postmemory

English

Etymology

Coined by Marianne Hirsch. From post- +‎ memory.

Noun

postmemory (usually uncountable, plural postmemories)

1. A relationship that people of subsequent generations bear to the trauma of their forebears, which they cannot directly remember but rather know through stories, imagery, and behaviour.
   • 1997, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Harvard University Press, page 22:

     In my reading, postmemory is distingushed from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.

   • 2002, Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton University Press, page 87:

     The postmemory of rape not only haunts the present, however, as do the postmemories of children of Holocaust survivors, but also reaches into the future in the form of fear, a kind of prememory of what, at times, seems almost inevitable: one's own future experiences of being raped.

   • 2019, Stephen Frosh, “Postmemory”, in American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79(2), pages 162-3:

     This complexity of experience can be seen fully present in the area of postmemory studies, which is concerned with understanding how it can be that a person might feel inhabited by memories that come from somewhere or someone else—notably, from the traumatized generation.