Join the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and the Brandeis Community for “On the Margin of the Holocaust: Vichy Forced Labor Camps in North Africa, 1940-1945”
A Brown Bag Seminar with Aomar Boum
When: Tuesday, March 10, 11:00am—12:30pm
Where: Multipurpose Room (Room 236)
Shapiro Campus Center, Brandeis University
In the early 1940s, the colonial Vichy administration set up networks of forced labor camps in Algeria and Morocco to build a railroad system connecting the Sahara to the Mediterranean Sea. Using Muslim oral histories, Aomar Boum argues that these camps exemplify a model of internment in which Spanish Republican and European Jewish captives had a margin of hope of survival despite the harsh topography of the desert and environmental conditions that restricted their movements in and out of the camp. Boum addresses the bureaucratic management of camps and prisoners’ daily lives and analyzes the movement of internees between labor and internment camps in French North African colonies and their connections to camps in the French mainland. The collective experience of these camps by Jews and non-Jews contributes to both a historical ethnographic understanding of North Africa and a reevaluation of the Holocaust period.
Aomar Boum is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Cosponsored by
Islamic and Middle Eastern studies program
Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry
Free and open to the public | Bring your lunch | Light refreshments will be served
