postmemory
postmemory noun: 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.
Noun
postmemory (usually uncountable, plural postmemories)
- 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 University Press, page 22
- 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
Forms of postmemory
| plural | postmemories |
|---|
Origin of postmemory
Coined by Marianne Hirsch. From post- + memory.
Questions about postmemory
- What does postmemory mean?
- Postmemory means 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.
- What part of speech is postmemory?
- Postmemory is a noun.
- What is the plural of postmemory?
- The plural of postmemory is postmemories.
Words near postmemory in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: postmemory (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “postmemory.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/postmemory. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.