How activists across three continents turned the memory of the Holocaust into an argument against empire
Genocide’s Shadow offers the first global history of Holocaust memory during the years of decolonization, uncovering its unsuspected influence on anti-imperial protest and thought between 1950 and 1980. Following a cohort of European leftists and global South activists, Charlotte Kiechel traces how Algerian revolutionaries, French socialists, West German leftists, and Vietnamese legal scholars rethought the meaning of the Holocaust as European empires came to an end.
The book charts the rise and fall of an anti-imperial regime of Holocaust memory across three continents and three decades. It shows how individuals invoked the Holocaust for surprising and often revolutionary ends: to argue against torture, condemn U.S. imperialism, and build postcolonial nations. Scholars typically cite the early 2000s as when the Holocaust emerged as a “global memory.” Genocide’s Shadow demonstrates how decades prior activists deployed the Holocaust to challenge, rather than affirm, a liberal internationalist world order.
By documenting how the Holocaust informed midcentury debates about justice, revolution, and empire, Genocide's Shadow advances contemporary debates about the role of Holocaust memory in and for the global South. Crisscrossing activist networks within and beyond Europe, it shows how central the politics of decolonization were to the formation of our present Holocaust memory culture.