Drancy–La Muette: Concentrationary Urbanism and Psychogeographical Memory in Alexandre Lacroix’s La Muette (2017)

OTOSAKA, Diane (2023). Drancy–La Muette: Concentrationary Urbanism and Psychogeographical Memory in Alexandre Lacroix’s La Muette (2017). Genealogy, 7 (1): 23.

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Abstract

That the Drancy transit and internment camp—the main camp from which Jews were deported from France—is currently inhabited, having reverted to its pre-war name ‘La Muette’ and initial function as a housing estate at the end of the 1940s, remains little-known. As a result of this multi-layered history, the site is deeply ambivalent, being both haunted and inhabited. Through a theoretical framework informed by psychogeography, this article brings to light the concentrationary presence that is layered onto the space of everyday life at the site of Drancy–La Muette and investigates the possibility of resisting the resulting spatial politics of dehumanisation. Through a close reading of Alexandre Lacroix’s novel La Muette (2017) and its spatial poetics, this article argues that it is by elaborating new ways of seeing, whereby the interpenetration of past and present, the visible and the invisible, comes to the fore, that the traumatic space of Drancy–La Muette may open up. This, in turn, allows for the circulation of affective resonances between the built environment and the individual, which resist the concentrationary logic.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	** Article version: VoR ** From MDPI via Jisc Publications Router ** Licence for VoR version of this article: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ** Peer reviewed: TRUE **Journal IDs: eissn 2313-5778 **Article IDs: publisher-id: genealogy-07-00023 **History: published_online 20-03-2023; accepted 14-03-2023; rev-recd 10-03-2023; collection 03-2023; submitted 18-01-2023
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Article, Drancy camp, La Muette, psychogeography, concentrationary, trauma, memory, affect, space, Holocaust memory, urbanism
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7010023
SWORD Depositor:	Colin Knott
Depositing User:	Colin Knott
Date Deposited:	06 Apr 2023 10:59
Last Modified:	06 Apr 2023 10:59
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/31743

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