Paul Connerton`s How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Marianne Hirsch`s The Generation of Postmemory: writing and visual culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia Press, 2012) investigate how we construct, transmit, and preserve memory. In the chapter Bodily Practices, Connerton emphasizes memory as a cultural faculty and the importance of incorporating practices (performances) in contrast to overrated inscribing ones (documents). In her turn, in the chapter The Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch introduces the postmemory concept: a generational structure of transmission that reactivates and re-embodies more distant political and cultural memories by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression.

 

Connerton asserts we commonly consider inscription to be the privileged form for transmitting a society`s memories, and we underestimate the mnemonic importance and persistence of what is incorporated. He says that every group will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body. By telling the latter, he meant the ability of groups to preserve habits and traditions. However, we can think about Hirsch`s postmemory concept, which “approximates memory in its affective force and its psychic effects.” The participants in a event (Holocaust, in this case) transform History into memory by its body inscription and share it with the “second generation.” Doing so connects “personal and public memory, present and past,” or, we could even say, inscription and incorporating practices. “The index of postmemory (as opposed to memory) is the performative index, shaped more and more by affect, need, and desire as time and distance attenuate the links to authenticity and “truth.”

 

“Inscribing practices have Always formed the privileged story, incorporating practices the neglected story, in the history of hermeneutics.” Nevertheless, Connerton asserts that these distinctions are merely heuristic, for every act contains both practices to some extent. Moreover, it is not about classifying them as good or bad: incorporation practices may also serve to control people (Here I remembered Diana Taylor`s The Archive and the Repertoire). It is in the body that some rules are reproduced and remembered.
Hirsch states that the memory of the past is an act firmly located in the present, which means the presence of the bodies that keep telling the stories of their ancestors. But we can also think in the present that reveals the persistence of old social structures, such as colonialism, racism, and sexism, as we will see in Andrew Nguyen`s and Rosana Paulino`s work. In “Everything for Your Happiness? And “The Weapons of the Empire”, for exemple, she shows a black woman and and domestic objects which alude to womens place in society, specilly the black ones. Ultimately, both deal with “the suppressed memories of the marginalized people most affected by colonization.”