Since Sarah has done such an excellent job laying out Ulanowicz’s methodologies and arguments, I don’t feel the need to belabor them here. To quote Sarah’s fabulous gloss, “[Second-generation memory] isn’t a passive reception of memories, but an active integration of the past into one’s present life – a critical awareness of how the memories of past generations can affect one’s own interpretation of self.” With this awareness in mind, I’m going to turn both briefly to The Giver and then, more substantially, to Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, the last installment in the Divergent trilogy.

First, however, I want to offer a brief foray into moments in my teaching where I’ve used ideas drawn from Ulanowicz and other scholars dealing with transgenerational trauma (which is a term more often used in explicit studies of race-based trauma, and I found myself wondering in Ulanowicz’s text about the need to create a completely separate term for her ideas). This gifset (also embedded below) was an excellent, excellent conversation-starter to explore transgenerational trauma and the denial of this trauma in both popular culture and dominant educational systems.

Analyzing this gifset in class opened up a plethora of opportunities for exploring both agency and oppression in the creation of history and the ways that this history affectively (to say the least) impacts people’s day-to-day lives.

And now… to The Giver! A brief note — I was disappointed by Ulanowicz’s lack of centralizing racial oppression in The Giver. As Mary J. Couzelis’s “The Future is Pale” essay in Carrie and Kate’s book discusses at length, the central memory issues are kind of meta-textual: everyone seems to be white in this future that Lowry creates, and this goes unquestioned both in the text and in many popular reader responses. The biggest memory issue, therefore, is one of racial violence: unacknowledged white supremacy has erased the history of racism that is absolutely central to the kind of oppression that The Giver supposedly critiques in the first place. Erasing racist violence in the narrative re-enacts this violence, and I was surprised that this was not the central feature of Ulanowicz’s analysis here.

This leads me to my “primary” analysis, of Allegiant.

In brief, the plot of Allegiant centralizes a conflict of memory versus the forcible erasure of memory. (The details are… quite muddy, because, well… it wasn’t, perhaps, the best planned out book in the history of the world. But, happily, the major details aren’t too necessary right now. The basics: The city that Tris, the protagonist, comes from [Chicago] has been subjected to a massive memory wipe, generations before, so that the dystopian U.S. government can experiment on the population in an essentially country-wide eugenics project. The experiment isn’t going as planned, so the government wants to wipe out the memory of Chicago’s inhabitants, which Tris equates to killing them. Then she… well, she — SPOILERS — does it to the government. *deep breath* Okay.)

Thus, the entire premise of Allegiant is that massive amounts of people have forcibly had their memories removed ‘for their own good.’ Inter-generational memory, for Tris, is therefore based on both brutal realities, passionate joys, and historical lies.

However, when she encounters people who still know U.S. history, race is never brought up. Though the novel has very strange and unsettling racial dynamics (I have a book chapter on it that’s in the works for publication, and I’m presenting on it at MLA — who else is gonna be in that hell hole?), race — moreover, racism — itself is never explicitly discussed in the narrative. Never.

So… the characters have literally had their memories of racism erased, and the narrative — the part that readers interact with (meta!) has also erased race. The generation of fictional children that Tris belongs to have literally been born into a self-contained city whose history is based on memory-altered lies, and the generation of real-world children that read about Tris are also having racism erased from their minds vis a vis the disturbing erasure of it in the narrative.

What, then, does second-generation memory mean when the refusal to transmit full memories (in this world and in future Tris’s world) actually perpetuates transgenerational trauma through erasure? What of the ways that transmission of transgenerational trauma by interpollating second-generation memories into generations who have not experienced such oppressions re-creates new oppressions (I’m wondering here about many things, including the potential hierarchicalization involved in needing to mediate Zlata’s Diary through Anne Frank)? What of ethics when memories inflict trauma? Thinking of the gifset above, what of ethics when memories are contemporary and transmitting knowledge across generations provides young people with tools to (try to) survive?