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Postmemory, a term first introduced by Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997) and then more broadly theorized in her 2008 article "The Generation of Postmemory," describes the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory between Holocaust survivors and their children.1 In her book-length study, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Hirsch defined postmemory as a generational phenomenon, wherein the "generation after" inherits the "personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before, [which they] 'remember' only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up" (5).2 These memories are transmitted so "deeply and affectively" that they appear to constitute genuine personal memory, even posing the threat of displacing and evacuating one's own "life story" (Hirsch 5). These children of victims sustain a connection to the traumas of prior generations that is mediated "not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation" (Hirsch 5). The mediated, always incomplete nature of postmemorial inheritance has also been theorized by Gabriele Schwab (2010), who reminds us that these postmemories of trauma are "fragmentary and shot through with holes and gaps" leaving the children of victims "to patch a history together [. . .] using whatever props they can find" (14).
Over the past ten years, Hirsch's notion of postmemory has drawn the attention of scholars from across the globe, becoming particularly useful to those studying the cultural production of the children of Latin America's many desaparecidos. While Hirsch herself contends that "it was precisely this kind of resonance [she] was hoping for" (19), the term's applicability has begun to be contested by Latin American-and particularly Argentine-critics, who argue that the framework, while useful for thinking through the aftermath of traumatic events, runs the risk of homogenizing "a set of entirely distinct situations, such as being the son of a disappeared, or being a perpetrator's daughter" (Perez 10).3 It also potentially limits the analysis of this generation's cultural production to parentcentric readings, ignoring the unique struggles, subjectivizes, and "lives after" (Perez 10) of the hijos themselves.4 Finally, it cannot be understated that there are significant differences between the ways in which Latin American and European hijos have inherited parental memories and legacies. Whereas the children referred...