What is the relationship between memory and haunting? Are we not haunted by precisely that which we cannot remember, or cannot bear to remember? Haunting and memory work in different ways, but they provide complementary lines of access to the forgotten past. Traumatic histories, in particular, are usually forgotten either because they have been willfully repressed or because trauma, by its very nature, circumvents cognitive recall. Yet even forgotten histories have a way of haunting their way back into narrative, of seeping back into the stories we tell even when they have lain silent for generations. Haunting thus becomes a dynamic of history whereby it acquires an agency of its own, a dynamic that is also at play in Marianne Hirsch's concept of “postmemory.”Footnote ¹ Postmemory refers to memories that exceed individual experience and are therefore not “remembered” through personal recall but are, rather, passed down through generations. In this way, one can be born into memories that, like ghosts, possess their own agency and circulate among the members of a family or community. In both cases, long-silenced events find their way into narratives that attempt to recoup untold or untellable histories, as Maria Rice Bellamy demonstrates in her compelling and thorough Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction.

While Bellamy's focus is not on haunting per se, the idea resonates forcefully throughout her analysis. She argues, for example, that her writers “transform haunting traumatic memory into represented ancestral knowledge, and, in this process, extend the possibilities for affiliative postmemory and cross-cultural understanding” (13). And in making her case she draws on the body of work in literary studies on the topics of ghosts, spectrality, and hauntings that was sparked by Jacques Derrida's notion of “hauntology” and followed in the field of American studies by Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters (1997) and Kathleen Brogan's Cultural Haunting (1998).Footnote ² Bridges to Memory figures as an important renewal and continuation of this series.

More specifically, Bellamy's exploration of postmemory as a mode of recouping silenced stories plays out through her analysis of Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (1997), and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004), a reading list that explores how daughters inherit ancestral trauma in several different cultural contexts. Bellamy even extends her focus to the question of how the perpetuation of violence on others can also leave shadowy postmemories – what she calls “the underside of postmemory” (129). She argues that Danticat's devastating novel illustrates “the maturity of this genre” (128) of postmemorial fiction in its representation of the impact of traumatic histories on everyone whose lives they touch, from victims to perpetrators and potentially even bystanders.

Bellamy's selection of texts also allows her to explore the traumas of slavery in the Americas and the sexual enslavement of Korean “comfort women” by the Japanese military, and the trauma of exile, with the result that she gets into both embodied and psychic registers of postmemory. She explores “the body in pain” (45) as a site of inherited traumatic history side by side with the psychic inheritance of powerful feelings of shame, guilt, desire, and courage. Her readings are exhaustively thorough and anyone studying any one of these novels would do well to attend to her chapter on that text: you are sure to come away with important insights. Moreover, Bellamy succeeds in the tricky endeavor of addressing both the intratextual and the extratextual workings of postmemory, for she illuminates the pull of postmemory on novels’ characters and looks as well at how authors stage postmemory in their explorations of their own identities. Of Comfort Woman, for example, she observes that Keller “mixes the pursuit of social justice with the effort to establish her cultural identity … taking responsibility for what she hears and using this traumatic history as a means of connecting to, or more precisely constructing, a Korean American women's collective consciousness” (103). In yet another extension of these strands of affiliative memory, Bellamy as a critic arguably practices postmemory by listening with care and clarity to writers’ representations of trauma and its hauntings, and channeling their stories into Bridges of Memory.

Bellamy's study is itself a bridge, between the burgeoning field of cultural memory studies and American literature. Cultural memory studies grew out of Holocaust studies for the most part, and Hirsch developed her influential concept of postmemory by exploring how the Holocaust is remembered, passed down as it is through the descendants of victims and survivors of its trauma. By bringing Hirsch's idea to bear on other histories, Bellamy participates in a trend in memory studies, which has taken something of a postcolonial turn with multiple scholars in the past few years making the connection between Holocaust-based memory studies and postcolonial literature.Footnote ³ Bellamy's extension of Hirsch's concept to ethnic American fiction takes a growing area of study in yet another transcultural direction. Bridges of Memory offers deeply insightful readings of ethnic literature in the course of showing just how haunted twentieth- and twenty-first-century characters – and contemporary readers – are.