Black Lives Under Nazism
Making History Visible in Literature and Art
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:5th Mar '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory.
This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.
Sarah 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 Perpetrators
Sarah 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, 1884-1960
The 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 Nonfiction
Black 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 Meaningfulness
ISBN: 9780231211963
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages