{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025929716820197884, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01501194131695667, 'mean_word_length': 5.740229885057471, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory

There has been a turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction. More precisely, and as Bernhard Schlink’sDer Vorleser (1995, published asThe Reader, 1996) andDie Heimkehr (2006, published asTheHomecoming, 2008), Jonathan Littell’s LesBienveillantes (2006, publishedasTheKindlyOnes, 2009),KateGrenville’sThe Secret River (2006), Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), Edward Jones’s The Known World (2003), Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), and Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007), amongst others, suggest, that turn has rendered the figure the perpetrator in empathetic terms, or rather raised the possibility, for the reader, of an empathetic or at least an affective relation to the perpetrator. This tendency in fiction is correspondent with recent critiques of memory studies, or rather what might be termed critical memory studies. Those critiques draw attention to the universalization of the victim’s identity in both the theory and practice of cultural memory, and suggest the possibilities of entertaining less palatable forms of identification, with the perpetrator, as a means of stemming such universalizing tendencies. This seems to have been an innovation in memory studies that is Holocaust-related, but it has been exported to other scenarios of cultural remembrance. The first concern of this essay is to question whether, if the universalization of the figure of the victim suggests a form of transculturalmemory that is all too homogeneous, the antidotal use of the perpetrator simply re-inscribes the same problem. Put otherwise, does the recent theory and practice of cultural memory that is perpetrator-centered make the perpetrator an appropriable figure available for facile identification across different cultural memories where once the victim figured such availability? After tracing and accounting for the universalising tendencies and logics that have so far been asserted, this essaywill considerways of reading the fictional perpetrator that reinstall its particularities as a figure around and through which the work of cultural memory can be conducted, and by which transcultural, comparative workmight take place – a node around which productive tensions and asymmetries between the remembrances of past events can be generated. Having done some conceptual groundwork for transcultural remembrance, this essay will turn its attention to one national instantiation of what might be called perpetrator fiction, twenty-firstcenturyNorth-American historical fiction that deals with the practice and institution of slavery, wholly or partly from themaster’s point of view.The reconceptualisation of how the figure of the perpetrator could be read in a particularized manner would not be complete without an assessment as to why he or she figures in the cultural remembrance of the present moment. In other words, memory studies’ foundational