Haunting Memory: The Extension of Kinship Beyond the Nation
There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being . . . (Conor Cruise O’Brien in Tóibín 2012)
The memory evoked in the passage quoted above is what I propose calling ‘haunting memory.’ This is what we are induced to remember as our own memory even though it is the story of our intimate forebears extending and haunting our recollection. In what follows, I develop this concept and, in doing so, offer a ...
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