Marianne Hirsch S Postmemory and The Fragments of History We Cannot Take in

Postmemory and the "Fragments of a History We Cannot Take
In"
Tahneer Oksman
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 48, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer

2020, pp. 133-136 (Article)
Published by The Feminist Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754886
[ Access provided at 15 May 2020 15:21 GMT from CUNY Graduate Center ]
Postmemory and the “Fragments of a History
We Cannot Take In”
Tahneer Oksman
“The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with, or rather
the effort to disentangle the grip of history while remaining in its palm,
so to speak. Especially this particular piece of history and this particular
novel” (Morrison 2019, 307). So writes Toni Morrison in “The Source of
Self-Regard,” an essay included in a recently published collection of her
works carrying the same name. Based on a speech she gave in 1992 at the
Portland Arts & Lecture series, Morrison initially said these words about
her novel Beloved, just four years after it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fic-
tion.1 I could not help but think about Morrison’s Beloved, and indeed, her
career-long concern with imagination and history in relation to African
American literature and culture, as I revisited Marianne Hirsch’s ground-
breaking essay, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” in
the wake of Morrison’s recent death.
Hirsch’s essay, which introduced her now widely employed term, post-
memory, around the same time that Morrison delivered her speech, was
composed, like Beloved was, at a moment when the atrocities of the early
and mid-twentieth century had begun to recede into the background in
light of fresh communal emergencies, like proxy wars related to the Cold
War and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union, and more locally, the
AIDS epidemic and the U.S. economic crisis of the early 1980s. As Ho-
locaust scholar Michael Rothberg points out, by then, too, “Intellectuals
interested in indigenous, minority, and colonial histories challenged the
uniqueness of the Holocaust and fostered research into other histories of
extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide” (2009, 8). Two years
following the Rwandan genocide, 1996, marked the publication of Alan
WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 48: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2020) © 2020 by Tahneer Oksman.
All rights reserved.
133
134 Postmemory and the “Fragments of a History We Cannot Take In”
S. Rosenbaum’s widely cited edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Per-

spectives on Comparative Genocide. Many scholars, artists, and writers were
starting to think about negotiations between communal and individual
experiences, past and present, and about how to maintain the relevance of
history in light of urgent contemporary unfoldings. And finally, the chil-
dren of survivors—the second and third generations—were asking them-
selves about the impact that the previous generations’ trauma had had on
their own lives; they were starting to consider themselves “possessed by a
history they had never lived” (Epstein [1979] 1988, 14).2
As Hirsch attests in the introduction to her 2012 book, The Generation
of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust—a work in
which she partly recounts the factors that led to her earlier scholarly pur-
suits—it was Morrison’s Beloved that helped her see that “latency need not
mean forgetting or oblivion” (2012, 11).3 For Hirsch, as for Morrison, a
careful fostering of imagination, or of transparent mediation from within
the “palm” of history, is what might help us maintain powerful and evoca-
tive associations between then and now, between here and there. It is what
might help us feel more proximate to a distant past we think we already
know. And, as Hirsch reminds us, the “connective,” not the comparative,
is what drives this mission, a determination rooted in feminist methodol-
ogies (2012, 21). As she writes, postmemory is “not identical to memory:
it is ‘post’; but, at the same time . . . it approximates memory in its affective
force and its psychic effects” (2012, 31). It is a structure—affiliative or
familial—that ethically binds even as it attests to, and stems from, as she
writes in her pioneering essay, “fragments of a history we cannot take in”
(Hirsch 1992–93, 27).
Photography is at the heart of Hirsch’s theorization of this network.
“Family Pictures” opens with descriptions of the author’s encounters with
various photographs from different points in her own personal story, imag-
es brought about in starkly divergent contexts, containing disparate repre-
sentations—of those who survived and those who did not. But the images
all gesture to the same impenetrable past. “Photography is precisely the
medium connecting memory and post-memory,” she writes, describing
the “contradictory and ultimately unassimilable dimension of photogra-
phy—its hovering between life and death” as a useful prop for grasping
at the horrors of events that feel, and that in many ways are, ungraspable
(1992–93, 9). Hirsch uses the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus—a
Tahneer Oksman 135
book she taught in several introductory courses at Dartmouth as early as

1987, before the second volume saw publication—as a kind of linchpin
for her conceptualization of postmemory (2012, 9). It would receive its
own Pulitzer Prize four years after Beloved (Maus won in a “Special Cita-
tions” category). For Hirsch, Spiegelman’s use of photography in Maus,
not to say the graphic memoir’s distinguished and in some ways originary
manipulations of various modes, mediums, and registers, including com-
ics, singularly brought to the surface the “levels of mediation that underlie
all visual representational forms” (1992–93, 11; italics in original). In es-
sence, Hirsch found a work in Maus that properly embraces history with-
out embalming it, that never relinquishes, even momentarily, an awareness
of how our understandings of personal and collective pasts are always
formed through and framed by a variety of intersecting forces.
About halfway through “The Source of Self-Regard,” Morrison transi-
tions from what she describes as a move from African American “history”
to “culture” (2019, 315; italics in original). She talks about her latest novel
at the time, Jazz, a book published in 1992 that focuses mainly on Har-
lem in the 1920s. Bringing together her thoughts on these two novels, she
argues that, with both texts, she was trying to explore what she describes
as “self-regard,” or the way a person sees herself under different circum-
stances. With “jazz,” she explains, as a work, a form, and an idiom, of “cre-
ative agency,” of “individual reclamation of the self,” she senses “the way in
which imagination fosters real possibilities” (2019, 319, 320). I wonder,
revisiting Hirsch’s essay as we hasten toward the middle of this new cen-
tury, what comes after postmemory, with the phasing out of those directly
involved in, or living at the time of, the Holocaust, with the passing, in
time, too, of the next generation? Does memory, or postmemory, simply
transition into history, into a distant, untouchable legacy? After 9/11, and
in a time when the digital image, the digital archive, has transformed our
relationship to photography as something no longer as easily identifiable
for its indexicality, its traceability in relation to the real world, will the pho-
tograph, in theory and practice, remain as useful or impactful? Are there
hopeful, productive, and ethical ways to move beyond memory in order
to more fully inhabit the present, with all of its “real possibilities”? These
questions, already being asked by many, are undoubtedly waiting to be ad-
dressed by scholars, artists, and writers galvanized by the legacies of those,
like Hirsch, who hazard to make their mark.
136 Postmemory and the “Fragments of a History We Cannot Take In”
Tahneer Oksman is an associate professor of academic writing at Marymount Manhattan

College. She is the author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and
Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and the coeditor of the
anthology The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself. She
is currently working on a book about comics, loss, and grief, and can be reached at
[email protected].
Notes
1. The original speech, revised and updated in the print essay, can be found on-
line. See Morrison 1992.
2. Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust is widely cited as one of the first
books to explore this question.
3. Hirsch also fleshed out and refined her concept of postmemory in earlier
works, including her 1997 book, Family Frames, and in numerous other arti-
cles and collections.
Works Cited
Epstein, Helen. (1979) 1988. Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons
and Daughters of Survivors. New York: Penguin.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1992–93. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-
Memory.” Discourse 15, no. 2: 3–29.
———. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Lecture. Portland Arts & Lectures series. The Archive
Project. Podcast audio. March 19, 1992. https://literary-arts.org/archive/
toni-morrison/.
———. 2019. “The Source of Self-Regard.” In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected
Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, 304–21. New York: Knopf.
Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. 1996. Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on
Comparative Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in
the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Postmemory and the "Fragments of a History We Cannot Take

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 48, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer

Published by The Feminist Press

For additional information about this article

S. Rosenbaum’s widely cited edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Per-

book she taught in several introductory courses at Dartmouth as early as

Tahneer Oksman is an associate professor of academic writing at Marymount Manhattan

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