Memory Ireland: Volume 1: History and Modernity

Introduction

xiii Introduction OON A F R AW L E Y The field of “memory studies” has been growing steadily in recent decades, fueled by multidisciplinary interest in the ways in which a variety of social groups remember. Among humanities-based scholars, those with a stake in this area include sociologists, historians, literary critics, art historians, and anthropologists, while outside of the humanities, psychologists, neuroscientists and biologists all have the potential to contribute valuably to the field. The net cast by memory studies is so wide, in fact, that in forums like the journal Memory Studies (established in 2008), attention is often paid to describing the useful limits of a field that can seem boundless. Although it is daunting to delineate an area of studies that has the potential to link the neuroscientist’s work to that of a literary critic, it is, simultaneously, immensely exciting to witness work that is adventurous and challenges traditional disciplinary categories. The aim of memory studies is not, of course, simply to force a reconsideration of the borders of academic arenas; the field developed in response to movements underway in several disciplines—most notably in history, with a domino effect for other fields—that sought critically to reconsider the past using new methodological and analytical tools. These movements, which to a certain extent usefully coincided with the growing attention to postcolonialism in the academy, provoked profound and heated debate in various contexts. “Revisionist” debates in Ireland from the 1960s onwards presented reinterpretations of Irish history from a variety of ideological positions that sought to use the past in order to explain the present, to create histories that provided a sense of release from traumatic or difficult pasts; because the xiv Introduction debates occurred against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they had particular resonance and generated a great deal of partisan anger about the question of Ireland’s relationship to colonialism. In France in the 1970s, Pierre Nora began his influential assessments of the ways in which the French past was constructed, analyzing versions of historical reality on which it relied; Nora, along with others like Jacques Le Goff, declared himself to be working on nouvelle histoire, that, taking inspiration from cultural studies, sought to de-emphasize historical narrative and move away from documentled historical studies in favor of more inclusive histories that took account of social movements and mentalities. The “history wars” in Australia saw critics pitted against one another in interpreting Australia’s colonial past and Aboriginal heritage, and in assessing blame for the treatment of Aborigines. What these and other movements shared, in the most obvious way, was a consideration of “history” from new and multiple perspectives that no longer privileged one particular narrative; overarching stories of a nation’s past tended to be rejected in favor of more nuanced, counterhegemonic interpretations . Within the context of the debates provoked by such movements, “memory” became a key term, often used in opposition to “history,” so that often “memory” came to signify an alternatively conceived approach to the past. I remain unconvinced that these terms represent consistently oppositional and thus conflicting approaches to the past and find Nora’s differentiation in his introduction to Les Lieux de mémoires suspiciously sure of itself: he concludes that “Memory is an absolute, while history is always relative” (Nora 1989, 3). It remains important, however, to retain awareness of a peculiar relation between these two terms, first of all, and, second, to recognize that the use of these terms as oppositional, however problematic, reductive, or provocative that might be deemed, marked a significant shift in historiography that contributed to the founding of memory studies as a field. Another significant contribution to memory studies comes through the related field of trauma studies, first the territory of psychologists and psychiatrists but explored in the humanities initially by historians, many with expertise in the history of Nazi Germany. Using psychological theories of trauma and traumatic memory, critics have assessed the impact of an event like the Nazi Holocaust on remembrance in the context of social groups, particularly among victims and their descendants, but also in considerations Introduction xv of larger-scale social remembering by the nation. The use of psychological theory—premised originally on the impact of trauma on the individual— applied to groups has proven controversial, but there is no doubt that trauma studies broke ground and thus changed the way in which we consider trauma...