Praca postpamięci w Kartografie Juana Mayorgi

Abstract

The Effect of Postmemory in Juan Mayorga’s The Cartographer

The Cartographer of Juan Mayorga was inspired by a visit to Warsaw in 2008. The author went on a ‘walk through an invisible Warsaw’, as he himself described it. It was a journey which followed the places pictured in photographs from the ghetto, which Mayorga saw at an exhibition at the Nożyki Synagogue. I was able to find them. Since photographs play an ‘essential role as a medium of postmemory’, as stressed by Marianne Hirsch, one of the leading researchers on postmemory processes in her paper The Generation of Postmemory, I would like to consider the means by which the photographs from the ghetto have initiated the effect of (affiliative) postmemory on this contemporary playwright (born in 1965), who has no connection to the Holocaust either through his family or even national background. I would also like to explore their effect on the dramatic developments of The Cartographer which take place within two time frames – Warsaw in 1940 as well as contemporarily.