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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2017
This essay responds to Bryan Cheyette’s “Against Supercessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora.”1 It argues that Cheyette fails to evade certain forms of binary thinking, in particular those that polarize thought and action, theory and praxis. We see this persistence of binary logic in his discussion of my book Multidirectional Memory and in his engagement with the critic Aamir Mufti on the topic of Israel/Palestine and the legacies of Edward Said.
CheyetteBryan, “For Activist Thought: A Response to Bryan Cheyette,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 4.3 (2017): 424–439 .
2 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–264 Google Scholar; cf. 261.
3 See Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Pertinent discussions of Benjamin can be found on pp. 43–44 and 80.
4 My engagement with recent historical work on the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust can be found in Multidirectional Memory, pp. 102–07. My purpose in that section of the book is both to identify parallels between my conception of multidirectionality and emergent trends in the historiography of genocide and to reflect on ways that a theoretically informed memory studies approach can help us reconceptualize historical processes. In a more recent essay that further refines the theory of multidirectional memory—but which Cheyette does not cite—I also write of the need to consider the politics of multidirectional memory in relation to “a differentiated empirical history, moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices, and an ethics of comparison that coordinates the asymmetrical claims of those victims.” See Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53.4 (2011): 523–48. This essay is equally relevant to the question of Israel/Palestine that Cheyette also broaches and that I address later.
5 The one example of a historical study in this mode that Cheyette mentions is Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, which was published by Penguin in September 2008 while my book was in press. See also the previous footnote for my own engagement with this historiography.
6 Lionnet, Françoise and Shih, Shu-Mei, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 I explore this history in chapters 8 and 9 of Multidirectional Memory. In chapters 6 and 7 I also focus on the moment of 1961, where I trace intersections between emergent Holocaust memory and ongoing decolonization. For a book-length consideration of the history and memory of October 17, 1961, see House, Jim and MacMaster, Neil, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
8 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). I am also thinking here of Slavoj Zizek’s gloss on Marx’s theory of ideology: “They do not know it but they are doing it.” See Zizek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989)Google Scholar.
9 Ato Quayson interviews Mufti, Aamir, “The Predicaments of Postcolonial Thinking,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.1 (2016): 143–156 Google Scholar.
10 For my own attempts to think through some similar questions as those at stake here, see Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw” and “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine,” Profession (2014). http://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/05/02/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israelpalestine/.
11 Levi, Primo, “The Gray Zone,” The Drowned and the Saved , trans. Michael F. Moore in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. III, ed. Ann Goldstein, pp. 2434–2435 Google Scholar.
12 I am thinking especially of the following passage in “The Gray Zone”: “I do not know, nor am I particularly interested in knowing, whether a murderer is lurking deep within me, but I do know that I was an innocent victim and not a murderer. I know that murderers existed, and not just in Germany, and that they still exist, retired or on active duty, and that confusing them with their victims is a moral disease, an aesthetic license, or a sinister sign of complicity” (pp. 2439–40). As Levi makes clear here, there is a great distance between recognizing the way the Nazi system forced or cajoled some of its victims into positions of collaboration and declaring—as the film director Liliana Cavani did—that “We are all victims or murderers and we accept these roles voluntarily” (quoted in Levi, “Gray Zone,” 2439).