From Postmemory to Posts: Hirsch’s Concept in the Digital Age and The Case of the Gaza 2023 War on Instagram

This article revisits Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory through the lens of the 2023 Gaza war as represented on Instagram. Hirsch’s notion of the “generation after”—those who inherit and creatively reconstruct the traumatic memories of others—is reexamined within an algorithmically mediated environment where witnessing occurs in real time. Drawing on recent studies and articles such as Images of the Israel–Gaza War on Instagram (Elmasry, 2024), The Gaza War Coverage: The Role of Social Media vs. Mainstream Media (Khamis & Dogbatse, 2024), and The War in Gaza Is Also Unfolding on Instagram (Al-Hlou & Nikolov, 2023), this text explores how digital platforms have transformed the ways memory is transmitted—speeding its circulation, deepening its emotional reach, and embedding it in patterns of algorithmic repetition.
Through a close reading of selected Instagram posts and Stories—including viral collaborations, protest graffiti, and symbolic imagery—this study identifies new forms of affiliative postmemory: practices through which users without familial or geographical ties to Gaza engage in acts of remembrance, solidarity, and testimony. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that digital witnessing on Instagram blurs the boundaries between personal and collective trauma. Ordinary users—teachers, cooks, artists—repost and comment on Gaza not only as acts of political solidarity but also as affective responses to their own unspoken memories or postmemories of displacement and loss. In this way, Instagram becomes a “space of affective permission,” where the trauma of others authorizes new articulations of self. The article concludes that, in the digital age, postmemory unfolds not only through familial transmission but also through networked and participatory forms of remembrance that entangle the present with the past.