Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art – Sarah Phillips Casteel

In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, Black writers and visual artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works of memoir, poetry, fiction, painting and photomontage illuminate both the relationship between creativity and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory. Probing the boundaries of Holocaust memory and representation, this talk draws attention to a largely unrecognized artistic corpus that challenges the erasure of Black wartime history.

Sarah Phillips Casteel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor of English at Carleton University. She has written and co-edited five books, the most recent of which is Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art (Columbia University Press, 2024). She has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Vienna and Potsdam and visiting fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg. The recipient of a Canadian Jewish Literary Award and a Polanyi Prize, she is a member of the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.

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