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This powerful and moving book draws together work Stephen Frosh has been doing over a long career, but is very immediately built on his work over the past two decades, on the complex questions of how individuals and groups hold, process, and reproduce intergenerational traumas, both macro and micro. He is attentive to what is passed on intergenerationally, often under the radar of awareness and consciousness. Most crucially, he seeks to understand how we - contemporary registrants of historic trauma - seek to absorb and to evade the legacies of oppression and violence.
The book begins and ends with a focus on the concept of postmemory, a term he borrows and enlarges on from the work of Marianne Hirsch. He is concerned, in this book, to think about how memory is passed on. What does it mean that some crucial witnesses cannot transmit trauma from which they died? Frosh's book is the first place in which I was drawn to think about the lost witnesses. What constitutes reliability in trauma's registration and resolution? Frosh brings the reader into complex unsettled conceptions of post-trauma work, both individual and collective. What are the limits of forgiveness? What does it mean that inevitably some aspects of our transmissions are unconscious, indeterminate, and at the same time urgent and haunting? In this first chapter, I found myself thinking about the complex distinctions between mourning and melancholy, the need to work through anguish and loss and the great barriers to this when trauma is on a scale that Frosh is addressing in this book: the Holocaust, genocides, colonial exploitation, and systemic racism.