Imaging Postmemory/Renegotiating History

Abstract

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processes of memory pose special problems for postmodern thought. While postmodern and poststructuralist thought have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as deeply engaged with the question of how to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century thought are the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history amid an understanding of the role played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms through which we mediate our histories, both personal and cultural. If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as both shock and death, in which he asks Is History not simply that time when we were not born?(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work on the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory. Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each offer complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms such as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic books as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's term, the imaginary, specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is concerned with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means through which the past, including the traumatic events of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed. Hirsch uses the term as a means to understand the complexities not only of the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. …