Nadège Veldwachter

How would France’s history be rewritten by placing at its center what has been marginalized - ‘repressed memory’? This book project will address this daunting question through a comparative analysis of rarely studied cases in European historiography and francophone literature. The first case is the story of Black Francophone Caribbean victims of the Holocaust. Most scholars have consistently read efforts to construct a history of black victims of the Holocaust in terms of an African, Afro-German, and Afro-American negrophobia. While there have been some exceptions, this scholarship is insufficient to help our understanding of interrelated questions of history and memory in the geographical and rhetorical landscapes of the francophone world. I concentrate on this Caribbean experience under fascism and demonstrate that it encapsulates the tensions inherent in the models of citizenship and belonging that underwrite France’s relationship with the past. The second case study concerns the contentious conditions of publication and reception of the literary works born from the project, “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire.” [Rwanda: Writing in Duty of Memory]. By shedding light on the extreme censorship that Aimé Yann Mbabazi’s novel, Sheridan, encountered in the francophone literary circuits for delineating France’s implication in the Rwandan genocide, I will consider the ways in which literary and ideological concerns intersect and contradict one another. This study presents a shift in thinking about the possibilities and limits of ‘trauma literature’ in the creation of a national memory. In short, “Repressed Memories and the Invention of National Histories” creates innovative connections between literary texts, historical and military contexts in the growing body of research on legacies of war in France, Rwanda and the Caribbean.