cyh371@nyu.edu

Readings

This week, both excerpts from books by Connerton and Hirsch offered us a dive into “collective” memory. He claimed that our societies remember and inherit significant events, customs, traditions, and so on by two types of memory practices, “incorporating” practice and “inscribing” practice. The former, by Connerton’s definition, can be transmitted “only during the time that their (sender/senders) bodies are present to sustain that particular activity.” (p.72) As for the latter, inscribing practice includes any medium which people are able to use it to “trap and hold information” (p.73) even after decay of their biological bodies. The invention of written words signatured that knowledge passing transited from oral to literate, meaning also from incorporating to inscribing as the main approach to build the canon of human culture. He also elaborated incorporating practice in the second part of the chapter by discussing techniques (gestures), proprieties (table manners), and ceremonies (courtesy of the French nobility) of the body. The latter two, specifically, are likely to present a differentiation between properness and improperness, meet and not meeting upper-class standards, by being executed well or not.

On the other hand, Hirsch focuses on the domestic inheritance of traumatic memory, specifically Holocaust in the assigned chapter. Memory, which used to be private, would no longer be private as soon as being shared to an object, and memory thus becomes “postmemory”. This object has never experienced in person, but from then on remember the experience and emotion from a second or third person perspective. She also proposed that the boundary between familial memory and social memory under the scale of trauma caused by a great historical tragedy is often blurred. This can be perceived from photos adoption; “this public image has been adopted into the private family album.” (p.30) Furthermore, one important point is that memory is not equivalent to history (p.33); history tends to be objective, founded by strict evidence collection process; it should be as-neutral-as-possible (although the “his” in “history” already proved that it isn’t) documentation of what happened.

This made me associate with the Taiwanese comfort women who were deceived and forced by the Japanese imperial troops during WWII. In my opinion, compared with the victims of Holocaust, these comfort women were much less willing to share their memories of being suppressed to their descendants (or in some cases, they did not even have descendant because of not only the trauma and traumatic sequelae, but also failure to meet social expectation to be “chaste” before marriage) owing to their gender. Since its initial discussion occurring in the 1960s, scholars have been debating whether comfort women should be defined as “sexual slaves” (because most Japanese comfort women were voluntary while most foreign comfort women weren’t), what kind of historical recognition which these group of female victims should be given, and so on. However, to these old ladies nowadays, this trauma would never disappear, and all they need for a level of recovery from the trauma is a sincere apology from the Japanese government. This, in my opinion, is a great example of Hirsch’s claim that memory and history should be placed on opposite positions; memory has emotion embedded, while history doesn’t.

Artwork by Tuan Andrew Nguyen

I was fortunate enough to go to the New Museum to appreciate Nguyen’s “Radiant Remembrance” before its exhibition period ended. Nguyen mostly expressed his ideology of postwar memory and trauma through images and videos, in particular  explore special familial bonds both interracial and intergenerational. Now, reviewing these works under the framework of the two readings assigned this week, I got to put my fragmented subjective feelings toward the artwork into words. For instance, the intertwined identities, whether acceptance or rejection, among Senegalese, Vietnamese, and Senegalese-Vietnamese/Vietnamese-Senegalese, can be observed in the interactions between husband and wife, parent and child, grandparent and grandchild in The Specters of Ancestors Becoming. Framing it under Hirsch’s discourse, this “identity” is far more than about race and nation; it is a carrier of memory from the previous generation, and decision of taking it or not of the coming generation, the generation of “postmemory”, can affect the status of postmemory’s existence.