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• 1 2017-04-23T23:52:08-07:00 Animating the Unrepresentable 7 image_header 2017-05-01T01:10:31-07:00 Within the same decade, and similarly influenced by poststructuralist ideas, contemporary memory studies began using memory to “destabilize the authority of the ‘grand narratives’ with which History had become associated” (Radstone and Hodgkin 10). Although it is decidedly difficult to generalize the practice of history-making, history was broadly conceptualized as a hegemonic narrative sanctioned and imposed top-down by institutional powers. Memory, being locally and personally situated, therefore embodied the potential to counter official histories. Memory absorbed positive connotations of subjectivity and multiplicity in opposition to history’s negative associations with objectivity and homogeneity.
  
  Animated documentaries thematizing personal memory and history can be seen as engaging with these counter-hegemonic strands of cultural studies and film theory. Our memories subtend and exceed empirical accounts and include non-empirical elements and imagined states of affairs that are still very much part of the way we experience and respond to reality. Animation’s formal excess can be used to articulate and overcome these discontinuities in private history inflicted by internal repression as well as instruments of power. Of particular interest is animation’s ability to overcome the limitations of realist aesthetic approaches to engage with traumatic events. Trauma is often understood as “an aporia in subjective experience and also for the possibilities of representation,” representing an absence of memory or feeling (Honess-Roe 156). The force of traumatic events dislocates us from them, making them difficult to access and even harder to assimilate into personal identity. If absence and dislocation play an important role in recollecting trauma, then it follows that animation, which embraces expressivity and metaphor, is an appropriate tool of excavation.
  
  Laura Marks claims that diasporic consciousness is characterized by a form of collective traumatic memory, subject to “violent spatiotemporal disjunctions […]—the physical effects of exile, immigration, and displacement” (245). Through the violent erasure of national myth-making and cultural destruction, marginal experiences are purged from official histories. When used to represent diasporic memory, animation intervenes to forge links with a past from which the subject has been forcibly disconnected and dislocated. Unlike photographic media, which foregrounds the ephemerality of a past instant which cannot be recaptured, animation is a way to re-create personal memories which have elided documentation and to convey the aliveness of the past. The evocative potential of animated documentary allows filmmakers to venture beyond mere indexical representation of the past by exhuming “phantoms” of private memory which are absent from official photographic record.