The Politics Of Irish Memory

Irish culture is obsessed with the past, and this book asks why and how. In an innovative reading of Irish culture since 1980, Emilie Pine provides a new analysis of theatre, film, television, memoir and art, and interrogates the anti-nostalgia that characterizes so much of contemporary Irish culture.

This book is an original case study of how memory has driven and challenged the Irish republican transition from armed conflict to constitutional politics that culminated in the acceptance of policing in the Northern Ireland state

What happens when cultural memory becomes a commodity? Who owns the memory? In The Memory Marketplace, Emilie Pine explores how memory is performed both in Ireland and abroad by considering the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history. Analyzing examples from this realm of theatre, Pine focuses on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience. Whose memories are observed in these transactions, and how and why do performances prioritize some memories over others? What does it mean to create, rehearse, perform, and purchase the theatricalization of memory? The Memory Marketplace shows this transaction to be particularly fraught in the theatricalization of traumatic moments of cultural upheaval, such as the child sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. In these performances, the role of empathy becomes key within the marketplace dynamic, and Pine argues that this empathy shapes the kinds of witnesses created. The complexities and nuances of this exchange—subject and witness, spectator and performer, consumer and commodified—provide a deeper understanding of the crucial role theatre plays in shaping public understanding of trauma, memory, and history.

"The year 1916 witnessed two events that would profoundly shape both politics and commemoration in Ireland over the course of the following century. Although the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme were important historical events in their own right, their significance also lay in how they came to be understood as iconic moments in the emergence of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on history, politics, anthropology and cultural studies, this volume explores how the memory of these two foundational events has been constructed, mythologised and revised over the course of the past century. The aim is not merely to understand how the Rising and the Somme came to exert a central place in how the past is viewed in Ireland, but to explore wider questions about the relationship between history, commemoration and memory"--

Derry is the second largest city in Northern Ireland and has had a Catholic majority since 1850. It was witness to some of the most important events of the civil rights movement and the Troubles. Derry City examines Catholic Derry from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the 1960s and the start of the Troubles. Plotting the relationships between community memory and historic change, Margo Shea provides a rich and nuanced account of the cultural, political, and social history of Derry using archival research, oral histories, landscape analysis, and public discourse. Looking through the lens of the memories Catholics cultivated and nurtured as well as those they contested, she illuminates Derry’s Catholics’ understandings of themselves and their Irish cultural and political identities through the decades that saw Home Rule, Partition, and four significant political redistricting schemes designed to maintain unionist political majorities in the largely Catholic and nationalist city. Shea weaves local history sources, community folklore, and political discourse together to demonstrate how people maintain their agency in the midst of political and cultural conflict. As a result, the book invites a reconsideration of the genesis of the Troubles and reframes discussions of the “problem” of Irish memory. It will be of interest to anyone interested in Derry and to students and scholars of memory, modern and contemporary British and Irish history, public history, the history of colonization, and popular cultural history.

The question of how to move beyond contentious pasts exercises societies across the globe. Focusing on Northern Ireland, this book examines how historical injustices continue to haunt contemporary lives, and how institutional and juridical approaches to 'dealing' with the past often give way to a silencing consensus or re-marginalising victims.

This edited collection considers the increasingly central role that memory and recalling the past plays in determining contemporary politics and the future direction of Northern Irish society. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, it considers how competing narratives of the past are constructed, re-constructed, commemorated and then harnessed to mobilise politics in present day society.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.