Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory
argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the
lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of
survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not
through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply
mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down
within the family and the culture at large.
In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual
legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne
Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's
chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian
Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such
as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel
Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy
Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and
identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial
aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her
analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the
familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other
movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to
connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she
brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more
intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a
multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in
memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new
understanding of history and our place in it.
