Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Mark A. Tabone
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
American Author ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Multidirectional Memory

This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues, a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a critical perspective that incorporates the imaginative recovery of (often silenced) history that Toni Morrison (1987) called “rememory,” along with what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls “multidirectional memory,” this article details Williams’s daring exploration of spaces of overlap between the histories of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Holocaust. The article demonstrates how the novel’s unconventional and controversial emplotment allows Williams to create a distinctive historical critique not only of slavery and the Holocaust but, more broadly, of otherization, racialized violence, and modernity itself, while making a number of historiographic interventions. These include inscribing a largely absent history of the experience of Black people affected by the Holocaust and the mapping of theretofore underacknowledged resonances between American and German ideologies and practices. Through its transnational, transcultural “multidirectionality,” the novel opens up a broad, structural critique of apartheid everywhere; however, this article also argues that the novel also offers models for liberatory communities of resistance. The article demonstrates how Williams accomplishes this through his novel’s allegorical and literal use of the blues.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

scholarly journals Polska literatura najnowsza i Holokaust – edukacyjny potencjał fikcji?

2020 ◽  
pp. 372-388
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Czyżak
Keyword(s):  
Mental Hospital ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of theShoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.

scholarly journals “The Torture of Colonization and the Holocaust: Multidirectional Memory in The Nature of Blood”

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Webb
Keyword(s):  
Linear Time ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Competitive Model ◽  
Diary Of Anne Frank ◽  
Multidirectional Memory

In this paper, I read Caryl Phillips’s 1997 post-colonial The Nature of Blood as a novel that exemplifies Michael Rothberg’s theory of “multidirectional memory.” Rothberg’s theory, which argues against the dominant competitive model of memory in the United States, asserts that memory is a “productive, intercultural dynamic” (Rothberg 3). In other words, memories of different groups of people, specifically African-Americans and Holocaust survivors in his essay, are intertwined and inform each other in a modern setting. Phillips’s novel depicts a relationship between the Holocaust and colonization through the use of multiple narratives interwoven throughout the novel. Those narratives begin with the Stern family, specifically Eva Stern, a survivor of a Nazi death camp who eventually commits suicide, and Eva’s uncle Stephan, a man who abandoned his family in order to join Israel and who eventually regrets his decision. The novel also explores other lives: Othello, the Moor of Shakespeare’s Othello before the events of the play during the early modern period; three Jews falsely accused of the murder of a Christian boy in the town of Portobuffole during the 15th century; Malka, a struggling Ethiopian Jew in Israel during Operation Solomon in 1991. The painful and bloody similarities in the relationship between the Holocaust and colonization are created through the nonlinearity of time and the refutation of modernity, which combine to depict the still ongoing consequences of genocide and colonization. The invalidation of modernity, which is the notion that humanity is forever moving toward a better civilized future, is significant because modernity is a lie despite some people’s belief otherwise. The nonlinearity is evidenced through the novel’s traversing of multiple historical periods. As Rothberg notes, it constellates these different histories in order to emphasize their commonalities. This paper extends this insight by focusing on the centuries of othering described in the novel that have resulted in the tragic relationship they share and the involvement of canonized works such as Shakespeare’s plays and The Diary of Anne Frank. The Nazis were not the first people to decide that Jews needed to be isolated and killed, though that does not make Eva’s story any less disheartening. Stephan was not the first Jewish man trying to achieve something better for his people and, ignoring any possible success or failure on the matter, he is unable to reap any potential rewards for his sacrifices. Othello was destroyed in Shakespeare’s play, but the novel describes his treatment and the internalized racism that led to those fateful events. The three Jews were killed senselessly because of a rumor despite doing everything in their power to survive. Malka, the youngest character in a temporal sense, is merely the latest depiction of the combined racism and anti-Semitism that has ruled the European world for centuries. If modernity were true, then the treatment of all of these characters would improve over linear time and the presence of racism and anti-Semitism would vastly decrease; however, that is not the case. All of these characters also survive a tragedy and/or assimilate if the dominant culture is to be believed; however, the novel demonstrates how monstrously untrue that lie is in actuality.

scholarly journals A poeticised indulgence. “The Beginning” by Andrzej Szczypiorski: A story of success

2021 ◽  
pp. 346-364
Author(s):  
Irina E. Adel'gejm
Keyword(s):  
Great Difficulty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Bright Field ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
The Individual

The article dwells upon the reception of the novel “The Beginning” (“The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman”) by Andrzej Szcypiorski. The success of the book turned out to be an extremely clear evidence of the then state of the Polish society in terms of the attitude to the problem of participation / non-participation of Poles in the fate of Jews during the Holocaust and the development of a language adequate to this trauma. The reception of the novel once again showed that the sale of book products directly depends on its ability to indulge the requirements of a wide segment of consumers — but this does not necessarily apply to low genres. Szczypiorski’s “The Beginning” was the first artistic step in a public discussion concerning probably the most painful story in the history of Poland. The historical truth associated with it, on being silenced for decades, makes its way into the bright field of consciousness, even though with great difficulty and provoking resistance in various circles of the society. The experience of shame is hardly included into the baggage of memory, since it does not create a positive image of society and the individual as a part of it, and therefore any nation state seeks to suppress the memory of events that violate the declared commonality of the national tradition. However, the writer offers the society — which latently feels ethical discomfort, but in fact is not ready neither to revise the idea of itself as of a solely heroic victim of history, nor to reflect on the discourse of Polish patriotism, or to experience the emotion of collective shame — the illusion of moral self-purification and mourning for the exterminated Jewish population of Poland to soothe the conscience.

Interrogation, Torture, and Confession in William Faulkner’s Light in August

2017 ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Light In August ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
Jim Crow South

This chapter explores the issue of police brutality Faulkner's seventh novel, Light in August. The novel locates the violent questioning of an African American detainee by the Yoknapatawpha County sheriff and his deputies within a national debate over custodial interrogation tactics that arose in the years after World War I, which became “a staple in American popular culture” as Faulkner was reaching maturity as a novelist. It shows that “the third degree,” as it came to be called, could be found not only in the legal and penal spaces of the Jim Crow South but also in the nation's metropolitan police departments. Faulkner demonstrates how “the difficulty of knowing, the indeterminacy of truth, and the ambiguity of identity” work to elicit and to compound the racialized violence of Light in August.

SURVEY OF DISASTERS IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE: A CASE STUDY OF I AM MALALA (I AM MALALA: THE GIRL WHO STOOD UP FOR EDUCATION AND WAS SHOT BY THE TALIBAN)

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-65
Author(s):  
Lale Massiha
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origin ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Real ◽  
Normal Part ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

I am Malala, the real story of the struggles of a girl who, unlike her elderly, did not remain silent, injustice and in order to bring the voices of the Pakistani girls to the victims of the bullying of the Taliban. Malala Yousafzai has gained world renown and released the story of her life with the help of Christina Lem in the story of a biography in 2013. Malala's militant spirit and his rhetoric have been of great interest to the world. But what caused Malala's fate was evil and evil that he had in his life from the beginning of his birth in various ways. In the present study, Kant's viewpoint is about moral misconduct, which suggests that evil does not have a super-human origin. Based on this, evil is being studied at its various levels and in the stages of Malala's life. In addition, John Kick's and Claudia Cardre's ideas have been used to analyze the intentions, motives, feelings and responsibilities of evil, organizational and individual evil in the novel "I am Malala". In other words, with the help of these theories and definitions, there are some kinds of evil in the novel, which at first glance is a normal part of the life of the characters of the story. The false beliefs and insistence on their continued existence make the various bad forms in Malala's life. With a carefulreading of the novel, one can show badly in the society and the context in which the story is formed. In a nutshell, theorists, including Hannah Arendt, refer to Hitler and the Holocaust, and then cite other examples. The present study seeks to add the Taliban to this list by showing the organizational weakness in this novel. The study seeks to show that evil in modern literature is not created by super-human forces or witch women, and terror and war are not even bad ones. But any harassment or enjoyment of the suffering of others or even silence against the suffering of others is evil and has irreparable negative effects on the lives of the characters what can be seen in the place of Malala's life.

scholarly journals “That Dreadful Country”: C. L. R. James's Early Thoughts on American Civilization

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN HØGSBJERG
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
West Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Marxist Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Working Class

If C. L. R. James could later reflect in Beyond a Boundary that before arriving in Britain, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same was fundamentally true about his relation to American society before his arrival there in 1938. This article will begin with discussion of the attraction of America for black West Indians, including George Padmore, in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the young James's own love of jazz and American literature. The complexities of the young James's “anti-Americanism” will be also explored, before we explore how James's turn to both Marxism and pan-Africanism after 1934 led to a new appreciation of both the power of the American working class and a new understanding of how a revolutionary solution might be found to the “Negro Question,” the question of the systematic racism towards black people in America. The article will conclude with discussion of James's 1938 work A History of Negro Revolt, in particular its Marxist analysis of the history of American slavery and its abolition during the American Civil War, as well as the strengths and limitations of Garveyism as a social movement.

The Unusual Case of Leslie Lapidus: The Purposes of the Remarkably Long Joke in William Styron's Sophie's Choice

Prospects ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 543-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Katz
Keyword(s):  
Unusual Case ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Word

In Discussing the humor of William Styron's humor-filled novel Sophie's Choice, I am particularly interested in focusing upon the nature of the joke that fills a huge portion of the novel, the Leslie Lapidus affair. Rarely (if ever) in the history of the written word, I'd be willing to venture, has a joke of the outrageous length of this one been set down. The Leslie Lapidus affair, from start to finish, actually takes up about a full fifth of a long novel. The reader first hears of Leslie as a “hot dish” promised to Stingo, the main character and the narrator, on page 82 of the 1992 Vintage edition, but the punch line doesn't come until page 193, followed by a few pages of denouement. What a buildup! That's a startlingly long joke. The over-length of the Leslie Lapidus affair, as well as its late-in-the-novel resurrection in the briefer “coda” that is the Mary Alice Grimball encounter, should be enough to make the reader take pause. What in the world is a joke of this size doing in a novel about the Holocaust? How does it relate to the major ideas of the novel? At 100+ pages, it's practically a major theme of its own.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Traumatic Memory of the Holocaust in Literature (Based on Monika Schneiderman’s Work “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”)

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (45) ◽  
pp. 170-180
Author(s):  
Uliana Yevchuk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

The article analyzes the attempt to reconstruct the historical memory of the Holocaust in the novel by Polish writer Monika Schneiderman “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”. The writer questions the issue of Polish-Jewish relations, the responsibility and guilt of Holocaust witnesses to its victims. The author, who has a complex identity, seeks to find out for herself why her Polish family did not show enough sympathy for the suffering of Jews during World War II, including her Jewish relatives. As such indifference on the part of Poles to Holocaust victims was quite common, Monica Schneiderman tries to explain this by examining the relations between societies who lived side by side for centuries in the pre-war period, concluding that the two neighbouring nations lived in separate communities that were not open to each other. Based on the reproduction of the history of her own family, the author seeks answers to difficult questions of universal human values – perception and understanding of others, empathy, compassion. In her works Monica Schneiderman shows the need to include these recently “closed” but extremely important topics in the public discourse.

scholarly journals Korzenie pamięci. O Mirabelce Cezarego Harasimowicza

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kwiatkowska
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The City ◽  
Plum Tree

The article attempts to interpret the novel Mirabelle in the light of hauntology, taken from Jacques Derrida’s works, existing in the Polish literary studies first and foremost thanks to the works of Jakub Momro and Andrzej Marzec. Harasimowicz’s novel recounts the history of Warsaw from the 1920s until the present-day period. The mirabelle plum tree growing on one of the backyards in Warsaw tells the story of the following generations of the city dwellers who fade away and fall into oblivion. The Holocaust, depicted in the beginning of the novel, does not, however, become the past. The recollection of the genocide is inscribed in contemporary Warsaw, in the city space and the consciousness of its inhabitants. The phantoms of the former dwellers of Nalewki, the Jewish district in Warsaw, visit their homes, little stores, and workshops, trying to end unfinished businesses and engaging with the representatives of the present-day citizens. The gesture of remembrance, which is the replanting and redeveloping a new mirabelle tree in the place of the damaged one, gives people hope for the restoration of balance and strengthens the bonds between the living and the dead.

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