The Camp

Narratives of Internment and Exclusion

Edited By: Colman Hogan, Marta Marin-Dòmine

£39.99

Camps are diverse: from extermination and concentration to refugee and detention. This book explores the universal structure of the camp, analyzing how narratives of internment and exclusion become potential sites of agency and testimony.

The camp is nothing if not diverse: in kind, scope, and particularity; in sociological and juridical configuration; in texture, iconography, and political import. Adjectives of…

The camp is nothing if not diverse: in kind, scope, and particularity; in sociological and juridical configuration; in texture, iconography, and political import. Adjectives of camp specificity embrace a spectrum from extermination and concentration, to detention, migration, deportation, and refugee camps. And while the geographic range covered by contributors is hardly global, it is broad: Chile, Rwanda, Canada, the US, Central Europe, Morocco, Algeria, South Africa, France and Spain.

And yet—is to so characterize the camp to run the risk of diffusing what in origin is a concentration into a paratactical series of “identity particularisms”? While The Camp does not seek to antithetically promulgate a universalist vision, it does aim to explore the imbrication of the particular and the universal, to analyze the structure of a camp or camps, and to call attention the role of the listener in the construction of the testimony.

For, by naming what cannot be said, is not every narrative of internment and exclusion a potential site of agency, articulating the inner splitting of language that Giorgio Agamben defines as the locus of testimony: “to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living.”

Marta Marín-Dòmine was born in Barcelona and lived in London and Toronto before graduating from the University Autonoma of Barcelona in Translation Studies with a dissertation on Psychoanalysis, Translation and Literary Theory. Her current research concerns Contemporary Catalan and Spanish literature focusing mainly on postwar literature and the literature of Spanish survivors of various concentration camps. She is now working on the problematics of memory and their impact on cultural productions. She currently teaches in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada where she co-directs the Research Group for the Study of the Literature of Concentration Camps World-Wide.

Colman Hogan has a background in theatre, tree-planting and translation, received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto, and has lectured in literature and film at the University of Victoria, WLU, OCAD, and the U of T. His research interests include science fiction, psychoanalysis, writing pedagogy, and representations of violence; he is a member of the Research Group for the Study of the Literature of Concentration Camps World-Wide. He currently teaches at Ryerson University, Toronto.

Colman Hogan is a lecturer in English at Ryerson University, Toronto. Marta Marín-Dòmine is Assistant Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, and author of Traduir el desig. Psicoanàlisi i traducció (2004).