https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.045
Roots That Remember: Intergenerational Trauma, Biopolitics of Care, and Posthuman Kinship in Coco (2017) and Encanto (2021)
SRIJANI CHATTOPADHYAY
Independent Research Scholar
Abstract: This paper examines Pixar’s Coco (2017) and Disney’s Encanto (2021) as resonant cultural texts that meditate on intergenerational trauma, memory and care within familial and ecological contexts. Drawing upon Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, the films are approached as narratives in which inherited grief, silences and emotional obligations circulate across generations, shaping identities and relationships long after the original wounds have receded from articulation. Here, trauma is neither spectacular nor singular; it persists quietly within domestic rituals, musical expression and expectations. Situated within the interdisciplinary frameworks of health humanities, the paper engages Arthur Frank and Rita Charon to conceptualize suffering as relational and narratively embodied rather than clinically diagnosed. Grief, anxiety and burnout emerge not as individual pathologies but as shared conditions produced by familial economies of care. Through Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s reflections on precarity, the study further argues that family in both films operates as a subtle regulatory system. In Coco, remembrance becomes a condition of survival, producing an affective economy in which the forgotten risk ontological erasure. In Encanto, magical productivity determines bodily worth, rendering unexceptional or non-performing bodies vulnerable within a seemingly nurturing household. Care thus reveals itself as a mode of soft governance, disciplining bodies and emotions through love, duty and tradition. Extending the analysis into eco-cinema and posthuman thought, the paper draws on Donna Haraway’s ethics of multispecies kinship and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism to foreground more-than-human agents—ancestral spirits, sentient homes and living landscapes—as active participants in healing and remembrance. These animated worlds challenge anthropocentric and biomedical models of wellbeing, proposing kinship as ecological, interdependent and ethically entangled. Ultimately, Coco and Encanto imagine survival not through productivity or mastery, but through collective memory, relational care and posthuman belonging.
Keywords: intergenerational trauma, postmemory, biopolitics of care, health humanities, posthuman kinship, eco-cinema, animated film
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