Performing postmemories: recollection in crisis

This thesis examines the problematic status and functioning of memory in avariety of contemporary contexts such as judicial cases, popular culture,television, memorials and museums. In doing this it develops an account of theculture of postmemory, originally defined by Marianne Hirsch as the experienceof descendents of survivors of trauma, particularly second generation Holocaustsurvivors, who inherit that trauma from their family forbears. From Hirsch,postmemory can be understood as the possibility of remembering an event thatone has not actually experienced.This thesis extends Hirschs notion of postmemory to account for a widerrange of contemporary memory practices. These occur beyond familyrelationships to manifest in institutional and discursive sites such as the archive,the museum, the narrative and the tourist attraction. This thesis argues that it isin these sites that memory can be seen to be breaking away from its referentialfunction. Instead of recollection, memory becomes the performance of slippageand the undoing of reference in which the fictive and the historical merge.The thesis plays out the ensuing crisis in recollection in scenes and actionsof a theatre of the postmemorial one characterised less by the familiar linearnarratives of memory as by multiple and contradictory narratives formedthrough the operations of chance, reflexivity and ambivalence working within thecontemporary cultural sphere. Performing Postmemories re-imagines theperformances of contemporary memory culture and examines its master texts