Disrupted (Post)identities

Memory, Place, and the Power of the 'Post'

Abstract

For a recent issue of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography, I was asked to write a response to an article that examined the use of the word ‘post’ as a heuristic to better understand places associated with ‘post’ ascriptions—in the case of the original article, post-apartheid (Houssay-Holzschuch, 2021). The post anchors a present-day entity to the past; it does so by opening and holding open a space of hope. This hopeful space is cruelly optimistic (cf. Berlant, 2011); it tethers identities to places and events of the past, while also carrying the promise of unattachment (Anderson et al., 2023). I concluded my response with a provocation drawn from Doreen Massey’s (1999) scholarship on the space-time regime, by asking: “Who uses that vocabulary most powerfully and to what effect?” (Drozdzewski, 2021: 5) Thoughts on that question comprise the subject matter of this _Essay—what can the ‘post’ do? To think-with the power and effect of the ‘post,’ I draw from a range of examples: (post)conflict, (post)war, (post)Socialist, (post)national, and (post)disaster. Then, using case study examples from Poland, Germany, and Australia, I explore the politics of identity, place, and memory across spatial and temporal contexts to show how the post functions powerfully as a lexicon, while being simultaneously sanguine and banal in its application.