Book contents
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- 1 Ancient World Literature
- 2 The Silk Roads of World Literature
- 3 Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture
- 4 Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia
- 5 Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature
- 6 Globalism’s Prehistory: Technologies of Modernism
- 7 After 1945: Holocaust Memory, Postcoloniality, and World History
- 8 World Literature after 1989: Revolutions in Motion
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- Index
- References
7 - After 1945: Holocaust Memory, Postcoloniality, and World History
from Part I - Genealogies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2021
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- 1 Ancient World Literature
- 2 The Silk Roads of World Literature
- 3 Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture
- 4 Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia
- 5 Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature
- 6 Globalism’s Prehistory: Technologies of Modernism
- 7 After 1945: Holocaust Memory, Postcoloniality, and World History
- 8 World Literature after 1989: Revolutions in Motion
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter makes a case for the persistent salience of the Jewish Holocaust in postcolonial cultural discourse and especially literary production. It adopts the term contrapuntal memory to describe these entanglements, and considers what figures of world and history this archive offers. It is organized into three sections. The first examines how the colonial ordering of the world globalized the Holocaust, and considers two novels about Jewish internment in the British colonies. The second concerns the role of Holocaust memory in postcolonial Europe, as a means for both the assimilation and exclusion of migrant and minoritarian subjects. The final section reconsiders 1945 as a temporal threshold and historical rupture, and examines how the Holocaust might be situated in relation to the longue durée of racial modernity.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 163 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021