Constructing Hungarian American Ethnic Identity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives

The recent shift in narrative and memory studies embraces the powerful impact of inherited family experiences on identity construction. In doing so, it brings novel ways to understand narratives about ethnic identification. In this talk, I suggest a narrative memory-based discourse analytic approach to selected samples of intergenerationally transferred stories to reveal how the memory-based storytelling plays a strategic role in ethnic identity construal. The accounts come from a database of qualitative life interviews I conducted with eighteen second- or later-generation European Americans, most of them Hungarian Americans. While the narratives are retold by descendants of Hungarian American immigrants born decades after the events in the story had happened, storytellers use them to reposition themselves and justify their ethnic choices. The analysis approaches the sample stories from the aspects of content, narrative structure and performative elements. Some of the most critical features of the fragmented or barely known ancestral memories when retold in the descendants’ life stories include restructured Labovian narrative structure, embedded conversational narrative, and the strategic placement and evaluation of past events. The approach to intergenerational memories explains how these remembrances emerge as an essential structural part of life stories about ethnicity and identity, explaining choices and agency in our inexplicable wish to come to terms with our past. Video length: 25:1