"Good Empire", "Bad Empire" : Representations of Nazism and Holocaust in Sub-Saharan African Literatures

Titelangaben

Ndi, Gilbert Shang:
"Good Empire", "Bad Empire" : Representations of Nazism and Holocaust in Sub-Saharan African Literatures.
In: Bosshard, Marco Thomas ; Patrut, Iulia-Katrin (Hrsg.): Globalisierte Erinnerungskultur : Darstellungen von Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust und Exil in peripheren Literaturen. - Bielefeld : Transcript , 2020 . - S. 271-288 . - (Edition Kulturwissenschaft ; 198 )
ISBN 978-3-8394-4724-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447246-014

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Abstract

The human tragedy unleashed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War remains a phenomenon whose ethical resonances reach wide beyond the fron-tiers of Europe and continue to serve as a paragon of systematically organized state terror and human abjection in contemporary history. Both in the discourses on global human rights regimes and in the popular consciousness at an almost global scale, Holocaust memory has generated, in the words of Amos Goldberg, »a common identity or common awareness of belonging that creates a very large kind of imagined community of the global village, or at least the Western global village« (Goldberg 2015: 5). However, in parts of Africa, especially those ›for-merly‹ under the French and British Empires, colonial discourses in relation to the nature of the Nazi horror inevitably entered the self-defensive colonial repre-sentation of ›good empire‹ versus ›bad empire‹ that had earlier characterized Eu-ropean powers’ responses to the tragedy of Leopold II’s blood rubber in the Congo in the last quarter of the 19th century. In both Anglophone and Franco-phone African literatures, especially in spaces where African colonial subjects were galvanized to contribute to the liberation of the European metropolises and their overseas territorial possessions, representations of Nazism/Holocaust be-came subject to contending discourses. Both the pioneer and ensuing generations of post-war African writers began to interrogate the way Nazism and Holocaust were inscribed in the discursive infrastructure intended to re-assert French/British political and moral authority in Africa.