Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion

This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II.

1.            Chapter 1 Introduction Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, And Germaine Tillion

2.            Chapter 2 Charlotte Delbo: Writing the Afterlife

2.1          Writings Informed by Past Experience

2.2          Inscribing the Afterlife

2.3          Configurations of Death, Feminine Links

2.4          Maternal Figures, Transforming Women

2.5          A Spectral Presence and Afterlives of the Deceased

2.6          Idealizing the Post-Internment Future

2.7          Effigies of Men in Literature

2.8          Echoes of Fears and Anxieties

2.9          Encountering Death in Spectres, mes compagnons

2.10        Conclusion

3.            Chapter 3 Noor Inayat Khan: Conceptualizing Resistance During World War II

3.1          A Literary Figure Emerges from the Prewar and Wartime Years

3.2          Creating Images of Resistance in Literature

3.3          Adapting and Blending Traditions of Sufism During Wartime Europe

3.4          Decoding Jakarta Tales in the Context of Resistance

3.5          New Resistance Narratives, Legends of War and Renewal

3.6          Nostalgia and Gendered Performativity

3.7          Princesses of the East: Empowerment, Exile, and Isolation

3.8          Powerful Feminine Voices and the End of an Era

3.9          The Sound of Sufism: Aède of the Ocean and Land: A Play in Seven Acts

3.10        Personal Accounts: Letters from Noor to Azeem

3.11        Conclusion

4.            Chapter 4 Germaine Tillion: Observations of Algeria and Ravensbrück

4.1          Rising to Prominence in the Twenty-First Century

4.2          Representations of Algeria and Ravensbrück

4.3          Creative Adaptation of Ethnological Methodologies

4.4          A Little Night Music: The Ethnographer as Impresario

4.5          A Tripartite Dynamic of Decline

4.6          Verfügbaren Are Born at Ravensbrück

4.7          Uses of Humor at Ravensbrück

4.8          Hierarchical Structures and a ‘New Zoological Species’

4.9          Death at Ravensbrück and in Algeria

4.10        A Post-Internment Publication and Revisiting Algeria

4.11        Conclusion

5.            Chapter 5 Conclusion: Women’s Reflections on Wartime Experiences

5.1          Three Factors That Made a Field Late in Flourishing

5.3          Prospects for the Future

5.4          Charlotte, Noor, and Germaine: Three Women of Engagement

Lara R. Curtis is a founder of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. She is currently a Five College Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.