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In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore's 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore's text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother's stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave.

In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore's 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore's text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother's stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave.

Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the times of perceived national crisis, concerns about American identity, family and literary history are articulated around this literary figure. The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison among others, and investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national and literary home. By analysing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.

cross-disciplinary text; does not fit DIVA's system of categories

Family and kinship carry special significance to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In autobiographies and family memoirs, writers of what Marianne Hirsch terms the postmemory generation employ different narrative strategies for coming to terms with the ways in which the Holocaust has marked their identities and family ties. This article focuses on women’s writing of the postmemory generation, examining three works in English by daughters of survivors in the UK, the US, and Canada, written during the 1990s. It investigates the narrative strategies used by Anne Karpf, Helen Fremont, and Lisa Appignanesi to represent maternal sexual agency and vulnerability in a survival context. It suggests that these representations are strongly influenced by matrophobia and matrophilia, defined as the conflicting dread of becoming and desire to be one’s mother, which are themselves strongly conditioned by Holocaust history, particularly the gendered history of vulnerability among women in open hiding during the war.

Denna specialnummer av Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap handlar om abort och reproduktiva val. Den innehåller en inledning av gästredaktörerna och 6 vetenskapliga artiklar som belyser ämnet från olika feministiska perspektiv. Den innehåller dessutom en diskussion kring "det kvinnliga ansvaret", samt bokrescensioner och inlägg från Sveriges genusforskarförbund.

Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman’s use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud’s definition of the uncanny as being “both very alien and deeply familiar,” she insists that “the second generation has grown up with the uncanny.” In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one’s mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to “the matrophobic Gothic” specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters.

The concept of postmemory has been advanced to account for some of the ways that the strong cultural and individual memories of trauma survivors impact on members of the next generation: their children. According to Marianne Hirsch (1997, 2012), post-memory generations have a special tie to history, which they “remember” through emotional and imaginative investment in the memories of others, whose stories, photographs, and day-to-day actions impart a strong sense of the life-changing, often life-threatening, circumstances they have lived through. In this paper, I explore the relevance and possible limitations of the concept of postmemory for two auto/biographical works written by women of the Polish diaspora: Losing the Dead (2006) by Lisa Appignanesi and Åka Skridskor I Warszawa (Ice-skating in Warsaw) (2014) by Emilia Degenius. Born about 10 years apart (1946 and 1955), the two writers have some similarities, including Jewish backgrounds, parental and personal experiences of anti-Semitism, and emigration from post-war Poland with subsequent fraught relations to the Polish language. Appignanesi, writing in English, has become a cultural commentator and author with an interest in memory and psychoanalysis. Degenius immigrated alone to Sweden in 1972, where she joined her sister, and she has become a practicing psychoanalyst and author of two autobiographical works in Swedish. The narratives of these women writers of the Polish diaspora straddle genres of autobiography, biography, family history, fiction, and memoir. In each account, the relationship to parental figures is of central importance. They each have double narrative strands, one that reconstructs the childhood past through the excavation of memory, and one that figures the adult narrator’s attempts to understand the past through return journeys to Poland, documentation, and interaction. I examine the texts’ formal and thematic characteristics in relation to postmemory., Södertörn Sabbatical

The author wishes to thank the Gertrude and Ivar Philipson Foundation for research support.

This article examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning's Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott's The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott's film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning attempts to sensitive non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affiming spiritual values.

This paper examines the affective landscapes of Poland, Canada, and the US in Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical account of her immigrant/exilic life in Lost in Translation (1989). Hoffman’s reputation as a writer and intellectual was launched with this autobiography. Hoffman left Poland for Vancouver with her Jewish family in 1959, when she was 13, and lived there until college in the US, where she made her career. She lives today primarily in London. Hoffman’s autobiography is divided into three parts, dealing first with Poland, then Canada, then the US. Hoffman's text explicitly thematizes nostalgia. Hoffman affirms her nostalgia for her Polish childhood with a postmodern awareness. Though Lost in Translation has been celebrated for its self-reflexivity and its treatment of the links between language and subjectivity, some scholars have been highly critical of the “nostalgic” view of Poland. Hoffman's work is clearly invested in the dynamics and the affect of remembering and forgetting particular times and particular places. In this paper, I examine Hoffman's understandings of nostalgia, and of the affective landscapes with which she engages. Poland, Canada, and the US have powerful associations, but I focus on primarily on Poland and Canada, emphasizing the overlooked importance of Hoffman's Canadian years. I am particularly interested in exploring how affect—defined roughly as “something that moves, that triggers reactions, forces, or intensities . . ., simultaneously engaging the mind and body, reason and emotions” (Berberich, Campbell and Hudson 314), and including the affect of nostalgia—is represented and textually communicated with readers. Thus, I look at the effects of Hoffman’s privileging of lyricism as a mode and mood for life-writing.

Making Home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in times of perceived national crisis concerns about American identity, family, and literary history are articulated around this literary figure. The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Toni Morrison. It also investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel, and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making Home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, multiculturalism, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national, and literary home. By analyzing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.

This paper compares Eva Hoffman’s representation of Poland and its effect on her immigrant/exilic life in Lost in Translation with Lisa Appignanesi’s representations in Losing the Dead. Their works are published about 10 years apart. While Lost in Translation has been viewed as an important work expressing a postmodern awareness of the links between language and subjectivity, a few scholars have been highly critical of the “nostalgic” view of Poland that Hoffman presents. Losing the Dead, though different tone, is also invested in the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. The author has very few first-hand memories of her childhood in Poland, however, and her work of postmemory thus straddles the borders of biography, family history, and memoir. Svetlana Boym’s discussion of restorative and reflective nostalgia provides an important framework for a comparison of these two works’ representations of Poland. While it is tempting to view Hoffman’s work as an example of restorative nostalgia and Appignanesi’s as an example of reflective nostalgia, I argue that these distinctions are not clear cut, and the representations of Poland in these two works complicate Boym’s typology.

This paper examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning’s attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.

Literary representations of orphanhood immediately activate the question of community through kinship and relation. In simple terms, "orphan" is unthinkable without its opposite family or kin. The language of orphanhood and family has been central to the study of national American literature, but recently indigenous notions of "kinship" have been proposed as key critical tools for examining Native American literature. In readings of Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes (1999), I find that attentiveness to kinship focuses inquiry squarely on literary responses to the historical disruption of Native kinship networks, broadly conceived, but also to the state's creation of Indian "orphans" through various forms of child removal. These works employ the motif of the Indian orphan's return to place Native thought and culture in critical relation to Euro-American social, ethical, and environmental practices. While previous scholarship has examined the critiques of Western, colonial cultures in the works of Hogan and Silko, the importance of the orphan figure to these projects has been largely overlooked. The literary orphan, I propose, is a particularly complex site in contemporary Native fiction for narrative interrogations of the limits and possibilities for community.

Making Home: Orphanhood and Agency in Contemporary American Fiction

Since the civil rights era, the concept of community has become increasingly politicizedin the US and Canada. Inextricably entangled in the new social movements andmulticulturalism of the 1980s and 1990s, community tends to be either much malignedor exaggeratedly extolled in the literary, cultural, and political discourses in which itfigures so prominently. The novels examined in this study, however, probe both thelimitations and the possibilities of community as a site for psycho-political empowerment.Bringing a variety of theoretical critiques of community to bear on Michael Ondaatje'sThe English Patient, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Paradise, and Joy Kogawa's Obasan andItsuka, the study analyzes the criteria for inclusion and exclusion at work in the types ofcommunity imagined in these texts, paying particular but not exclusive attention to theprinciple of race. Though imagining community in terms of race, place, nation, or gender risksreinforcing essentialist views of identity and repressing intra-group difference, the novelscounter that risk, at least in part, by returning to historically specific moments of collectivetrauma and oppression. Each novel's focus on collective social experience, it is argued,works in various degrees of opposition to the individualism at the heart of humanistthought. At the same time, however, the depictions of systemic violence and historicaloppression, as well as those of resistant solidarity, inevitably appeal to "universal"conceptions of human value, justice, and, in the case of Kogawa and Morrison, publicnegotiation of difference. The readings of the texts scrutinize the instances andimplications of tensions between essentialist and constructivist foundations for variousforms of community. From these readings emerges a view of community as a conceptuallycomplex and unstable terrain.