Michael Rothberg is a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel
Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University
of California, Los Angeles. Working in the fields of
Holocaust, trauma and memory studies, critical
theory and cultural studies, postcolonial studies,
and contemporary literatures, he developed the
concept of multidirectional memory. He is a founding
member of the Advisory Board of the Memory
Studies Association and a partner of the Network in
Transnational Memory Studies and Mnemonics:
Network for Memory Studies. In this interview, he
introduces the figure of the implicated subject, a new
category to analyze the political responsibilities in
the past, and presents his latest research.
1. In 2009 you published Multidirectional
Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the
Age of Decolonization, forging this new concept
that helped to analyse the transmission of the
past by relativizing the competition between
memories and allowing a new reading of the
relationship between them. How do you assess
the academic impact of your theory a decade
later? How has this concept evolved since then?
of competition: the idea that different memories
displaced each other from the public sphere. Too
much Holocaust memory meant not enough memory
of slavery, too much memory of slavery detracted
from Holocaust memory, etc. My counter-proposal
was that memories actually feed off of each other
in a productive dynamic. That doesn’t imply that
there are no conflicts or competitions. Indeed, we are
experiencing a similar moment right now in the US
where we are fighting over whether “concentration
My concept of “multidirectional memory” emerged camps” can only refer to Nazi camps or whether
out of the strong sense that I had in the first decade they might also describe the detention camps in
of the twenty-first century that both scholarship and which the US government is placing migrants and
public discourse were misunderstanding how public refugees from Latin America. What I was trying to
memory works. Much discussion of the clash of get at with the concept of multidirectional memory
different memory traditions (say, African American was the underlying dynamic of memory discourses,
and Jewish American in the US context) was which I continue to think are non-zero-sum and
premised on what I came to call a zero-sum logic based rather on borrowing, cross-referencing, and
INTERVIEW
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