Memory Studies

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in Ireland this year, a large and well-attended parade worked its way through the streets of Dublin. Commencing at the city castle, the procession ended at the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, where rebel leaders first declared Ireland a republic in 1916. Flags flew half-mast, soldiers stood at attention, officials laid wreaths, and historic proclamations were read. This was no ordinary commemoration: it was the city's first official parade in thirty-five years and the largest ceremonial duty, of 2,500 soldiers, ever undertaken by the Irish army.

Historically, the Irish Republican Army has claimed to be the rightful heir to uprising heroes; this year, rebel leaders were remembered in more inclusive ways. President Mary McAleese likened those who lost their lives in the uprising to the thousands of Irish men who died in the First World War fighting with British troops: ‘They did what they did in the belief that they were helping a new generation to grow up in freedom and without fear. … That is true of those who died [in Dublin] in 1916, and it's true of those who died on the Somme’. At another ceremonial event, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern paid tribute to the leaders executed at Kilmainham Jail. He described the day as one of ‘remembrance, reconciliation and renewal’: ‘As we look to the future, we must be generous and inclusive so that all of the people of Ireland can live together with each other and with our neighbours in Great Britain on a basis of friendship, respect, equality and partnership’.¹ Yet claims to national belonging are always fragile, contested by those who seek to promote their own narratives of the past in the public realm. Ian Paisley Junior, of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, derided President McAleese for stating that the rebels ‘gave their lives for those who now enjoy the benefits of the Celtic Tiger economy’. For him, such a statement was ‘utter folly and would not stand up to ‘historical scrutiny’. Not only are claims to the past contested, citizens enact a range of relationships to the nation. At the day's events, young men shouted obscenities at government ministers, some families enjoyed the pageantry, locals attended political rallies, old-timers debated the future of Sinn Féin in pubs, and visiting British students were confused about the lack of media coverage of the day's events in the UK.²

As Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone note in the introduction to their edited volume Contested Pasts, memory, as invoked through such commemorations, communicates ‘political agendas which serve particular ideas about the virtues of the nation, the family, or the current government’ (p. 5). As a process and a way of knowing, memory raises questions about the complex interactions between individuals, psyches, social entities and cultures. Over the past decade, memory studies has emerged as an interdisciplinary field in its own right, with specialist journals and degree programmes. Conference sessions and special journal issues highlight particular themes, such as ‘Gender and Cultural Memory’ (Signs 2002) or ‘Spectrogeographies’ (Institute of British Geographers 2005 annual conference).³ Within disciplines, ‘memory’ is also an entry for numerous dictionaries and state-of-the-art review anthologies.⁴ The books examined in this essay highlight some of the field's most topical issues: the politics of public memory; individual and social memory; and embodiment and representation.

The...