postmemory

plural postmemories

1. uncountableusuallyA 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.

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

   1997, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Harvard University Press, page 22

   2 more examples

   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.

   2002, Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton University Press, page 87

   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.

   2019, Stephen Frosh, “Postmemory”, in American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79(2), pages 162-3