument sions of race, decolonization, and colonial war. Turning to contemporane-
demonstrates the workings of a multidirectional memory able to hold ous discourses of the anticolonial movement in France, I demonstrate how
together the disparate histories of blacks and Jews while simultaneously the notion of "truth" that is central to cinema verite circulates in attempts
allowing for the reardculation of their specificities. In Chapter 5, I con- to expose the violence of the late colonial state. In particular, controversies
tinue the discussion of blacks and Jews through attention to two writers about torture, censorship, and the use of concentration camps in the fight
who also foreground ghettos) ruins, and other diasporic spaces as sites against the Algerian independence movement lead to the importance of
of multidirectional exchange. Here I pursue the anachronistic aesthetic testimony as a" mode of articulating the suppressed truth of colonialism.
 Jntroductio n Introduction 27
In the same year that the Eichmann trial and Chronicle of a Summer Marguerite Duras and a recently rediscovered novel by the African
staged Holocaust testimony in public, Auschwitz survivor and memoirist American writer William Gardner Smith} I demonstrate how the French
Charlotte De1bo published her first book-a collection of open letters, state's late colonial racialization of the war led to intensified connections
surrounded by Delbo's editorial comments, on the Algerian War. Chapter with the experiences of Jews under Nazi occupation. I also show how
7 demonstrates how the same context of torture, censorship, and camps texts can help us rethink discussions of the universalization of the
that elicits Rouch and Morin's film also prompts DeIbo to reflect on the Holocaust by foregrounding complicity and revealing a multidirectional
form of testimony and the shape of the public sphere. Much more explicit- alternative beyond the universal/particular opposition-an opposition
ly than Chronicle, Les belles lettres is a political text; it takes part, materially that nevertheless sneaks back into Smith's novel through a simplified gen-
and discursively, in a network of anticolonial activity. Harnessing memory de ring of memory. Chapter 9 tracks the return of attention to October
of the Nazi occupation and genocide, DeIbo's text offers possibilities for a 17 since the 19805 in order to argue for an ethics of multidirectional
critical, leftist politics of Holocaust memory that also possesses implica- memory subtended by a fidelity to historical comparison. Here the key
tions for a moment defined by «war on terror.» texts are a novel by the French detective fiction writer Didier Daeninckx,
By the time Les belles lettreswas published and Chronicle ofa Summer the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's 2005 feature film Cache, and
opened in Paris in the fall of 196I, the country was facing another crisis a novel for young adults by French~Algerian writer LeYla Sebbar. I also
pertaining to the war in Algeria. At the very moment when the war seemed read the latter two works in relation to the 1997-98 trial of Papon for
headed for a certain end with the coming independence of Algeria, vio- crimes against humanity during the Holocaust, which offers fascinating
lence intensified in the metropole as well as in the colony. Ongoing vio- evidence of the current status of multidirectional memory and testimony
lent confrontations between the French state, the Algerian independence and of the transformations under way due to generational shifts. As both
group the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), anA the extreme right- the trial and the works of Sebbar and Haneke suggest, the figure of the
wing Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS) culminated in a police massacre child has taken center stage as a site of uneasy, multidirectional memory.
of dozens of unarmed, peacefully demonstrating Algerians in the streets This chapter reflects on the possible ethical and political significance of
of Paris during the evening of October 17. Part IV continues to explore the child as a bearer of memory and postmemory in a moment of violent
the echoes that the Algerian War has cast around the globe and uncov- global transformation. 40
ers a multinational archive of texts that respond to the October 17, 196r As the scope and scale of Multidirectional Memory suggest, the book
massacre and roundup by Maurice Papon)s Paris police. Long absent from cannot possibly offer a comprehensive survey of all texts, films) or political
the dominant collective memory of France, October 17 has in recent de- movements that engage with both the Holocaust and European colonial-
cades become a significant site of mob~lization for antiracist and migrant ism. But it does provide both in-depth analysis of many key texts from
groups. Drawing on research into contemporaneous responses among the this not-yet-recognized) six-decade-old tradition and close consideration
cohon of anticolonial activists discussed in the previous chapters as well of moments of epochal change-such as the transitional early postwar
as works produced long after the events, this section of the book argues years and the 196r turning point when Holocaust memory increasingly
that the October events constitute a significant turning point in French entered the public sphere and many formerly colonized nations attained
Holocaust memory and that a lasting multidirectional network connects independence. I hope that other scholars will find it worthwhile to apply,
the Nazi past to this episode of the Algerian War. adapt, or correct the approach undertaken here. Certainly, the methodol-
In Chapter 8, I focus in particular on contemporaneous responses ogy of the book could be directly applied to other obviously «multidi-
in order to mount an argument about race, and universalism. rectional" works such as Michelle Cliffs Abeng (1984; Anne Frank and
Considering both a little-known journalistic text by the French writer the Caribbean), Anita Baumgartner's Bombay (1989; the Holocaust
 Introduction Introduction

and the colonization of India), Nancy Huston's The Mark of the Angel I use this short epilogue to make a few concluding points relevant
(I999; the Algerian War and the Holocaust), or W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz to the book's exploration of multidirectional memories of genocide and
(200I; the Holocaust and Belgian colonialism). In addition, the writings of colonialism. Through the example of the Israeli historian Benny Morris,
French-Jewish-North African scholars Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, I argue that invocations of the Holocaust in the context of the Israeli!
and Albert Memmi constitute a fertile terrain for further investigation. Palestinian conRict are part of a larger multidirectional network that in~
Perhaps more crucially, the concept of multidirectional memory might cludes ~pocalyptic colonial fantasies of the dissolution of the "Western"
help scholars working on other historical and cultu"ral traditions-histo- self-fantasies that in Morris's case reference France's "loss" of Algeria
ries and traditions that sometimes overlap explicitly with those discussed and call upon the Conradian vision of savagery that plays a disruptive role
here and sometimes do not. Multidirectional legacies of violence haunt in Arendt's account of imperialism and that Cesaire acutely critiques. I
the histories of indigenous peoples on a global scale and cut across the further argue that despite the obvious ugliness of many of the invocations
former Yugoslavia and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc as well as of the Holocaust in the context of contemporary Middle Eastern politics
Afghanistan, South Africa, Argentina, and other formerly colonized na- (and elsewhere!) and the temptation to declare a moratorium on such ref
tions. Meanwhile, labor migrants and their descendants in Europe often erences, the theory and history of multidirectional memory suggests the
find themselves confronted with the ghosts of the past at the same time need to confront a different possibility. While all intercultural memory
that they experience the prejudices of the present. 41 Finally, there are the does not foster cross-cultural understanding-as the case of Morris illus-
prospective multidirectional legacies of the American war in Iraq, a coun- trates here-comparisons, analogies, and other multidirectional invoca-
try scarred by colonialism, dictatorship, and genocide, and now by neoim- tions are an inevitable part of the struggle for justice. Against the alterna-
perialism and civil war. tives to comparison-an intense investment in the particularity of every
That unhappy current conjuncture shadows this book, but the book case or the promulgation of absolutely neutral and universal principles~I
also directly conf1"Onts those shadows at a couple of key moments. Indeed, offer the multidirectional option: an ethical vision based on commitment
the Algerian War, which figures so prominently in these pages, has in- to uncovering historical relatedness and working through the partial over-
creasingly become a charged and highly politicized reference point at the laps and conflicting claims that constitute the archives of memory and the
turn of the new millennium, as Haneke's film Cache also attests. The terrain of politics.
Bush administration frequently references Algeria as an analogy for Iraq,
and the Pentagon even hosted a screening of Gillo Pomecorvo's The Battle
ofAlgiers, apparently in order to "benefit" from its insights into coun-
terinsurgency.42 Having considered the Algerian question throughout the
second half of this book, I briefly turn to another mulddirectional politi-
cal hotspot in conclusion. Along with the Iraq War and the "war on ter-
ror," which, with their liberal use of torture and indefinite detention, have
produced uncomfortable echoes of the Holocaust and colonial adventures
past, the other dominant political site of multidirectional memory today
is the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis. In the Epilogue, "Multidirectional
Memory in an Age of Occupations," I briefly consider the implications of
my theory of collective memory for that intractable struggle as well as for
the claims of indigenous peoples.
'Notes

CHAPTER I

1. Walter Benn Michaels, "Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Anrira-

cism," American Literary History (summer 2006): 288-302; here 289-90. See also
j
my response in "Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels/
American Literary History (summer 2006): 303-II. Michaels's p'assage can be found
in almost identical form in The Trouble with Diversity: Hol!-' ~ Learned to Love
Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 55-56. Michaels
makes some related points about the Holocaust, memory, and identity in his pre-
vious book The Shape of the Signifier: I967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004).
2. For a critical account of the memory boom, see Kerwin Lee Klein, "o.n
the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,>' Representations 69 (2000):
127-50. An earlier version of a related argument can be found in Charles Maier,
"A Surfeit of Memory?" History and Memory 5) no. 2 (1993): 136-51. For sophisti-
cated the~retical and cultural-historical discussion of the emergence of memory
on a global scale and in relation to' temporal, technological, and political change,
see Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics ofMemory
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). An excellent survey of recent:
work on memory, with an emphasis on sociology, can be found in Jeffrey K. Ol-
ick and Joyce Robbins, "Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to
the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,'> Annual Review of Sociology 24
(1998): 105-40. With the exception of Huyssen. none of these writings considers
the kinds of intersecting, cross-ethnic, and transnational memories at stal{e in my
study. Marita Sturken has explored the entanglement and negotiation of differ-
ent memo,ries, albeit within a national frame, in Tangled Memories: The Vietnam
~t; the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics t.{Remembering (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997). Memory is itself a historical category and does not remain
stable over time. This book seeks to contribute to the theorization and historici-
zation of memory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and thus
engages primarily with work on modern memory practices. Important work on
earlier periods indudes Frances Yates, The Art ofMemory (London: Routledge and
 316 NDtes Notes

Kegan Paul, 1966); and Mary Carruthers, The Book ofMemory: A Study ofMemo1JI 8. In considering this era and this conjunction of histories, the work of schol-
£n Med£eval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 199 0 ). ars in postcolonial and Mrican diaspora studies is essential. Both of these (al-
3· See Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, ready quite heterogeneous) fields have enormous literatures, and I mention only
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). In understanding memory as a form of work- a few key texts here. Paul Gilroy's writings have been a particular inspiration.
ing through, I am indebted especially to Dominick LaCapra's writings on trau- See especially his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
ma and Holocaust memory. Among other works, see his History and Memory Af bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and his Against Race; Imagining Po-
tel' Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On remembrance as a litical Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard Univer-
form of social practice in the equally relevant contexts of JewIsh studies and colo- sity Press, 2002). Brent I-layes Edwards has continued and refined scholarship on
nial/postcolonial studies, see, respectively, Jonathan Boyarin, Storm .from Paradise: diaspora. See The Practice ofDiaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise ofBlack
The Politics ofJewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 199 2 ); Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). For an excel-
and Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art ofMemory in Madagas·" lent overview of colonial and postcolonial discourses, see Ania Loomba, Colonial-
car (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). ismlPostcolonialism,2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005). Robert Young's Postco-
4· Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, "Introduction: Noises of the Past," in The lonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 2001) provides a
~rk of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. useful historical account of anticolonial writings and movements.
A. Confino and P. Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5. Relat- 9. Elie Wiesel, Against Silence: The Voice and VISion of Elie Wiese4 ed. Irving
edly, Olick and Robbins clarify that collective memory is not a "thing," but rather Abrahamson (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), 158. Claude Lanzmann, "The
comprises "distinct sets of mnemonic practices in various social sites" (112). Taking Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude ~anzmann," in" Trauma:
advantage of the semantic resources of the French language, Philippe Mesnard re- Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Uni-
fers, in a work too little known in the English-speaking world, to "consciences de versity Press), 206.
la Shoah." He thus suggests replacing the concept of memory with a phrase that 10. Steven 1'. Katz, "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimen-

combines the notions of "consciousness" and "conscience." See Philippe Mesnard, sion," in Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2d ed., ed.
Consciences de la Shoah: Critique des discours et des representations (Paris: Kime, Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001),49-50.
2000). II. The debate about uniqueness has generated an enormous amount of schol-
5· For an exemplary and nuanced study that also knits together history, biog- arly and polemical literature. On the side of uniqueness, some of the key fig-
raphy, and representation, see Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second ures are Yehuda Bauer, Katz, and Wiesel. Those who have challenged the claims
World war (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2006). of uniqueness include Ward Churchill, Ian Hancock, and David Stannard. For
6. For the belated emergence of Holocaust memory in different national con- some representative contributions to this debate, see Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust
texts, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mif- Unique?
flin, 1999); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New 12. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth
York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and Annette Wieviorka, The Era ofthe Witness, trans. and Memory (New York: Plume, 1994), 215.
Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). For the presence ofHo- I3. Richard Golsan, Vichy's Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar
locaust consciousness in the "third world," see William Miles, "Third World View France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 20-2L
'y. of the Holocaust," Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 3 (2004): 37 1-93. 14. Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's
7· On the globalization of Holocaust memory, see Huyssen, Present Pasts, espe- Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995), 267. Linenthal, who certainly rec-
cially his comments on the "globalization paradox" (13-14); and Daniel Levy and ognizes the specificity of the Nazi genocide, do~ot, like some, argue that Holo-
Natan Sznaider, Holocaust" and Memory in the Global Age, trans. Assenka Oksiloff caust memory functions only as a "screen memory," but rather provides a useful
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005). I return to Levy and Sznaider, typology of different modes of memory.
as well as to the important work of Jeffrey Alexander on cultural trauma- The 15. David E. Stannard, "Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Schol-
Meanings ofSocial Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, arship," in Is the Holocaust Unique? ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum, 2d ed. (Boulder, CO:
2003)-io Chapter 8. Westview Press, 2001), 250.
3I 8 Notes Notes 31 9
16. Samantha Power, '/l Problem .from Heir': America and the Age of Genocide Levi, '''No Sensible Comparison'?: The Place of the Holocaust in Australia's His-
(New York: Perennial, 2003), 503. As Dirk Moses points out, Power's study is also tory Wars," History and Memory 19, no. I (2007): 124~56.
symptomatic of the phenomenon it describes, insofar as it refuses to recognize the 23· In the opening chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud attempt~
possibility of the United States as a perpetrator of genocide and not simply a by- co find a metaphor for the preservative capacities of the mind. He evokes the fa~
stander. See A. Dirk Moses, «Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in mous image of Rome, with its layers of history preserved in ruins, but then goes
[he 'Racial Century': Genocides ofIndigenous Peoples and the Holocaust," Pat- on to remark that "destructive influences" analogous to trauma render the city a
terns ofPrejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7-35. of forgetting as much as a site of memory. Even barring such individual or
17. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism collective traumas, we may not be as optimistic as Freud that in social life, as in
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xii-xiii. mental life, "nothing which has once been formed can perish-that everything
18. For a succinct articulation of the relations between memory, narrative, and is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances ... it can once more be
representation, see Mieke Bat's introduction to M. Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo brought to light." Yet, MultidirectionalMemory takes inspiration from Freud in ar-
Spitzer, Acts ofMemory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: Dart- guing that much more can be-and always is being-brought back to light than
mouth College Press, 1998). competitive models of memory suppose. See Sigmtmd Freud, Civilization and Its
19- Michel Foucault, The History ofSexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 17-19.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 12. 24· For an extensive account of Freud's theories of memory that has inRuenced
20. In a useful discussion of uniqueness discourse and questions of historical my own, see Terdiman)s Present Past;
comparison, Moses makes a similar point; his focus, however, is not explicitly on 25· Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories," The UncannJ, crans. David McLin-
questions of memory. See Moses, "Conceptual Blockages. l ' See also Dan Stone, tock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 5-6.
«The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond 'Uniqueness and Ethnic Competi~ 26. R. Clifton Spargo makes this point eloquently in describing the approach
tion,'" History> Memory, and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide to history of the contemporary trauma theory associated with Cathy Caruth and
(London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 236-51. inspired by Freud: "What trauma theory proposes as a new mode of historiog-
21. James Young develops this point about the metaphorical charge of the Ho- raphy is a forgetfulness full of memory, finding in our most basic structures of
locaust in his still extremely useful Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. See James avoiding knowledge residues of history as trauma and in that sense also the im-
E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of plicit imperatives for subsequent acts of remembrance." See R. Clifton Spargo}
Interpretation (BloomingtOn: Indiana University Press, I988). See also his excellent Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (Balti-
study of Holocaust memorialization, The Texture ofMemory: Holocaust Memorials more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 257. Spargo's rich and chal-
and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). lenging book also engages critically but appreciatively with Walter Benn Michaels
22. Miriam Hansen) "Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Command- and puts forward a concept of the "memory of injustice" that complements my
ment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): concept of multidirectional memory. '
I3. Andreas Huyssen has made a similar daim: «The universalized 'never again' 27· Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Lifo, trans. Anthea Bell
command and with it the instrumentalization of memory for political purposes (New York: Penguin, 2003), 45-46.
have become a veil covering ongoing atrocities in our present world. The Holo- 28. Hugh Haughton, "Introduction," in Freud, Uncanny, xix.
caust is a screen memory.') See Huyssen, "Trauma and Memory: A New Imagi- 29· In an important study of West German Holocaust historiography, Nicolas
nary of Temporality," in World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, ed. Berg describes how discussion of the Holocaust in Germany (and elsewhere) has
Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 19· fluctuated between fears of "too much" and "too little" memory. Berg>s decoding
My interest in thinking about competitive memory in relation to screen memOlY of these fears and his argument that there can be no perfect balance or just amount
was first spurred by Gary Weissman. See his essential work on the contemporary of Holocaust memory accord well with this study of multidirectional memOlY. .A1-
American fascination with the Holocaust, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts though I am more concerned with the "qualities" of memory than its "quantities,"
to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). For an my understanding of memory as an associative process not contained by
excellent discussion of why screen memory is an inadequate frame for thinking identity politics> Illstrumentalization, or zero-sum logics parallels Berg's account
about the Holocaust in relationship to aboriginal history in Australia, see Neil of memory's auctuation, although I explore significantly different terrain. See Ni-
320 Notes Notes 321

colas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erin- of multidirectionality acknowledges the' potential for competitive comparisons, it
nerung (Gottingen: Wallstcin, 2003). seeks to unlock such competitive moments when they arise.
30. See, for example, Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis 34. For a related view of comparison, with an emphasis on incommensurabil-
A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 2 ). ity, see Melas, All the Difference in the World. Emily Apter's The Translation Zone:
31. Avishai MargaJit, The Ethics ofMemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- A New Comparative Literature (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)
sity Press, 2002), 51-52. also offers a stimulating rethinking of comparative method. My interest in il1-
32 . It is important co note that from the very moment that the postwar era traminority exchange overlaps with that of the contributors to Franc;oise Lionnet
began, World War II and Algerian struggles for independence have been linked. and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
On May 8, 1945, a demonstration in the Algerian city of Setif took place to mark Press, 2005). This book's methodology should also make dear my sympathy with
the end of the war and call for decolonization. Mtet several dozen pied noirs were Wai Chee Dimock's argument that national literatures need to be read "through
killed in ensuing violence, the French army took part in reprisals that included the other continents" and in relation to nonlinear temporalities, although I'm even
massacre of thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Algerians. At least in the for~ less inclined than she is to hold onto adjectives such as «American." See Through
merly colonized world, the massacre has forever soldered together the liberation Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep TIme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
of Europe from fascism and the reI uctance of that liberated Europe to let go of its University Press, 2006). .
own forms of extreme violence. On the Setif massacre, see Yves Benot, Massacres 35. Nancy Fraser, :<Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World," New Left Re-
coloniaux: 1944-I950; La We Republique et la mise au pas des colonies franraises (Par- view 36 (November-December 2005): 69-88.
is: La Decouverte, 2001 [1994])· 36. The question of economic redistribution exceeds the «frame" of this book
The recent historical echoes that have reawalcened interest in Algeria and the (which in no way should be taken as a judgment about the crucial nature of such
Algerian War have also stirred the interest of other critics. For two different ap- a question), While matters of economic distribution may well involve zero-sum
proaches that trade Algeria's resonance for critical theory today, especially with re- logics, questions of culture and politics work differently. More work needs to be
spect to violence, justice, and torture, see David Carroll, Albert Camus the Alge- done in coordinating the claims of these different realms.
rian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 200 7); 37. Other accounts of justice I have found useful include Wai Chee Dimock,
and Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: W0men and Representation, 183 0 to the Present 0/
Residues Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California
(Stanford} CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 0/
Press, 1996); and Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics Difference (Prince-
33. Of course, comparison can-and often does-take competitive forms. ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I990).
Such forms show up with especially great frequency when questions of colonial- 38. I return to Badiou and ethics in Chapter 9. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An
ism and "civilization" are at stake. A classic critique of such colonial compari- Essay on the Understanding 0/Evil (New York: Verso, 2002). See also my review of
sons can be found in Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia this book in Critique 43, no. 4 (2001): 478-84.
University Press, 1983). More recently, see Natalie Meias, All the Difference in the 39. For a fascinating and timely discussion of how debates about Jewishness
World; Postcoloniality and the Ends a/Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer- in Enlightenment Europe echo in the dilemmas of postcolonial societies such as
sity Press, 2006). Harry Harootunian, who draws on Fabian, details other pitfalls India, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Cotony: The Jewish Question and the
of comparison, especially during the cold war and in relation to capitalist impe- Crisis o/Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
rialism, in «Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space~Time Problem," 40. Marianne Hirsch's concept of posrmemory-a structure of generational
boundary 232, no. 2 (2005): 23-52. Harootunian argues that many contemporary memory that primarily describes the experiences of children of survivors of trau-
approaches to comparison end up reifying time as space and proposes the impor- marie events-plays an important role in this final chapter. Sec her book Family
tance of thinking the relationality of space-time along the lines of Bakhtin's chro- P'J"ames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
notope, Henri Lefebvre's critique of everyday life, and Ernst Bloch's concept of versity Press, 1997), as well as the many essays on postmemory she has written
nonsynchronicity. My concept of multidirectionality is also meant to draw atten- since then.
tion to the inseparability of space and time in acts of remembrance-indeed to I describe the figure of the child as an uneasy sire of memory because I am
the interaction of multiple, nonsynchronous spaces and times. While my account aware of the dangers in the investment in such a figure. Queer theorists, includ-
ing especially Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, have convincingly drawn atten-
322 Notes Notes .323
tion to the potential of the figure of the child to reinstall sentimental normarivity. minated in the 1990S with critical studies by Dagmar Barnouw, SeylaBenhabib,
While this risk remains significant, I would argue that the texts considered here and Richard J. Bernstein. At the same time, and from a slightly different angle,
emerge out of familial and cultural disruptions that they refuse to "normativize)' Margaret Canovan's illuminating 1992 study, Hannah Arendt:. A Reinterpretation of
through fetishistic disavowal. In these texts, in other words, the child marks a Her Political Thought, ptoduced a new vision of the centrality of The Origins afTo-
site of failed transmission and resistance to normativity. See Lauren Berlant, The talitarianism to Arendt's political vision and significantly advanced understanding
Queen ofAmerica'll Goes to Washington City: on Sex and Citizenship (Dur- of Arendt's concept of rotalitarianism, which had been buried for too long under
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer The- cold war misunderstandings. See Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Iden-
ory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC! Duke University Press, 2004). tity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New Yotk, Grove Press,
41. On the "touching tales" that connect Turkish migrants in Germany to 1978); Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish
ish and other histories, see Leslie A. Adelson's rigorously argued book, The Turkish Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Seyla Ben-
Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar ofMi- habib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage)
gration (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 1996); Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge,
42. It is often mentioned that Bush and other administration and military MA: MIT Press) 1996); Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation
personnel have been reading Alistair Horne's history of the Algerian War, A Sav- of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Ste-
age 'War of Peace: Algeria, I954-I962 (New York: Viking, I977). See, for instance, ven Ascheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California
the extended discussion of analogies between Iraq and Algeria in Thomas Ricks's Press, 2001).
review of the reissuing of Horne's book: "Aftershocks: A Classic on France's Los- 6. See Enrique Dussel, "Beyond Eurocentrism: The \Vorld-System and the
ing Fight with Arab Rebels Contains Troubling Echoes of Iraq Today," Washing- Limits of Modernity," in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and
ton Post Book World, November 19, 2006, T5. See also Ricks's surreal account of a Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 3-31; and Ann Laura
seminar on the Algerian War at the Marine Corps' School of Advanced Warfight- Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds. Tensions ofEmpire: Colonial Cultures in a Bour-
ing: "SAW 'The French Army at War in Algeria, I954-1962,'" Washing- geois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)' .
ton Post, April 28, 2006, A:q. 7. From Dussel's world-systems perspective, Europe is not simply any part of
the system) but "in fact, its center' (4). Some postcolonial critics might question
CHAPTER 2 this recentering of Europe, but Dussel's useful point is that the world-system is
structured by hierarchies of we:ilth and power.
1. See the informative obituary by the English art historian Sarah Wilson in
8. I derive the notion of cultural memory from Jan and Aleida Assmann, who
The Independent, September 18, 1998.
use it to indicate the memory stored in canonical texts of culture. See, for instance,
2. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars} Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of
Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gediichtnis (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999).
French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
9. Recently} numerous scholars, such as Isabel Hull, Dirk Moses, Dan Stone,
. 3. Kristin Ross, May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago
Enzo Traverso, and Jurgen Zimmerer, have taken inspiration from Origins to pur-
Press,
sue with conceptual sophistication and in greater empirical detail the links be-
4. See the excellent standard biography: Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Ar-
tween colonialism and genocide-a trend I return to in the conclusion of the next
endt: For Love a/the World, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
chapter. While drawing on the insights of such historians, my reading of Arendt
See also the helpful chronology in Dana Villa, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
eschews the empirical question of colonialism's relationship to the Holocaust in
Hannah Arendt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
order to focus instead on the contributions and limits of her work to the concep-
5. In the last thirty years, the reception of Arendt's work has taken a number
tualization of multidirectionaliry and comparison. Such a consideration of Ar-
of interesting turns that make her oeuvre ever-more relevant to the project of de-
endt's work necessitates interrogation of her very particular use of categories such
colonizing Holocaust memory. Starting with Ron H. Feldman's 1978 collection of
as comprehension and the human. For a sense of the state of the rapidly changing
Arendt's Jewish essays, The Jew as Pariah, and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biog-
field linking colonialism and genocide, see the interesting forum of leading histo-
raphy, Hannah Arendt: For Love ofthe World, a new appreciation of the importance
rians and critics, "The German Colonial Imagination," German History 26, no. 2
of Jewish history and politics entered into studies of Arendt's work. This work cul-
(2008): 251-72; and A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colon)IJ Genocide: Conquest, Oc-