postmemory

Noun

1. 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.
   • 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...
   • 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...
   • 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...