The Impossibility of Postmemory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Texts

Abstract:

Marianne Hirsch maintains that literature based solely on "postmemory"—that is, second-hand memories passed down from a generation that experienced a collective trauma to a subsequent one that did not—is qualitatively different because it is connected to its object of study not through recollection but through an imaginative investment. Following this definition, Lebanese writings stemming exclusively from postmemories of the Civil War cannot be expected to emerge before the second half of the twenty-first century. However, this long view of postmemory, I contend, is not tenable in the case of Lebanon.