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In the last two decades, flight and expulsion have emerged as critical topics in contemporary German literature and culture, with authors exploring narrative modes in literary texts that open transnational perspectives. Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003) and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge (2010) are examples of such texts, dealing with traumatic experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Second World War, while challenging exclusionary narratives. Both novels employ the railway journey, including places and objects associated with it such as the platform and the station, tracks and railcars, as a central motif. In the following, I will show the degree to which this motif allows for “multidirectional” (Rothberg) modes of “postmemory” (Hirsch) that transcend national borders and memory discourses. The railway provides a link between generations in both of the texts discussed. However, it also interlinks the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and Poles at the end of the Second World War with the experience of Holocaust victims. Can modes of postmemory in Jirgl and Janesch therefore be read as multidirectional, or do they simply equate distinct experiences, blurring distinguishing features of different groups’ suffering and historical contexts?

I examine US and Canadian Sikh diasporic politics through the lens of 1984 postmemory, or the collective memory of traumas not directly experienced but felt as such. I use interview data with US and Canadian Sikh community leaders to make the case that 1984 has been a crucial impetus for the majority of Sikh advocacy today, even that which does not directly engage the Indian state. Rather than craft a fresh political imagination, violence of the Indian state upon the Sikh body acts as a spectral force through which all continuing advocacy projects for Sikh belonging are filtered. I [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Leur Algérie, a 2020 documentary about remembering and representing the Algerian experience of immigrating to France's "rural desert"—or to what geographer Roger Béteille calls "la France du vide." The context for this analysis lies in the decline of the aging chibanis (North African "elders" or "grey hair") population in France. While the social issues they face (ranging from lodging, to pension, health, and social benefits) have received media and political attention, questions about their memory and its place in contemporary France point to a "vide mémoriel" (memory void) that has largely been filled by French cultural figures of Maghrebi descent. Thus, with Leur Algérie (2020), filmmaker Lina Soualem delves into the history of her paternal grandparents. Originally from the Laaouamer area in rural Kabylia, they raised their family in France, specifically Thiers, a small French town in the sparsely populated mountains of the Massif Central. This essay examines how Soualem uses scenery and silence to symbolize a memorial void and absence. It relates images of desert-like emptiness and "non-places" in both Thiers and Laaouamer to the gaps in the grandparents' narrative. Ultimately, it explores tensions between the experiences of Algerian immigrants in France and what Soualem identifies as their "invisibilization" in France's memorial space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how a contemporary music video can pass down memories and trauma in post-dictatorial Chile. Focusing on a video by the Chilean band Illapu, it uses theories of collective trauma and (post)memory to show how the video represents past traumas and challenges dominant narratives and current negationist discourses. The study finds that the video uses audio-visual and (inter)textual elements to make viewers reflect on the past, underlining its ability to counter attempts to deny or distort history. This contributes to understanding how music videos can serve as sites of “voiced postmemories” and act as powerful tools in the collective processing of traumatic events, promoting truth, justice, and reconciliation in post-dictatorial Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the author’s interview with her father, a Holocaust survivor. It asks how the circumstances of the interview, particularly the relationship between father, daughter, and gestating grandchild, impacted the exchange. Drawing on Henry Greenspan’s work and mentorship, it examines the grief of an unfinished story. Invoking the metaphor of the Kaddish prayer, she argues that the nature of listening is as contingent as the act of recounting. By centering these multiple contingencies, we can better engage with the complexities and humanity of survivors and their memories, enabling us to keep learning from them even after they are gone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My short story contributes to discussions about the relationship between memory and place. It is set in Muranów, erected on the ashes of the former ghetto, a space of absence and repressed guilt. Even though the quarter was razed to the ground, it is still part of the city's landscape and remains a haunting presence. It exists in fragments: memories, images, and ghost stories. The short story focuses on the connection between memory, trauma, and storytelling. The space of Muranów, a palimpsest of the past, becomes a trigger for re-examination of what has been forgotten and silenced. Moreover, it explores how a foreign language can serve as a tool through which painful and repressed stories can be (re)told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile hosts regular travelling exhibits about the country's recent traumatic past of 1973–1990. In this article, I study the visitor books (VBs) that accompanied travelling exhibits to the cities of Valdivia and Puerto Montt to examine their effect on the audience. The entries reflected a variety of writers, from younger generations to survivors and witnesses. The analysis shows that the VBs are used to exercise the right to memory, to confirm their 'duty to remember' manifested in the presence of transitional justice discourses, and to express emotions that seem to reflect a positive and healing effect. Moreover, it was proven that the nature of the visitor's memory (direct or postmemory) would showcase different reactions to the exhibit experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the real-life experiences of Indonesian exiles, Leila S. Chudori's Pulang explores the journey of an exile of the New Order regime attempting to come to terms with the trauma of the 1965 tragedy, and the inherited trauma of his daughter, who returns to the country of her father’s birth amid political turmoil. This research focused on revealing the discourse of exile as a victim who transmits their trauma to a subsequent generation, as well as the position of gender in the formulation of transmission, affecting the identification of trauma inheritance. Hirsch’s postmemory perspective was employed to analyze the process of trauma inheritance, which was rarely found in Indonesian literary works, as were the historical descriptive, causality, and comparison methods. The trauma inheritance experienced by the first generation is the trauma of loss due to the 1965 tragedy, which was then passed down to a child. Familial transmission becomes the basis of trauma inheritance, strengthened by affiliate transmission, which was a work of authentication in Indonesia. Gender plays a role in the affectivity of transmission, wherein transmissions involving fathers (exiles) and daughters are just as trauma-creating triggers. It is noteworthy that affiliative transmission fosters intersubjectivity among non-exiled female characters who are closely connected to the first generation, thereby enhancing the inheritance of trauma more effectively than familial transmission. The first generation is exiled and identifies its trauma by remembering and bringing with it Indonesian features, in various forms. In contrast, the second generation does it more concretely by becoming a real Indonesian. These findings underpin how an exile's trauma stemming from the 1965 tragedy can be passed on to the second generation, through a transmission process, a journey back to Indonesia, and gender relevance. Pulang redefines an exile as a victim and as an effort for reconciliation.

Blue Bayou (2021), a film by Justin Chon, presents issues of imagination, postmemory, and identity through self-referential techniques. Referring to Marianne Hirsch’s theory on postmemory, this article examines how this film represents imagined moments and how they serve as a postmemory of the history of Korean immigrants, and how this kind of forgetting constitutes the American shared experience. The findings and discussion show that imagined moments in Antonio's subconscious function as postmemory for Antonio, while the film itself serves as a postmemory for America’s imagination. It can be argued that Blue Bayou deliberately acknowledges itself as a film and as fiction to present the world that America imagines and understands. We argue that Blue Bayou conceives memory, fosters imagination, and acts as a documentation for the audience as well as for America’s fragmented memory.

Blue Bayou (2021), a film by Justin Chon, presents issues of imagination, postmemory, and identity through self-referential techniques. Referring to Marianne Hirsch's theory on postmemory, this article examines how this film represents imagined moments and how they serve as a postmemory of the history of Korean immigrants, and how this kind of forgetting constitutes the American shared experience. The findings and discussion show that imagined moments in Antonio's subconscious function as postmemory for Antonio, while the film itself serves as a postmemory for America's imagination. It can be argued that Blue Bayou deliberately acknowledges itself as a film and as fiction to present the world that America imagines and understands. We argue that Blue Bayou conceives memory, fosters imagination, and acts as a documentation for the audience as well as for America's fragmented memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the real-life experiences of Indonesian exiles, Leila S. Chudori's Pulang explores the journey of an exile of the New Order regime attempting to come to terms with the trauma of the 1965 tragedy, and the inherited trauma of his daughter, who returns to the country of her father's birth amid political turmoil. This research focused on revealing the discourse of exile as a victim who transmits their trauma to a subsequent generation, as well as the position of gender in the formulation of transmission, affecting the identification of trauma inheritance. Hirsch's postmemory perspective was employed to analyze the process of trauma inheritance, which was rarely found in Indonesian literary works, as were the historical descriptive, causality, and comparison methods. The trauma inheritance experienced by the first generation is the trauma of loss due to the 1965 tragedy, which was then passed down to a child. Familial transmission becomes the basis of trauma inheritance, strengthened by affiliate transmission, which was a work of authentication in Indonesia. Gender plays a role in the affectivity of transmission, wherein transmissions involving fathers (exiles) and daughters are just as trauma-creating triggers. It is noteworthy that affiliative transmission fosters intersubjectivity among non-exiled female characters who are closely connected to the first generation, thereby enhancing the inheritance of trauma more effectively than familial transmission. The first generation is exiled and identifies its trauma by remembering and bringing with it Indonesian features, in various forms. In contrast, the second generation does it more concretely by becoming a real Indonesian. These findings underpin how an exile's trauma stemming from the 1965 tragedy can be passed on to the second generation, through a transmission process, a journey back to Indonesia, and gender relevance. Pulang redefines an exile as a victim and as an effort for reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai's invocation of queer memory as "postmemory" in line with Marianne Hirsch's theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch's framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has highlighted the heterogeneity of second-generation Irish identities in Great Britain, yet the varieties of self-identification espoused by the English-raised children of Northern Irish parents remain almost wholly unexplored. This article redresses this neglect by examining the relationship between parentally transmitted memories of the Northern Ireland Troubles (c.1969–1998) and the forms of identity and self-understanding that such children develop during their lives in England. Drawing on original oral history testimony and using the concepts of narrative inheritance and postmemory as interpretive tools, it demonstrates the complex correlation that exists between parents' diverse approaches to memory-sharing and their children's negotiation of inherited conflict memory as they position themselves discursively within contemporary English society. Based on a close reading of five oral history interviews, the analysis reveals a spectrum of creative postmemory practices and identity enactments, whereby narrators agentively define themselves in relation to the meanings they attribute to inherited memories, or the dearth thereof, as they navigate their tangled transnational affinities and allegiances. The article also explores how these practices and enactments are subtly responsive to narrators' changing relationships to their narrative inheritances as their experience and awareness of their own and their parents' lives deepen over the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

María Teresa León's Las peregrinaciones de Teresa is a short story collection published in 1950. This article examines two of its stories from the perspective of the neologism transmemoria, which the author presents in her introduction, with the aim of exploring its critical potential for analyzing the essential meaning of the stories. This allows us to question the use that Hirsch, Young and Bedingfield have made of the concepts of postmemory and transmemory since the early 21st century to highlight the value of the production of "vicarious" discourses about the past by the second generation of exiles and immigrants based on their own reinterpretation of the trauma suffered by their parents. From the analysis of the two narratives and León's use of the term transmemoria, this article argues for an alternative model of memory in which the resulting narratives have an emancipatory role and in which utopia prevails over trauma and experience over inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s poems and performances as artistic representations of familial postmemory. Dycki’s poetry frequently concerns his family’s Polish-Ukrainian background and the impact of World War II and its aftermanth on the life of next generations. The article discusses how Dycki’s poetry, based on this particular family story, differs from Polish functional memory and common narratives about the war, postwar, and borderlands. The article argues that these contexts likewise shed light on Dycki’s celebrated poetry readings, which can also be seen an artistic staging of postmemory that modifies Polish cultural image of the borderland region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) engagement with Holocaust survivors and their photographs. A key concern is photographs and testimonies' roles in the transformation of individual memory into the cultural memory of the Holocaust. Of concern is why and how private photographs are used as a significant resource in IWMs Holocaust Galleries and the impact that on the museum’s narrative of Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust. The article acknowledges the challenges faced by curators as they strive to accommodate the expectations of stakeholders whilst simultaneously maintaining historical accuracy and engaging the reflective capacities of visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced border changes and population transfers have affected many nation-states. However, memories of these events are usually described as part of a "unique" national memory of cartographic violence, "lost" territories, and victimhood. In popular representations, often reinforced by the personal memories of the wartime resettled, the territories ceded from Poland (Kresy) and Finland (Karelia) to the Soviet Union after World War II are remembered and imagined as "timeless" places which preserve and encapsulate "Polishness" and "Finnishness." "Territorial phantom pains" is a central framing idea for us. We understand phantom pains as a social emotion related to memories and postmemories that tells members of a community that the body of their nation is not complete without the detached territories. Phantom pains are nostalgic, romanticizing, but also exclusive keeping memories of the territorial loss as not (only) memories of personal loss of home and heimat, but of a national loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I contend that both HIV and AIDS must continue to be seen as crises if the pandemic is ever to be brought to an end. I start by exploring the presence of death imagery in Danez Smith's poetry in light of Marianne Hirsch (2008) and Samuel O'Donoghue's (2018) reflections on postmemory, arguing that AIDS haunts the experience of HIV in Smith's work in the form of postmemory. Based on this idea, I engage with the ongoing debate about the "post-crisis era" (Kagan, 2018; Rofes, 1998), and critical "post-AIDS discourse" (Basu et al., 2022; Walker, 2020) to claim that postmemory constitutes one of the multiple expressions of the "network of crises" which AIDS and HIV continue to be in the 21st century (Cheng et al., 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1984, Sikhs were massacred following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Cultural expressions attempt to foreground the haunting legacies of this genocide. This paper explores Harpreet Kaur's documentary, The Widow Colony- India's Unsettled Settlement which unfolds as trauma testimony of the understudied conflict, contextualizing the spectral wounds of Sikh widows and their struggle for survival. Using hauntology and postmemory as critical lens, this article examines the spectral wounds of 1984 Sikh genocide. It also focuses on the gendered dimensions of violence against Sikh women by enunciating their doubly victimized sensibility through their experiences of shame, trauma and suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Deirdre Madden's Time Present and Time Past through the lens of Marianne Hirsch's theory of postmemory, focusing on the role of photographs in bridging gaps between generations and constructing narratives about traumatic events. Despite a societal inclination towards anti-nostalgia and a desire to forget past concerns in favor of newfound prosperity, the main characters deal with a past that intrudes into the present in a quasi-traumatic form. To assay such fractured identity formation in characters, characteristic of post Celtic Tiger Ireland, this article explores memories as one's inseparable source of identity. As such, Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory will be used to understand the connection between traumatic memory-formation and identity formation shared among the survivors of catastrophic events. Such an abstract connection invites an examination of photography as a means to transfer meaning, memory, and identity from one generation to another, meditating the relationship between the past and the present. This article concludes by paying special attention to how postmemory works as a healthy means of grappling with unresolved traumas, leading the characters towards an ethical form of remembering the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the consequences of parents’ absence in transmitting the memory of homeland in Rawi Hage’s Carnival (2012). This narrative demonstrates how storytelling could reflect on the protagonist’s memory of home and origins as an Easterner. Besides, it analyzes the significance of using the transmission of memory and how it could shape the second generation’s identity. In such a diasporic literary work, the protagonist, Fly, attempts to construct their own identity even in the absence of their parents; however, traumatic memories about childhood cause a deep disparity in the mind. Hage’s Carnival identifies the circus life where the protagonist was born and raised as an old memory. Further, it identifies the flying carpet, inherited from the protagonist’s father, as a path to an imaginary space. The latter represents an escape from a miserable life. In this respect, the memory transmission of Fly is studied based on Hirsch’s conception of postmemory and Erikson's theory of psychosocial development and identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2020, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile started the digital project Epistolario de la memoria, which aggregates letters addressed to victims of the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990). The first epistolary consisted of 34 letters from grandchildren to their disappeared or executed grandparents, which constitutes the corpus of this article. The letters were analysed to examine the grandchildren’s aims, commonalities, and postmemory discourse. The results show that for these young people, the victims are a constant and desired presence in their everyday life. Grandparents are memorialised in sobremesas (family conversations), through photographs and artefacts, as well as through embodied forms of memory such as names passed to descendants and inheritance of personality traits. In their letters, these grandchildren highlight their inherited memories, manifest their commitment to memorialisation and justice, express the pain of absence, and reflect on the presence of the past in the present. This study informs the field of Trauma and Memory Studies and Discourse Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the way in which conflict-generated diasporas pass on collective memories of a violent past onto the next generation. It contributes to uncovering the intergenerational memory transmission patterns in the diaspora by examining how new generations inherit the experiences of a violent past from their parents and mobilise and demobilise around issues concerning such past. By focusing on the Kurdish diaspora as a case study, the authors suggest that diasporas gradually form collective memories that may align with or differ from the narratives of those who stayed in their home countries. The collective memory of diasporic communities is also shaped by various factors related to their new countries of residence. This diasporic memory is ever evolving, influenced by each new generation that not only inherits but also reinterprets the shared memories, asserting their own agency in this ongoing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shared trauma and slow violence caused by industrial disasters alter the collective environmental memory of the surviving population. The survivors and victims of mercury poisoning are a case in point that exist as memorial remains of eco-sickness. Industrial disaster comics galvanise such discussions as concerns of environmental, social, and biological damage. The Minamata Story: An Eco Tragedy, written by Sean Michael Wilson and Akiko Shimojima, visualises the chaotic memories of the mercury poisoning disaster that ravaged the Japanese village of Minamata in 1956. Mediated through witness accounts and the research expeditions of the protagonist Tomi, the comic portrays the spatial landscape of Minamata as a container of memories. The Minamata Story illustrates the psychosomatic damage of the eco-crime on human body, and the resultant social vulnerability of victims in their post-disaster lives. It exposes the typical portrayal of the victims as toxic embodiments and assumes an empathetic perspective which is pitted against the medicalisation of the identities of survivors. The long-lasting nature of the biological damage qualifies the text as a case for intergenerational trauma and postmemory. Taking these cues, the present article analyses the representation of environmental memory, and reviews the visualisation of eco-sickness in industrial disaster comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Armenian Memory Project (AMP) is a collaborative effort designed to harness the energy and resources of the University of Connecticut and the New England Armenian community for the goal of fostering greater understanding of the region's Armenian cultural heritage and the impact human rights crimes had on the Armenian community. In 2019, students and faculty from the university worked with Armenian American institutions and individuals on an initial component of the AMP, employing digital media technology to tell the story of one immigrant Armenian family, the Dildilians. A unique course was created to produce a documentary film centring around this family's experiences in Ottoman Turkey before, during, and after the Armenian Genocide. Designed and taught by a documentary filmmaker with support from a family archivist/historian, the course brought students together in a collaborative learning experience. By immersing themselves in the family's extensive photograph archive, these students came to understand the important role that the past continues to play in the lives of present-day Armenians. Furthermore, by taking on the responsibility as storytellers of the Dildilian narrative, students developed a deeper identification with this distant history and, in a wider sense, an appreciation for the ethical value of memory in bearing witness to the past. This collaborative and participatory framework for teaching using archival collections can serve as a model for creating a transformative learning experience in the study of human rights, war, and genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partiendo del concepto de posmemoria (Marianne Hirsch) y algunos estudios sobre memorias materiales de la violencia política del siglo XX en España y América Latina, el presente artículo aborda el papel de los objetos testimoniales en la transmisión generacional del trauma de la guerra civil española y de la dictadura franquista. En concreto, se examina cuáles son las formas y funciones de las antiguas pertenencias de los testigos en el teatro de la memoria. Centrándose, de modo ejemplar, en las obras Bagaje (1983), de Jerónimo López Mozo; Santa Perpetua (2010), de Laila Ripoll; y La armonía del silencio (2016), de Lola Blasco, el estudio explora las diversas posibilidades que tiene el teatro para poner en escena estos objetos o, al contrario, para marcar su ausencia o su estado latente. Asimismo, el análisis pone de relieve el potencial de los objetos testimoniales para poner en marcha trabajos de la memoria, afectar a los personajes, así como para influir en la acción, el tiempo y el espacio dramáticos.

This article examines the relation between music and the transgenerational trauma of the Pontic Greeks - the descendants of the 1923 Black Sea [Karadeniz] refugees. More specifically, the article concerns the 1921 destruction of the Santa locality, in Gümüşhane province, and how the memory of this violence is negotiated in the practice of dialogical and participatory singing called parakathi or muhabeti. It is demonstrated how muhabeti enables Pontians to cultivate an empathic postmemory of the 1920s refugees’ Santa trauma and what this might mean for trauma theory in general.

The Hungarian-born English contemporary poet George Szirtes has written several times about two traumas of his family history: the Holocaust, which both his parents survived, while several of their relatives perished, and the Revolution of 1956, which forced them into exile. My paper focuses on two major narratives about Szirtes’s mother: a cycle of poems “Metro” (1988) and a biography in prose The Photographer at Sixteen (2019). Exploring the differences in perspective and form as well as the similarities in themes and structure, I seek the answer to the questions how one’s own memories are intertwined with the past of the communities where one belongs; how these controversial sets of memories might lead to internal conflicts; and how the memory of one’s predecessors are being transformed by the process of the speaker’s own transformation in the time span of three decades. Investigating these aspects, I argue that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory not only proves to be instrumental in understanding several books by Szirtes better but also that Szirtes goes one step further than Hirsch by revealing how individual memory not only is embedded into and influenced by communal memory, but also is constructed in the form of family memories passed on from one generation to the next.

In the paper, I critically discuss the commemorative exhibition “Asia Minor Hellenism: Heyday-Catastrophe-Displacement-Rebirth” (Athens, Benaki Museum, 2022–2023), examining the role of postmemory in the shaping of national identity in contemporary Greece. Building my analysis on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, I draw attention to commemorative exhibition practices and the intergenerational transmission of collective traumatic experiences related to dark events of national significance. Touching upon issues concerning the civilianization of war, I interrogate commemorative exhibitions as prefabricated events, bringing to the fore the selective management of collective memory through exhibition design.

This article examines a sub-genre of postmemoirs which have been published since the mid1980s, written by children and grandchildren of veteran combatants of the Allied Forces. These British and American generational texts both preserve and unveil hidden historical memory of these men’s participation in what is often referred to as the deadliest war in human history. The silent suffering of these veterans and their families had not been widely disclosed until Stephen Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan opened a Pandora’s box. And yet, it remains an enigmatic memory in the collective consciousness of the post-war period. These writers recount the experiences not only of their fathers’ wars, but of homecoming and the subsequent psychological impact of the war on family life, whilst also attempting to understand and come to terms with their own traumatic resonances rooted in these veterans’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I discuss some examples of these texts, which include writers such as Germaine Greer, Lucinda Franks, Leila Levinson, Cole Moreton, or Carol Schultz Vento, who have written within this postmemoir sub-genre. I discuss some common approaches to these postmemorial narratives, which interweave tropes of archival romance, confessional literature, and historiographic metafiction. These family postmemoirs challenge the oft mythologized cultural memory of the ‘Good War’, question the meaning of heroism, and reveal the unspoken traumas of post-war familial life, and ultimately contribute not only to disclosing an unknown history but to broadening the thematic horizons of postmemory to the post-generations of Allied ex-servicemen.

This article describes two aspects of an exploratory international online study conducted by written questionnaire in the years 2021-2022. One focus of the study was on the personal importance/meaning participants ascribed to their Jewish Lublin roots. A second focus was on the role Lublin stories played in participants' lives, i.e., the presence/absence of such stories in family life, the age/stage of life when Lublin stories were first heard, the content and tone of these stories, and whether a relationship could be detected between the narratives heard and importance ascribed by the participants to their Lublin roots. The participants were those who, or whose ancestors/families, originated from Lublin but left the city decades ago, mostly during the twentieth century. These participants now live in countries around the world. Preliminary quantitative information and qualitative analyses hinted at differences among the study's sixty respondents. These differences were most often associated with (a) the period of history during which respondents or their families left Lublin; (b) how closely/directly the lives of those who left had been touched by events of the Holocaust; and (c) how much time had elapsed, and how many generations came, between those who left Lublin and their now-living descendants. Selected results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Res Rhetorica is the property of Polish Rhetoric Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores Lily Brett's The Auschwitz Poems (2004) and Elizabeth Rosner's Gravity (2014), two female-authored second-generation poetic renditions of the Holocaust. Examining these works through the lens of postmemory, my goal is to shed new light on the intergenerational transmission of trauma from a gendered perspective, focusing on its connections with poetry. I argue that both anthologies share at the core of their narrative a gender-focused layer of meaning, which penetrates into a postmemorial experience that is to a great extent defined by this social construct. This essay fosters scholarship on postmemory by conceiving it as a double-edged process encompassing both aesthetics and a form of social activism, and informed by feminism, which is mirrored in the reconception and rethinking of both the female body and gender hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Ondaatje's fictionalized memoir Running in the Family (1982) and his novel Anil's Ghost (2000) are thematically concerned with a return to the country of birth and a confrontation with the past, both individual and collective. In both the memoir and the novel, the history of the author's native Sri Lanka is not only consciously recorded, but also inscribed on material traces and on the human body, "terribly" and insidiously shaping subsequent generations. The article argues that this unconscious, hidden past involves gradual changes and developments that occur imperceptibly over the long term, including events whose effects are transmitted unconsciously through intergenerational (epigenetic) transfer and imprinted on individuals and communities. In both works, Ondaatje adopts a long-term perspective reminiscent of Fernand Braudel's longue durée to rethink the Sri Lankan past in a way that dismisses a deterministic idea of historical inevitability. As argued by Walter Benjamin and contemporary interpreters of the longue durée, the future is not predetermined. The past holds unrealized potentialities, which may inspire and shape alternative futures. What sustains this way of thinking is a belief in the power of counterfactual thinking to subvert the inevitability of the current order or values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigerian-British writer and playwright Biyi Bandele Thomas' novel Burma Boy (2007) is inspired by his father's combat experience in the Burma Campaign of World War Two. This postmemorial re-enactment not only commemorates his father but also the marginalised black African soldiers who participated in that campaign. Critical attention paid to Bandele's work has noted his surrealistic and satirical style, usually in alignment with a post-colonial epistemology. This paper aims to show how the novel evokes the origins of a trauma and the futility of war within an African consciousness, alongside broader ontologies concerning the modern condition. I contend that through an aesthetics of the Absurd, as outlined by Albert Camus, Burma Boy not only evokes the absurdity of war but transcends its temporal wartime boundaries by offering a broad reflection on the fundamental cause of the author's father's wartime trauma: the divorce of humankind from the reality of existence. Thus, I conclude that this post-generational novel leverages an aesthetics of the Absurd to address contemporary political and environmental concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrea Tompa's novel A hóhér háza (2010; Eng. trans. The Hangman's House, 2021) gives insight into a teenage girl's coming of age during the last decades of the Ceauşescu regime. Recounting the story of three generations of a Transylvanian intelligentsia family, from the 1940s until the fall of the dictatorship in 1989, the novel depicts all the crucial moments of 20th-century Transylvanian history. At its crux stands a journey of self-discovery, which gains meaning in the context of the family history. This duality is reflected in the hybridity of the novel's genre. Tompa's work is of a hybrid genre that, in addition to the dominant presence of the autobiographical novel, encompasses elements of the Bildungsroman and the family novel. Self-discovery and family history are joined together in the protagonist's character, as the traumatic experiences of the family past become crucial parts of the protagonist's self-knowledge and personality through postmemory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay troubles the application of Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory" to the Cambodian postwar generation's relationship to the Khmer Rouge regime and the war, instead proposing the term "nonmemory" as a description of what we who are not survivors of that war tend to understand as an absence of narrative regarding the war and the regime. In doing so, it calls attention not to the silence of Cambodian survivors but to Cambodian American second‐generation treatments of survivor silence. Instead of "breaking the silence," it offers for the purposes of deep and critical contemplation the figure of the kapok tree, reputable and fabled to Cambodians, toward a concept of the epiphytic, understood as a multilayered life‐giving, anti‐ and de‐colonial force in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about "Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures" based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers' long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Using the case of an undergraduate graphic design course taught in a Colombian private university, this article focuses on ways of teaching memory – historical, collective, cultural and individual. The authors emphasize the importance of the critical and socially responsible approach in education. Drawn from critical pedagogies and affective memory studies, the authors discuss the journey of the students of rediscovering alternative realities of their city and country and learning to acknowledge the complexity of memory and multiple forms of its mediation in a socially fragmented post-conflict society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the Spanish documentary related to the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship has experienced a verifiable boom. At the same time that interest in the past grew, it was possible to see, in the words of Enzo Traverso, how the «I» burst into the writing of history. These new discursive practices, described by some authors as hybrids between fiction and history, have also been adopted by some Spanish documentary filmmakers belonging, for the most part, to the so-called «post-memory generation». The objective of this essay is to analyze this trend from a theoretical perspective while focusing attention on three especially relevant documentary films: Mi tío Ramón (Ignacio Lasierra, 2015), Canción a una dama en la sombra (Carolina Astudillo Muñoz, 2021) and Apuntes para una herencia (Federico Robles, 2018). We will analyze the use that these products make of that «I» introduced and conceptualized as a problematic element within the writing of history, and that originates from avant-garde products and related to family cinema and found footage, the case of the film by Astudillo, to others closer to the strategies of autofiction, as is the case of the work of Federico Robles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]