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The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art-the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe-proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

Facing Postmodernity explains French cultural theory by grounding it in the politics of the issues facing France today such as: * the breaking of the city * racism * the crisis of culture * new citizenship. It discusses some of the major responses to postmodernity by contemporary French thinkers, both the very well known -Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida - and those who will be less familiar to a non-French audience. In doing so, it addresses the questions central to the postmodern debate whatever country it takes place in; questions of history, of representation, identity and community.

\"Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.\"

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol’s key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

[...]they also extend its reach as a figurative, explanatory tool which serves to remind us how the retrieval of forgotten or repressed memories is closely linked to questions of power and ideology (why were these memories forgotten and repressed in the first place? what choices have been made - consciously or unconsciously - to foreground certain memories and efface others?) and the possibility of resistance to dominant power relations (are there other spaces, voices and practices which challenge the established order and question its apparent coherence and homogeneity?) So, for example, Battaglia relates the palimpsest to Michel Foucault's 'heterotopia' to reintroduce troubling features of a capitalist past in Havana that revolutionary Cuba wished to efface; Holdaway and Trentin use Derrida's understanding of the dual nature of the archive to reveal the tension between a normative sexual order and its other in Rome; Castro highlights the counter-culture to colonial Luanda; and Davidson situates Barcelona's monumental Umbracle within the longer-term trajectory and transformation of the city, often in opposition to the Spanish capital and, indeed, empire.

The works of the French writer Georges Perec could be described as a sustained interrogation or reading of everyday life. When tracing the lineage of those who preceded Perec in a similar encounter with the everyday, the roll-call (at least in French Studies) often starts with the nineteenth century poet Baudelaire and takes in Apollinaire, Surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes, amongst others – and then includes Michel de Certeau and other more recent city strollers and ludic re-enchanters of the banal. The list of writers on the everyday does not normally include Jean Cayrol, while,

Facing Postmodernity explains French cultural theory by grounding it in the politics of the issues facing France today such as: * the breaking of the city * racism * the crisis of culture * new citizenship. It discusses some of the major responses to postmodernity by contemporary French thinkers, both the very well known -Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida - and those who will be less familiar to a non-French audience. In doing so, it addresses the questions central to the postmodern debate whatever country it takes place in; questions of history, of representation, identity and community.

It might seem perverse to place a text that contains nothing explicit concerning memory in the preface to an essay on that subject. However, I am using the prose poem “Les Fenêtres” (The Windows) by the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire for this purpose, as the central premise of the poem—the imaginative and empathetic encounter with the other—is crucial to the work of memory that I wish to discuss in the film Je Veux voir (2008, I Want to See), directed by the Lebanese filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and the novel L’Empreinte de l’ange (1998, The