‘Genealogical nostalgia’: Second-generation memory and return in Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa

Abstract

Second-generation family memoirs often recount physical pilgrimages to distant homelands. While such journeys suggest a naive privileging of an essentialized, ideal origin, I argue that these visits also have the power to problematize origins by exposing the gaps between place and narrative. These journeys illuminate the dual forces of postmemory and what I term ‘genealogical nostalgia’, the longing for the times and places of one’s ancestral past. These ‘returns’ therefore can play a key role in the construction of second-generation identity. Drawing on Caterina Edwards’s 2008 memoir Finding Rosa, I show how journeys to the ‘homeland’ highlight the particularity of second-generation experience as a generation making connections between multiple forms of memory and multiple sites of belonging.