Description
Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history.
Trade ReviewSarah Phillips Casteel’s beautifully written
Black Lives Under Nazism offers a startling new account of the memory of World War II and the Holocaust that centers Black artists and writers. Moving from internment camp art and memoirs by historical eyewitnesses to the novels, photography, and dance of later generations, Casteel’s book reveals how certain histories are rendered invisible while simultaneously showing us the power of art and literature to reanimate the forgotten past and decolonize hegemonic perspectives.
Black Lives Under Nazism is a fascinating work of recovery and a strong argument for a relational approach to memory. -- Michael Rothberg, author of
The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and PerpetratorsSarah Phillips Casteel’s rich, imaginative, and compelling study seeks to make visible the Black experience of the wartime period. Through her deft analysis of a diverse range of Black testimonial and creative work she brilliantly illustrates the limitations and possibilities these offer in creating countermemories of the Holocaust. -- Robbie Aitken, coauthor of
Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960The experience of people of African descent in the Third Reich has been hauntingly absent in the public imagination of the Holocaust. With her penetrating and sophisticated study, Sarah Casteel illuminates the lived histories of Black victims and survivors of the Nazi regime, thereby expanding the canon of Holocaust representation. -- Erin McGlothlin, author of
The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and NonfictionBlack Lives Under Nazism provides an in-depth analysis of a largely unknown corpus of Black African diaspora artworks and literature that address Black lives under Nazism. By making this corpus coherently visible, this book illuminates the complex relations of Black and Jewish experiences in World War II Europe and challenges extant scholarship in Black and Holocaust Studies. -- Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, author of
The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for MeaningfulnessTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Invisible and Invented Archives
Part I: Documenting the Past: The Artist as WitnessIntroduction to Part I
1. Outside the Frame: Josef Nassy’s Visual Diary of Internment in Nazi Germany
2. Broken Citizenship: Survivor Memoirs by Hans J. Massaquoi, Theodor Michael, and John William
Part II: Imagining the Past: The Artist as HistorianIntroduction to Part II
3. Jazz Fiction and the Holocaust: Testimonial Objects in the Novels of John A. Williams and Esi Edugyan
4. Performing to Survive: “Queen of the Trumpet” Valaida Snow in Fiction, Drama, and Graphic Narrative
5. Postmemorial Landscapes of Black Europe: Maud Sulter’s Alpine Photomontages
Coda: Dancing Out History in Oxana Chi’s
Durch Gärten TanzenNotes
Bibliography
Index
