Marianne Hirsch to speak at Washington University in St. Louis

The renowned memory scholar Marianne Hirsch will be speaking at Washington University in St. Louis on November 8 at 4 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. Marianne Hirsch's name is most often linked to her formulation of "postmemory" in the book Family Frames and in subsequent articles written individually and with her partner Leo Spitzer.

I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain.  While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!

Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea

For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.

Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.

Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.

“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”

Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.

McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.

“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.

Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.

With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”

Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.

In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.

She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.

For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.

Book on Art and Memory

Contemporary Art and Memory
Images of Recollection and Remembrance
Joan Gibbons

I.B. Tauris, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84511-619-4, ISBN10: 1-84511-619-4,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 344 pages, 30 b/w illus.,

Description: Contemporary Art and Memory is the first accessible survey book to explore the subject of memory as it appears in its many guises in contemporary art. Looking at both personal and public memory, Gibbons explores art as autobiography, the memory as trace, the role of the archive, revisionist memory and postmemory, as well as the absence of memory in oblivion.

Grounding her discussion in historical precedents, Gibbons explores the work of a wide range of international artists including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Doris Salcedo, Keith Piper, Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and new media artist George Legrady. Contemporary Art and Memory will be indispensable to all those concerned with the ways in which artists represent and remember the past.

Joan Gibbons is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham and Course Director, MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice. She is the author of Art and Advertising (I.B.Tauris).

Documentary Film - "A Generation Apart" (1984)

I am in the final stages of planning for the honors seminar course on memory and historical trauma that I am teaching this semester. One of the films I have been considering is "A Generation Apart," which was originally produced in 1984, but re-released on DVD in 2007. If I do end up using this film in class, I will do so in conjunction with a discussion of postmemory. I am really surprised that I did not come across this film earlier, during research for my dissertation (I'm sure I must have read about it, though I never saw it). The film is not a documentary masterpiece, but I do believe it is a valuable text with which to look at the particular challenges facing second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (and perhaps, by extension, descendants of other historical traumas). Director Jack Fisher interviews his parents, Auschwitz survivors, and his older brother Joe in an attempt to understand how the direct, lived experience of the Holocaust, as well as its intergenerational transmission, have affected his family. A Generation Apart also includes poignant interviews between the director's friend Shelley and her mother Mary, who survived Bergen-Belsen. There are obvious moments of tension between parents and children, and between the siblings as well. Of particular note is the segment in which the Fisher brothers address one another regarding the importance of the Shoah in their everyday lives.

New Book - Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

I always get particularly excited when a publication comes out with "postmemory" in the title. I wrote my dissertation on postmemory in contemporary Spanish literature and film; however, I drew largely from the field of Holocaust Studies in my discussion of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

"Postmemory" is a term popularized by -- and most associated with - Marianne Hirsch, although it was also deployed by Andrea Liss in Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. I am not positive, but I do think Liss used the term first -- albeit in a slightly different manner -- which Hirsch acknowledges. Hirsch defines postmemory as "the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events taht they can neither understand nor re-create" ("Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy," 8). In addition to Hirsch's formulation, Holocaust Studies scholars have created a large, rich body of work on "second generation" cultural production, with "second generation" referring broadly to the descendants of Holocaust survivors (and yes, at times, also to the descendants of perpetrators).

At some point, I will dedicate another post (or several) to the concept of "postmemory" itself, which has recently come under fire in Beatriz Sarlo's Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (to read an excellent review in English of Sarlo's work, see here). For now, I will limit this post to the mention of the following new book from Routledge:

Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

By Brett Kaplan

Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

List Price: $95.00
Add to Cart

* ISBN: 978-0-415-87476-2
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 31/08/2010
* Pages: 192

About the Book

How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations—whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas globally? In this interdisciplinary study, Kaplan asks and attempts to answer these questions by looking at historically and geographically diverse spaces, photographs, and texts concerned with the physical and/or mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. Examining the intersections of landscape, postmemory, and trauma, Kaplan's text offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the spatial, visual, and literary reach of the Holocaust.