Social Forces Shaping Memory Transmission

Abstract

In this chapter, I consider the interpersonal pathways of traumatic histories and memories. I focus on the transmission of emotions and affect as structuring of individual and group identities as well as of the continuously refashioned public sphere itself. I explore the role of the transmission of emotions and affects with regard to how and why they can stir individuals and collectives to such an extent that the past continues to operate as a source of social and political division. Drawing on contemporary theories of the emotional and affective transmission of memories, I explore the verbal and non-verbal ways in which traumatic memories are communicated between individuals and across generations. In particular, I look to artistic forms of the expression of affect, including recent books and films that explore the lives of children of the desaparecidos, as a way of understanding how the affective registration of memories of one individual’s past in one generation can also be experienced as a traumatic memory at a later stage in another generation. How are existing political and ideological antagonisms between collective memorial cultures intensified if we take into account the transmission of unintegrated memories of violence?