Reading connectivity in the Shoah and Transatlantic slavery: developing a framework alert to memory, trauma and the reinscription of the human

This thesis investigates the on-going debate over the convergences and divergences between the Holocaust or “Shoah”, as referenced here, and Transatlantic slavery in order to propose a new connective framework, based on Marianne Hirsch’s work on connectivity, in which to read them. Drawing on primary texts relating to Transatlantic slavery and the Shoah in both Francophone and Anglophone literature, as well as archival material, I argue that both historical processes arise in significant ways from racialised colonialism. An interdisciplinary methodology is adopted, drawing on postcolonial literary and historical critique. The thesis focuses on trauma and postmemory, which are studied in relation to the archives and neo-archives respectively. It is also argued that the neo-archives – a central focus of the research – serve to (re)inscribe the human and combat their erasure from the long-established archive and public memory. Based on the findings gathered from using a framework of connectivity, the thesis concludes that the literary study of these two modern regimes of terror reveals the épistème of racialised colonialism in the workings of modernity. This thesis’ arguments are centred in Paul Gilroy’s articulation of this debate in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and respond to Aimé Césaire’s challenge in Discours sur le colonialisme (1955) to investigate clinically, and in detail, the two historical processes.