Messan Tossa
Research Fellow (3/2021 - 7/2021)
Artefacts of Holocaust Literature in the African Context
The increasing interconnection of worlds due to the relativisation of material distance goes hand in hand with the transformation of local characteristics through global forms of representation. The virtual lack of distance leads to narratives from central worlds becoming paradigms, which then serve to explain future manifestations of analogue realities. This applies especially to the Holocaust, the literary representations of which have been used to document the Rwandan genocide. This parallelism is so trenchant that Robert Stockhammer in his book on the Rwandan genocide called this the ‘other genocide’, emphasising the unmistakable reference back to the Holocaust whenever one speaks of the Rwandan genocide.
This project questions the incorporation of poetic, aesthetic, and formal signs from Holocaust literature in fictionalisations of the Rwandan genocide.
Messan Tossa works in the State Archive of Togo and as a lecturer in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lomé. He completed his PhD in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lomé in 2014 and has previously held fellowships at German institutions such as the DAAD, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the State Library in Berlin. He has published numerous articles as well as the monograph Friedensdiskurse in der neueren deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bern 2018).
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