THE DYNAMICS OF IDENTITY AND THE GENERATION OF POST-MEMORY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN

Year 2016, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 4 - 8, 01.07.2016

Masıha Vaala

Abstract

This paper addresses how post-revolutionary youth are dealing with the legacy of Iran’s recent past 19791988 , particularly through processes of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Hirsch’s 1997 concept of post memory, I will explore the memory of a generation that grew up dominated not by traumatic events, but by narrative accounts preceding their births. This is a form of memory not personally experienced but socially felt, mediated through imagination and creation, and in this way shape the post-generation’s identity. Such memory works to bring together Iranian youth from a particular period in the past, while helping to create collective frameworks through which contemporary events can be evaluated. This includes the renewing of stories, histories, prejudices and suffering across generations, as well as the selective forgetting of a past that has been purposefully erased, denied or collectively ignored. This research aims to present a better understanding of Iranian society by constructing a new framework between memory studies and cultural memories, in this way attempting to shed light on the thoughts of youth in terms of remembering or forgetting the past. This dichotomy will illuminate the ways in which social change is proceeding

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