Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed, art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human.

Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, UK. She is Editor, with Anthony Bryant, of "Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image" and of "Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures" (both I.B. Tauris) and is Series Editor of Tauris' "New Encounters" Series. Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. His recent publications include "Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film" (Berghahn, 2013). Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman are joint authors of "Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's 'Night and Fog', " which won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Best Book on the Moving Image, 2011.