Sarah Phillips Casteel. <i>Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art Reviewed by Naomi Sarah Taub</i>

If you study any subject for long enough, even one with the depth and magnitude of Holocaust literature, there may come a point where the horizon of novelty seems to fade. That certainly doesn’t mean that the art no longer captivates you, that the unimaginable loss no longer devastates you, or that the unyielding hatreds at the heart of Nazism cease to disturb you. But it can feel, at times, like they have lost the ability to surprise you. In such moments, you can only hope that a book like Sarah Phillips Casteel’s Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art comes along to tap you on the shoulder.When you turn around, what appears is not a new world per se, but one that has been present all along and yet “invisibilized” and “dis_remember[ed]”: a sprawling archive comprised of memoirs, novels, short fiction, drawings, photography, and choreography of African diasporic writers engaging with the Holocaust and World War Two. To capture the most thrilling aspects of the book, I will have to admit something no one likes to: of Casteel’s corpus, I had only heard of two or three authors. This, I suspect—or perhaps hope, for the sake of my dignity—would hold true for most people in Jewish studies. Thankfully, Casteel gives her texts the painstaking, fastidious, intimate, and descriptive attention they deserve. She also links these more obscure figures to one another, and to the “mainstream” of Holocaust studies (such as it is), with the judicious application of well-known trauma and memory studies concepts. Many of the questions at the heart of the book are also deeply familiar: What is the artist’s responsibility to history? What are the ethics of fictionalizing an event for which truth claims are of the utmost urgency? How do visual, textual, and performative representations work to restore identities stripped away by fascism, to bridge lacunae of traumatic memory, and surface histories that were either absent or only present as absences? Yet to ask even oft-repeated questions of such an unexpected archive has an invigorating effect.But Casteel will not allow us to overlook the problematic dimensions of that very unexpectedness. All aesthetic representations of the Holocaust have, in one way or another, confronted the claim that the first and paramount task of anyone who speaks, writes, or in any way depicts the Nazi genocide is to prove that it actually happened. For Casteel’s Black wartime artists and their descendants, there is yet another layer of proving that must take place. Not only do people (broadly speaking, of course) tend not to know or believe that the Nazis persecuted Black people, but they also tend not to know or believe that there were any Black people there in the first place, nor especially that people of African descent lived and worked and settled in Europe well before there was an “Africa” or “Europe” to speak of. In Casteel’s words, then, her aim is to “consider the role of art in the formation of collective memory” by recovering works that demonstrate how “art operates not only as a vehicle but also as an agent of memory—in particular Black wartime memory. Challenging the systematic erasure of Black histories and perspectives, the artworks surveyed here serve as a counterweight to hegemonic historical narratives” (3). The layered, multidirectional texts in her corpus, she adds, illustrate “the capacity of literature and art to generate countermemories that reframe our understanding of the past” by generating “unfamiliar images of World War II and the Holocaust—images in which European and African diaspora histories, fascism and colonial violence, are deeply and inextricably entangled” (8).The book is organized into two parts, differentiated by the level of mediation between the artist or writer in question and the events of World War II and the Holocaust. Part 1 thus focuses on art created in the internment camps themselves and survivor memoirs. In chapter 1, Casteel attends primarily to the work of Josef Nassy, a Surinamese visual artist of African, European, and Sephardic Jewish descent, who spent his internment in Ilag VII creating ink and pencil portraits that capture both the alienation and the camaraderie experienced by the group of Black artists and musicians imprisoned there. Nassy’s work thus demonstrates the vital role of creative expression in surviving the depredations of internment. As such, it “not only testifies to the presence of Black civilians in the Nazi camp system” but also complements better-known survivor artworks “by transmitting affective memories of Black civilian internment” that provoke us to challenge accepted frameworks of Holocaust representation (59). In chapter 2, Casteel explores the survivor memoirs of Hans J. Massaquoi, Theodor Michael, and John William within the context of “broken citizenship” as well as what she sees as the conflicted relationship between Holocaust testimony and the bildungsroman and their respective approaches to (re)constructing the self. Although the fragmentation of the subject is common across traumatic genres, “[i]n the case of the Black German memoirists, the pact of citizenship is also broken, still more profoundly eroding their sense of self and belonging” (87–88). However, in using the “democratic, accessible, and capacious” memoir form, they are able to vividly depict experiences, images, and timescapes that transcend the standard repertoire of Holocaust memory and prevailing Western narratives of the Second World War.Moving on to consider postmemorial texts, images, and performance art, part 2 focuses on younger artists who set themselves the weighty task of integrating Black experiences into the hegemonic Holocaust memorial culture so firmly established in the public consciousness through museums, monuments, and films. At the same time, these creators encourage their audience to maintain a certain skepticism toward this type of recuperation, specifically by “self-consciously foregrounding their own status as representations, by questioning the truth claims of realism, and by challenging the idea of a stable, recoverable past” (94). Chapter 3 brings together John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues (1999) and Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (2010), emphasizing their shared mixture of affiliative Holocaust testimony with jazz fiction, a genre that incorporates the improvisational and yet leitmotif-driven rhythms of jazz music to the prosaic form of the novel. These works are catalyzed by “testimonial objects,” which these postmemorial authors use to map out a complex and fraught network of fractured selfhood and implication that extends African diasporic Holocaust narratives backwards toward the transatlantic slave trade and forward toward the erasure of Black subjects in European identity narratives that continues even now (100). In chapter 4, Casteel considers an array of quasi-factual narrative works that center on the fabulous and fabulist figure of singer, dancer, and jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow. Snow, a Tennessee native, toured the world before undertaking a more sustained period of work in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942 she was arrested by the Nazis in Copenhagen and detained for a period of time under conditions that remain something of a mystery, as the harrowing stories she related to the US press after her release have been largely debunked. Snow’s life has proved a rich inspiration for a number of writers, for whom she is a powerful example of how Black women’s histories have been effaced while also, in her self-mythologization, occasioning a deep consideration of what it means to construct historical truth.Expanding incandescently on the subject of Black women’s erasure within the broader erasure of Black subjects in European history, Casteel closes with a detailed explication of the work of Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter. Sulter’s photomontages “[disrupt] the logic of the archive” and “[subvert] the evidentiary role of photography” as a means of unsettling received European histories in which Black lives are rendered unrepresentable. In the final section, “Coda,” Casteel brings us all the way back to our present moment through the interpretive dance choreography of Oxana Chi, whose Durch Gärten Tanzen “dances out” the forgotten story of Chinese-Jewish-Russian Tatjana Barbakoff. For Casteel, Chi’s piece “embodies the relationship between art, memory, and resistance—and the concomitant commingling of past, present, and future—that is at the heart of [Black Lives Under Nazism’s] larger artistic corpus” (192). Together and separately, then, these works offer us the opportunity, or perhaps task us with the responsibility, of reworking the past as a means of changing the future.If Black Lives Under Nazism has a weakness, it lies in a distinction Casteel borrows from Tina Campt between a “project of disruption” and a “project of recovery.” Although Casteel repeatedly insists that “to open up our understanding of . . . Holocaust representation by engaging with African diaspora works . . . is not simply an additive measure” (99), at certain points it seems that recovery is the book’s dominant mode; in those moments, it fails somewhat to go beyond mere addition. For example, some of Casteel’s textual analyses seem to largely recapitulate extant readings of canonical Holocaust literature and art without necessarily evolving our understanding of the underlying concepts. Another provocation I wish the book had taken up more thoroughly is that suggested by the titular reference to “Black lives,” which offers the tantalizing possibility of Casteel’s weaving her deep insights into the archive of Nazism’s Black victims into a conversation about contemporary US politics, which she ultimately does not. This is an immensely difficult subject to broach, of course. But given that we are in yet another moment in which the ability to claim a form of ownership over Holocaust memory and over the very concept of genocide is paramount, I would have very much appreciated Casteel’s reflections on it.But the thing is, if all Casteel aimed or managed to do was recover this dis_remembered archive and surface these invisibilized wartime experiences, even without disrupting our broader understandings of the representation of trauma, of kinetic performance as memory work, of contemporary diasporic identity politics, or of the relationship between art and history in Holocaust memorial culture, we would still have to say: Dayenu. That alone would have been enough, and Black Lives Under Nazism offers a great deal more.