"The Plantation-Auschwitz Tradition: Reimagining Slavery in Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner"
Department: Jewish Studies
Date and Time: March 2, 2016 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: HIB 135
Event Details
Presented by Danielle Christmas
Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina
In William Styron’s best known novels, Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, two burgeoning discourses emerge: a commitment to the idea that economic motives can explain the histories of the Holocaust and slavery, and the different but equally developing commitment to the idea that racial sentiments against blacks and Jews are the defining feature of these histories. Styron’s much-criticized commitment to an economic explanation is considered alongside the fate of that explanation in Stanley Engerman’s and William Fogel’s controversial history of slavery, Time on the Cross. All of these works were controversial because critics claimed they failed to take racism seriously and, in failing to do so, produced what were regarded as exculpatory accounts of Holocaust and slavery perpetrators.