Collective memory: theory and politics—POSTMEMORY

Chris Weedon & Glenn Jordan (2012): Collective memory: theory and politics,
Social Semiotics, 22:2, 143-153


Post memory


In her work on the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch uses the term postmemory:

to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to
the experience of their parents, experiences that they ‘‘remember’’ only as stories and
images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to
constitute memories in their own right. (Hirsch 1999, 8)
Hirsch argues that this is memory of a different qualitative and temporal order from
the memories of survivors, since it is marked by ‘‘its secondary or second generation
memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness’’ (1999, 8).    p147

Hirsch defines postmemory as:

not an identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through
cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance,
identification and projection. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences and thus also the memories of others as one’s own, or more precisely, as experiences
one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story. (1999, 8 9)    p148

This signals a shift from individual to a broader cultural, collective memory in which
‘‘it is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the
same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other
proximate or distant cultures and subcultures’’ (Hirsch 1999, 9). Hirsch argues
that this can bring the question of ethics to the fore since it signals ‘‘an ethical
relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a
model: as I can ‘remember’ my parents’ memories, I can also ‘remember’ the
suffering of others’’ (1999, 8 9).
p148