Remembering Anne Frank: Marjorie Agosín’s Multidirectional Feminist Postmemory

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Abstract Chilean Jewish author, professor, and human rights activist, Marjorie Agosín ties her own fate to that of Anne Frank through a multi-genre literary alignment spanning twenty years. The article traces the mechanisms by which Agosín engages the social, political, and cultural preconditions for catastrophe, whereby systemic violations against humanity are effected through a precursing systemic breakdown of meaning and human connection. Engaging contemporary scholarship on trauma memory-with trauma defined as the psychic and physical effects of catastrophe-this article approaches the intersection of his­torical fact and transnational memory in Agosín’s work, understood here as “feminist mul­tidirectional postmemory.”