so profoundly occurred before I was born . Art Spiegelman found a form through which to express the complex relationship the second and subsequent “ postgenerations ” have to the traumatic histories they have inherited – the simultaneous identification and disidentification , the curiosity and need , the desire and envy , and also the fear , rejection and abjection of that past .
I ’ ve been surprised at the widespread use the term has enjoyed and I ’ ve learned a great deal from the ways in which it has informed work on the transgenerational memory of slavery , dictatorship , authoritarianism , torture and terror , partition , and more recent wars and genocides .
I suspect that these multiple uses are enabled by the fact that my initial conceptualization of postmemory was quite capacious , leaving me to refine and tighten it over many years in different publications , as you observe . If it was , and still is , a work in progress , however , it is due not so much to my rush to publish an unfinished argument , but to the many conversations in this burgeoning field that I ’ ve been fortunate to join , and to the inspiring work on the memory of painful pasts done by scholars , artists and activists across the globe .
What I call a “ structure ” of intergenerational transmission is not in any way limited to the Holocaust but describes the experiences of , and the aesthetic forms used by , what Eva Hoffman called the “ postgenerations ” of many other traumatic histories . But each of these histories also has particular dimensions and working across them has changed my understanding of each one . To name just a couple of examples , speaking with child survivors of the Rwandan genocide interested in postmemory out of concern about how the trauma they are passing down will affect their children and grandchildren provoked me to think about what our Holocaust survivor parents might have done differently . Focusing on the afterlives of apartheid in South Africa and the lack of economic reparations for its victims has enabled me to see how important geopolitical and economic factors are in the shapes that postmemory takes in sites of continued poverty and inequality .
The critiques of postmemory have also been instructive and have helped refine my understanding of contextual differences in intergenerational transmission . Postmemory has been a common but also hotly debated reference point for the postgenerations of the Latin American dictatorships . Is it too much focused on the past , rather than the future , some scholars have asked ? Too geared to trauma rather than the political ideals of the victims of political disappearance ? And does not the absence of the disappeared parents make their children themselves the victims , thus complicating the numbering of generations ?
But scholars of the Holocaust have criticized my initial conceptions as well . While I had been eager to underscore the mediated qualities of memory and postmemory and thus to minimize their biographical and familial locations , enlarging the circuits of transmission beyond family , children of survivors quickly pointed out that their own experiences were particular to the familial context . In response , and with their help , I worked to distinguish between “ familial ” and “ affiliative ” postmemory . This has been a crucial elaboration that enabled other thoughts as well , about how our acts of contemporary witness of distant contemporary catastrophic events might be structurally similar to intergenerational postmemory . We experience these events at a distance , often unable to intervene , and we ask ourselves what our responsibility might be to address or redress wrongs that we are not ourselves suffering , or responsible for , but that affect us profoundly . This practice of co-witnessing , in the terms of Irene Kacandes , is something I ’ ve been thinking about a great deal , especially during this spring and summer of trauma and social distance .
4 . During the last years you have been working in other concepts , like “ mobile memory ” or “ stateless memory ”. Could you please tell us what do they mean ?
During this last decade , I ’ ve been struck over and over by the discrepancy between scholarly discussions in memory studies and public memory
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