Imaging postmemory/renegotiating history

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processe of memory artificial position special problems for postmodern musing While postmodern and poststructuralist meditation have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as to [i]or[/i] at a great depth engaged with the question of in what manner to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century notion are the questions of in what manner we remember and what is restoreed as history amid an understanding of the part played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms [i]or[/i] part of to the other which we mediate our histories, the pair personal and cultural.

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form end which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no of that kind easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the character of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its greatest in quantity symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write rhyme after Auschwitz is barbaric"(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as the one and the other shock and death, in which he asks "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?"(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation profoundly problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work upon the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory.

Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing from one side Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by dint of History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each present complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms similar as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic volumes as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's bourn the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is be of importance toed with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means end which the past, including the traumatic incidents of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the bourn "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities not single of the memories of the children of survivors, on the contrary the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is

distinguished from memory by means of generational distance and from history through deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and true particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its thing or source is mediated not end recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who increase up dominated by narratives that preced their birth, whose possess belated stories are evacuated through the stories of the previous generation shaped by dint of traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.

Postmemory is about the continuation of memory and its regeneration in those for whom memories are experienced one time or twice removed. Liss, who also occupys the term, uses it to leave to "the artists' distance from the incidents as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors diocese artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not alone the ways in which the past is understood, showed and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of novel experience and representation was frequently posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that of the like kind communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an incident forced a dramatic shift in notions of what is representable and communicable. Walter Benjamin wrote mournfully of the consequences of the mechanical terror of World War I upon the capacity to tell stories or to return an experience communicable precisely because of the abysmal change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from single of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) still it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western meditation as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic circumstances and genocides of the twentieth hundred yet it seems clear that the horror of this incident with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, single that can be characterized as a questioning of modernist beliefs precisely because of the inconceivable nature of its death and destruction. Hence the Holocaust has been seen as a topic too volatile, too sacred and too unimaginable, its representations bring under rule to stringent moral codes. in what way then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular agriculture that have attempted to make faculty of perception of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? by what mode can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? single could read it as profoundly disabling in that it pay backs all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. however one can also see by what means this statement forced an examination of the question of representation in general and helped lead to a search for new, non-modernist forms of engagement with history and memory.