Debarati Sanyal

Debarati Sanyal

Debarati Sanyal

Category
Associate Professor Fellows
Department
French
2012-13

In her book project, “Dangerous Intersections: Complicity, Allegory and Holocaust Memory in Postwar France,” Debarati Sanyal (French) investigates the cultural politics of trauma, complicity, and Holocaust memory from postwar to contemporary France. She examines fiction, theater, film, and contemporary theory in light of their strategies of complicity and the dialogue they forge between different legacies of historical violence, such as the Holocaust and colonialism. Professor Sanyal argues that, in dismantling the singularity of the Shoah, such gestures mobilize a transnational politics of memory. Yet these memorial convergences remain "dangerous intersections" in their necessary betrayal of an event's particularity. Sanyal’s research contributes to the emerging field of transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory, and more broadly, to transnational, comparative analyses of historical violence from a literary perspective.