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

Ed and Fran Sonshine Holocaust Education Lecture

Sarah Casteel (Carleton University)

"Making History Visible: Black Lives Under Nazism in Literature and Art"

In a little known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Germany and occupied Europe found themselves caught up in the Nazis’ genocidal campaign. In the absence of public commemoration, artists and creative writers have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Probing the boundaries of Holocaust memory and representation, this talk addresses the role of art in challenging the erasure of Black wartime history.

Sarah Phillips Casteel is Professor of English at Carleton University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her most recent books are Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2016), which won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and the co-edited volume Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (2019). Last spring she was a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in 2021 she held the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her book Making History Visible: Black Lives Under Nazism in Literature and Art is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

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This lecture will be delivered in-person at JHB100 and virtually via Zoom. To attend virtually, please click THIS LINK on Monday, February 13 at 4 PM.