Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 1)
• I Familial Postmemories and Beyond
• 1 The Generation of Postmemory (p. 29)
• 2 What's Wrong with This Picture? (with Leo Spitzer) (p. 55)
• 3 Marked by Memory (p. 79)
• II Affiliation, Gender, and Generation
• 4 Surviving Images (p. 103)
• 5 Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art (p. 127)
• 6 Projected Memory (p. 155)
• 7 Testimonial Objects (with Leo Spitzer) (p. 177)
• III Connective Histories
• 8 Objects of Return (p. 203)
• 9 Postmemory's Archival Turn (p. 227)
• Notes (p. 251)
• Bibliography (p. 275)
• Acknowledgments (p. 291)
• Index (p. 295)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Hirsch (Columbia Univ.) is a prominent proponent of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. Certainly, this is an important concern, but memories (personal/cultural) of catastrophes are never easily forgotten. During 9/11 commemorations, one father remarked that he thinks "twenty-four-seven" of his son, who perished in the destruction of the towers. How acknowledgments of loss like this should be classified is a difficult question to answer. Is it postmemory or individual, familial, generational, transgenerational, communicative memory or part of cultural, political, social, collective, communal, national or historical memory? These are terms operative in the present academic-memory industry--in which various scholars struggle to create novel ways to capture others' suffering of loss. For Hirsch, Holocaust postmemory is memory of the second or third generation of the Holocaust, of those who "remember" the catastrophe second- or thirdhand. To pursue how postmemory works, she looks at not just the Holocaust but also mass killing of Kurds in Iraq and Palestinians who lost their homes with the founding of the state of Israel. She analyzes the role literature, photos, and objects play in the transmission of catastrophic memory from one generation to the next. This is a book for those concerned with the "erasure" of memory. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Comprehensive collections. R. C. Conard University of Dayton

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Marianne Hirsch is a professor of comparative literature and gender studies at Columbia University. Her most recent books are, with Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and, with Nancy K. Miller, Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory. Two of this book's chapters were written with Leo Spitzer, who is also the author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism and Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil, and West Africa, 1780-1945.