Abstract
A palimpsest is a piece of writing material whose text is erased and on which later writing is then superimposed. As a metaphor for memory, it suggests that memory is hybrid in nature as it is composed of overlapping and interconnecting traces. It is part of the development of transnational and transcultural approaches to cultural memory (especially memory related to traumatic moments in the past like the Holocaust and colonialism) which explore the ways in which memory “travels” across communities and nations in the contemporary age of global communication flows. Its distinctive contribution to this field is to question identitarian notions of memory and the past, and challenge the competitive “memory wars” that are often a consequence of this approach. The impurity of memory suggested by the palimpsest proposes, instead, a composite and dynamic structure in which traces of different voices, times, and places are always interwoven, overlaid, rewritten, and transformed through their interaction.
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Filmography
Resnais A (1959) Hiroshima mon amour
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Silverman, M. (2023). Palimpsestic Memory. In: Bietti, L.M., Pogacar, M. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93789-8_62-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93789-8_62-1
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