JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004 Page: 415
261-512 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Wendy Wolters
fetishized, feminized object. In her analysis of Holocaust photography,
Hirsch ponders the line between identification and empathy in the
viewing of postmemorial pictures. She argues, "unbearably the viewer is
positioned in the place identical with the weapon of destruction: our look,
like the photographer's, is in the place of the executioner" ("Surviving"
233). The photograph of Laura Nelson's body is not just evidence of her
lynching, as Allen argues, but ofthe rhetorical gaze ofthe camera. It is not
just evidence of the aggression of the camera, but the violence that
lingers, that haunts, that is remembered, in every act of reexamination and
relooking.
Racial Memory and Ghosts
Hirsch describes this violence, specifically the reexperience of trauma by
those who did not directly experience it, as "postmemory." Postmemory
is specifically the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or
collective trauma to the experiences of their parents; they "remember"
these experiences only as the stories they grew up with, but they are so
powerful that they constitute memories in their own right:
It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences-and thus also the
memories-ofothers as one's own, or, more precisely, as experiences one
might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one's own life story
[...] an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which
postmemory can serve as a model. ("Projected" 8-9)
While Hirsch uses it to address specifically the situation of second-
generation Holocaust survivors, postmemory can be used as a model to
begin to theorize about the experiences and reexperiences oftrauma in the
collective memory of lynching, and the particular sentience of this
inherited memory for African Americans.
As Trudier Harris notes, violence against African Americans is a
"recurring historical phenomenon to which every generation of black
writers in this country has been drawn in its attempt to depict the shaping
of black lives. Especially compelling has been violence that takes the
form of lynching" (ix). Harris examines the ways in which racial violence
in America has shaped not only what African American writers have often
written about, but why they write: "how much is voluntary, how much is
determined; how much is political, how much is the true substance of art;
how much is racial memory, how much is personal fear; how much is
confrontation, how much is its own form ofexorcism" (xiii). While Harris415
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004, periodical, 2004; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28644/m1/161/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .