Postmemory

Quick meaning: Postmemory is a noun meaning 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.

Meaning

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.

Example Sentences

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

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.

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.

Word Forms

• postmemories

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include posthistory, afterwardness, afterwardsness, postexistence, promnesia, afterstory.

Related Dictionary Tools