Suji Kwock Kim's “Generation” and the Ethics of Diasporic Postmemory

Regarding her highly acclaimed first book of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country, second-generation Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim has stated that she considers the representation of the traumatic experiences of the Korean War as “the responsibility that one has, in terms of using the imagination as a means of compassion, and understanding things one couldn't have experienced.” If Notes from the Divided Country is a work created from a sense of ethical responsibility, we could perhaps also see it more specifically as a project of ethical memory and ask, along with ethnic studies scholar Jodi Kim, “What does it mean to want to represent or ‘remember’ a war that has been ‘forgotten’ and erased in the U.S. popular imaginary, but has been transgenerationally seared into the memories of Koreans and Korean Americans, and experienced anew every day in a still-divided Korea?” Notes from the Divided Country in many ways grapples with this very question and can be seen as an effort to remember the “Forgotten War” through vivid, chilling, moving poems that depict the enduring trauma of wartime violence from the perspective of diasporic postmemory. Taking Hirsch's work on Holocaust photos as a point of departure, this article reads in the poem “Generation” the poetics of postmemory and the ethics of memory from the perspective of diasporic subjectivity

From Tell Ye Your Children to Dinner with Polpot: the challenges of globalizing Holocaust memories at Sweden’s Living History Forum

Established in 2003 as Europe’s first publically funded national educational authority on the Holocaust, tolerance, democracy and human rights, Sweden’s Living History Forum (LHF) lies at the intersection of global, national and local Holocaust remembrance cultures and their ‘universalisation’ into the wider study of global ‘Crimes against Humanity’. Beginning with LHF’s origins in 1997’s Living History Project, this paper will discuss major developments within the organization over the last ten years. It will address how LHF has effectively worked in the space between the national and the transnational as well as the controversies that LHF has stimulated, particularly as Conny Mithander has noted, in relation to the representation of communist crimes. This paper will also give an overview of an increasingly critical liberal historiography, which sees LHF as part of a progressively more ‘regularized’ Swedish remembrance culture. My paper will include interview material with Paul Levine and Stéphane Bruchfeld, authors of Tell Ye Your Children as well as information from a 2014 meeting with Marcel Rådström (Educator) and Johan Perwe (Press Officer) at LHF’s premises in Stockholm on 14 May 2014. My paper will also connect the case of LHF to some of the broader findings of my forthcoming book, Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational: A Case Study of the Stockholm International Forum (2000) and the First Decade of the ITF

Hirsch, Sebald, and the Uses and Limits of Postmemory

Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory articulates the ethical significance of representing trauma in art and literature. Postmemory, for Hirsch, “describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right”. Through appeal to philosophical work on memory, the ethics of remembering, and Peter Goldie’s discussion of empathy, I explore the virtues and limitations of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and the risks involved in empathic engagement in the past of another. This analysis informs my rejection of Hirsch’s attempt to place German author W.G. Sebald in league with the postmemory generation

The Amnesiac Consciousness of the Contemporary Holocaust Novel: Lily Brett’s Too Many Men and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated

No abstract (available)

Traces of the (m)other: deconstructing hegemonic historical narrative in Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona's Os Sertões

This article focuses on the way in which renowned São Paulo-based theatre company Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona deconstructs hegemonic historical narrative in their 2000 - 2007 25 hour-long production of Euclides da Cunha’s seminal Brazilian novel Os sertões (“Rebellion in the Backlands”), an account of the War of Canudos (1896-1897), the first major act of State terrorism carried out by the nascent Brazilian Federal Government on the country’s subaltern population. The Teat(r)o Oficina’s epic adaptation fuses events from the colonial period, the military dictatorship and contemporary 21st Century São Paulo to relate the repetitive cycles of misappropriation, oppression and resistance that have characterized the history of Brazil and its people over the centuries. However, any fatalistic view of victimhood as an essential aspect of Brazilian subjectivity is radically challenged by the vibrant, rhythmic, material impact of the theatrical super-signs underpinning the performance text. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic - the pre-linguistic, illogical, rhythmical materialism of language intimately related to a primordial relationship with the abject mother – I shall suggest that it is the rhythmic, libidinal force of the performance and its extensive use of the cultural manifestations of Brazil’s subaltern population that imbues Os Sertões with the silent presence-as-absence of the abject Brazilian (M)Other – the Black, Indigenous and Mestiza matriarchal line whose alternative discourse is often barred from hegemonic accounts of Brazilian historiography. Her silent heritage is embodied on stage by the members of the Oficina, who reclaim an alienating national heritage for themselves by transforming the often tragic tale of Brazil’s past into a joyous celebration of tenacious vitality

Redefining Diaspora through a Phenomenology of Postmemory

This article seeks to intervene in the debates about the definition of diaspora by attending to the way in which it is a phenomenon, rooted in a particular kind of experience and consciousness. This approach seeks to move beyond ontological definitions based on categorical criteria toward a more phenomenological definition that can help us better understand the lived experience of diasporic subjects and the formation of diasporic communities. While these groups do not exist as entities that have some common essence or nature, I insist that they do exist phenomonologically. Rather than an objective, prescriptive definition of diaspora, this essay explores the subjective, descriptive quality of diaspora when approached from the inside, as an experience. A phenomenological approach, therefore, can rescue the term diaspora from its overextensions and case-specific limitations. A key consideration will be the role of memory in creating the phenomenon of diaspora. Diaspora must be understood as a phenomenon that emerges when displaced subjects who experience the loss of an "origin" (whether literal or symbolic) perpetuate identifications associated with those places of origin in subsequent generations through the mechanisms of postmemory

Memory and influence : a story of trauma transmission in Anna Janko’s "Mała Zagłada"

The article focuses on the issue of postmemory (a term by M. Hirsch) basing on Mała Zagłada (published in 2015) written by Anna Janko, the daughter of Teresa Ferenc, who survived the massacre in Sochy (June the 1st 1943). The main objective is not only to present the experience of „the second generation” in the context of the phenomenon of postmemory, but also to analyze the effect of transmitted memories and trauma on next generation representatives’ identity and narrative. Interpreting the subject of postmemory the authoress provides a theoretical background referencing, among others, the thought of M. Hirsch, E. Sicher and H. Raczymow

Is Collective Memory Making the Next Balkan War Imminent?

Sometimes cultures, religions, and ethnicities that shared the same space for centuries become fierce rivals, forcing their irreconcilable differences to develop to such an extent that they see war as the only option. The Balkans has had its share of conflicts, destruction, and atrocities leaving scars too deep to heal. The question is: have they seen the end of it, or will the frozen conflict lurking beneath the fragile peace unleash its deadly force again