2 . After beginning your career in the field of comparative literature and feminist theory , your work has also become a benchmark for scholarship in memory studies . You ’ ve always defended the importance of interdisciplinarity when dealing with the past . Over the years , what challenges have been involved in pursuing and reconciling the many disciplines that comprise memory studies ?
Interdisciplinarity is both what attracted me to memory as a field of study , and what I feel I need to learn about the workings of personal and cultural memory . The opportunities for interdisciplinary and transnational collaboration are especially exciting . To understand how the past is transmitted and how it shapes the present and future , I ’ ve had to read and be in conversation with colleagues from history , anthropology , political science , literature , the arts , architecture , law , human rights , psychology , psychoanalysis , neuroscience and more . Memory studies is one of the most interdisciplinary fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences . And , in addition , the study of memory is intimately tied to practice . The working groups in which I have been involved over the years include not only scholars and artists , but also practitioners – archivists , curators , memory activists of many kinds . But , as your question suggests , these conversations and collaborations are not always easy .
Some historians , for example , resist the authority of individual recollection and discount it as evidence . Other memory scholars respond that individual ordinary stories are essential if we want to understand the intimate dimensions of a traumatic past , how it is lived , and how it is recorded beyond official records . In another example , when neuroscientists discuss the epigenetic inheritance of trauma , their research is based on minute studies of rat brains and behaviors . But those of us in the humanities may be too quick to see our own assumptions about the bodily and psychic aftereffects of trauma confirmed by this research . It will take years to find the neuroscientific evidence we seek .
Very different assumptions undergird each of these fields and it often takes a while to see that we might not even mean the same thing at all when we use basic terms like “ memory .” That may be why we are all qualifying , defining and redefining our terms , why we keep adding prefixes and suffixes . But , importantly we are also drawing on each other ’ s work across disciplines in quite unprecedented ways and this cross-fertilization promises to make memory studies not so much interdisciplinary as trans- or even post-disciplinary . Beyond that , the transnational networks and collaborations that have defined the field also affect its disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations . Fields like anthropology and sociology , for example , have different inflections in Europe than they do in the United States , gender studies move in different directions , and so on .
And feminist , anti-racist and decolonial commitments that have been central for memory studies are also differently shaped in different locations . I am excited by the efforts of younger scholars to “ decolonize ” memory studies thus enabling it to build on the progressive commitment to social justice in a global perspective that so many involved in this field share .
3 . You first coined the term “ postmemory ” in an article on Art Spiegelman ’ s Maus in the early 1990s , and since then you and many other scholars have gone on defining and refining it . After almost thirty years , how has the importance of postmemory changed ? How useful has the term been and what uses has it been put to ?
Yes , the idea of “ postmemory ” emerged for me from my own experience as a child of parents who survived persecution and ghettoization as Jews during the Second World War in Nazi Europe . I needed a term for my relationship to the memories my parents transmitted to me which , at times , felt like my own memories – they were so much more vivid and powerful than my own childhood recollections . But , of course , they were not my own . These experiences that shaped me
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4