Inheritance Trouble: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance. A book co-authored with Yasemin Yildiz (under contract with Fordham University Press).
Remembrance of the Holocaust has been central to Germany’s national self-understanding in the decades since the genocide. Yet, in the last sixty years, the population of Germany has been significantly transformed by migrations of guestworkers and refugees, many from Muslim countries. "Muslim immigrants" in particular are often described as unwilling to “integrate” into German society and uninterested in Germany history and the Holocaust. However, much evidence exists to complicate this picture. Drawing on the complementary scholarly expertise of its two collaborators in Holocaust studies, migration studies, and memory studies, this project assembles and analyzes examples of immigrants and postmigrants grappling with the history of Nazism and the Holocaust in a variety of arenas, including community activism, novels, essays, performances, and songs. Inheritance Trouble explores the effects of transnational migration on cultural memory, demonstrates the ways many immigrants take on the histories of their adopted societies, and interrogates the presumption of Muslim anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
This project was supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Remembrance of the Holocaust has been central to Germany’s national self-understanding in the decades since the genocide. Yet, in the last sixty years, the population of Germany has been significantly transformed by migrations of guestworkers and refugees, many from Muslim countries. "Muslim immigrants" in particular are often described as unwilling to “integrate” into German society and uninterested in Germany history and the Holocaust. However, much evidence exists to complicate this picture. Drawing on the complementary scholarly expertise of its two collaborators in Holocaust studies, migration studies, and memory studies, this project assembles and analyzes examples of immigrants and postmigrants grappling with the history of Nazism and the Holocaust in a variety of arenas, including community activism, novels, essays, performances, and songs. Inheritance Trouble explores the effects of transnational migration on cultural memory, demonstrates the ways many immigrants take on the histories of their adopted societies, and interrogates the presumption of Muslim anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
This project was supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (forthcoming from Stanford University Press; summer 2019)
When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak to this interconnection and show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity.
See Ann Rigney interview Michael Rothberg about The Implicated Subject here. See a Skype discussion of this forthcoming book (and the essay "Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject") with graduate students and faculty in the University of Leeds seminar on "Memory, Trauma and Violence."
When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak to this interconnection and show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity.
See Ann Rigney interview Michael Rothberg about The Implicated Subject here. See a Skype discussion of this forthcoming book (and the essay "Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject") with graduate students and faculty in the University of Leeds seminar on "Memory, Trauma and Violence."