Diasporic Montage and Critical Autoethnography: Mediated Visions of Intergenerational Memory and the Affective Transmission of Trauma

Abstract

Looking for paths that have been disavowed, left behind, forgotten, silenced, covered over, and left unseen begins by performing juxtapositions of fragmented memory. In this chapter, I employ a performative, critical, and (un)locatable autoethnographic writing approach to explore the affective transmission of trauma. In my research, I am particularly interested in exploring how traumatic memory can affectively pass from one generation to the next across chronological time and geographical space — a concept referred to as intergenerational ‘hauntings’ (see Cho, 2008; Gordon, 2008; Abraham and Torok, 1994). My unique interest in ‘ghosts’, however, requires an equivalently unique methodology and epistemology that can adequately deal with such issues. In response, I ‘stage’ in this chapter different (un)locatable autoethnographic approaches that employ what I call a ‘diasporic montage’.¹ Throughout this paper, I unpack this discussion and demonstrate how the existence and composition of this very chapter, in fact, embodies my autoethnographic act of creating a ‘diasporic montage’. One key question I ask is: Can such methodologies ‘see’ ghosts, the forgotten, and the unseen?

if … studying ghosts allows us to rethink a society’s relationship to its dead, particularly to those who are subject to some kind of injustice, the ghost and its haunting effects act as a mode of memory and avenue for ethical engagement with the present.

Cho (2008, p. 29)