ABSTRACT
The relationship between narrative and identity is a widely researched area. There is little information, however, about how intergenerationally transferred memories also function as a narrative platform to construct the storyteller’s identity. In this chapter, Mónika Fodor examines the essential aspects of selfhood in intergenerational narratives, such as telling rights, memory transfer, and making up for lost information. The analysis illustrates how narratives of inherited memories retrieve and recontextualize culturally enrooted events from the ancestors’ lives to construct the protagonist’s agency, which is transferred to descendants through their obligation to remember and to find more information about the events if possible. Thus, storytellers justify their ethnic identification choices by attributing or denying the social and cultural value potential of ethnicity through their ancestors. With its focus on individual life histories, the chapter offers a unique take on second- or late-generation European Americans’ ethnic subjectivity construction, adding the subjective content element that is missing from large-scale sociological approaches.
