Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulations

Value

£1,000,000

Partners and collaborators

Washington University in St Louis, also (as impact partners, for public engagement), the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership (HGRP, led by the Wiener Library) and, in the USA, the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University (HEFNU).

Description

With the passing of the final survivors, the Nazi genocide of European Jews is at last truly becoming historical. Yet antisemitic and other racial prejudice, hate speech, and violence are everywhere still present and indeed surging. In the context of ethnic and religious conflict, popularism, social and economic precariousness, and even pandemic, the Holocaust is variously invoked as a warning from history; a moral, legal, and political imperative to promote and even enforce universal human rights; and in social and cultural controversies from abortion, animal rights, and climate change to COVID-19 mask mandates and anti-vaccination misinformation.

This project aims to theorise Holocaust Literature (HL) as a literary system defined by inequalities of power, resources, and privilege between different experiences, geographies, and languages.

In Phase 1, the project's international, multi-lingual team will consolidate and critically assess recent developments in HL research, e.g. gender; minor languages; intersectionality; underrepresented sites and methods of mass killing; the role of translation and the publishing industry, etc. In Phase 2, we will build on new thinking in World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and Jewish Studies to explore how texts BECOME Holocaust Literature.

Focussing on the key concepts of context, canons, and circulations, we will compare across languages and contexts: 1. the social, political, and cultural conditions under which HL texts are composed at different times and in diverse places; 2. the mechanisms by which HL texts become canonical; and 3. how HL texts circulate transnationally and globally and impact within ever-changing memory discourses. The project promises new insights into the construction of HL, individual works, and the literary-theoretical debates that frame the project.

Working with our partners at the Wiener Library, in London, and the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University, in the USA, we will also engage the public in discussions of the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust for debates on the war in Ukraine, military intervention in present-day genocides, refugees, abortion, vegetarianism, and other such topics like antisemitic and other racial prejudice, hate speech, and violence are everywhere still present and indeed surging.

In the context of ethnic and religious conflict, popularism, social and economic precariousness, and even pandemic, the
Holocaust is variously invoked as a warning from history; a moral, legal, and political imperative to promote and even
enforce universal human rights; and in social and cultural controversies from abortion, animal rights, and climate change to
COVID-19 mask mandates and anti-vaccination misinformation. 

Impact

Will generate academic interest in the project from museums, academic institutions etc. It’s a large international team – 40 plus people from around the world, so will be seen as a major arts and humanities international collaboration. 

So, some organisations with interesting in promoting A&H success might be interested in amplifying—musuems, libraries, galleries, etc. 

Impact: likely to change academic curricula in schools and unis around the world, diversyfing texts taught beyond the usual handful taught now (Primo Levi, Anne Frank etc); likely to impact on thinking around questions of power in Holocaust literature and its reception; link into decolonising the curriculum debates etc---the volume will include, for first time, Holocaust literature written in Africa… 

We’re als working with Wiener library in London and https://hef.northwestern.edu, in the US on a series of public events.

Other impacts might be feeding into recent deabtes on Holocaust sigbificance in modern world.