Meaning of postmemory | Babel Free

Definitions

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.

uncountable, usually

Examples

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

“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.”

“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.”

CEFR level