Postmemory

MÓNICA SZURMUK

Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies

University Press of Florida

Lugar: Gainesville, Florida; Año: 2012; p. 258 - 263

The term "postmemory" originates within the field of memory studies in the United States towards the end of the 1980s to account for the experience of the generation of the children of Holocaust survivors, but it has already been used to explain the perdurability of trauma in other contexts. It was coined by Marianne Hirsch to define a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated. I have developed this notion in relation to the children of Holocaust survivors, but I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences. (22)