Description: An exploration of the Holocaust victim experience that comparatively contrasts the differing experiences of colonised peoples and slaves in Africa and early America.
Brief description: Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, at San Francisco State University, USA. She also is the editor of the Bloomsbury Series, Comparative Jewish Literatures. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Her book, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), analyzes the constitutive side of victimization within three groups, slaves in the Americas, Africans under German colonization, and death camp survivors of the Reinhard camps.
Review Quotes:
"[An] ambitious and complex book ... Significant for graduate collections. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty." --CHOICE
"Kitty Millet's study sounds the subjectivity of persecution by looking at victims' lived experiences of colonial occupation, physical confinement, and large-scale violence. I was moved as much as informed by her evocation of "what was lost" the sense of absence, the being with death, a feeling "outside the world," "a people without the memory of autonomy." A thorough and creative inquiry into the shared sense of experience." --Dennis B. Klein, Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies Program, Kean University, USA "With The Victims of Slavery, Colonialism, and the Holocaust, Kitty Millet has delivered an extraordinarily compelling interpretation of three historical spheres that are rarely examined comparatively. Drawing primarily on victim and perpetrator narratives, Millet's brilliant analysis focuses on the victims' self-imagination, including their minds and physical bodies, toward the goal of surviving persecution." --Michael Berkowitz, Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College London, UK "Kitty Millet's comparative study offers a thought-provoking exploration of the imagined communities of victims and perpetrators of mass atrocities. In lucid prose, she draws from individual narratives to consider the subjectivity of victimization. A valuable addition to Genocide Studies." --Kjell Anderson, Lecturer/Researcher and Coordinator of Master in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), The Netherlands