Memory Ireland, Volume One: History and Modernity ed. by Oona Frawley (review)

Scholarly engagement with memory—collective, cultural, national, and personal—is not especially new, particularly not in relation to the development of Irish society. Yet, as with so many such subjects, the specific ways in which memory influences an understanding of Irish identity, politics, and history are more often implicit within a wider scope of issues than subject to scrutiny themselves. In Memory Ireland, Oona Frawley has put together an impressive and wide-ranging collection of essays that tackle the subject of Irish memory explicitly. Contributors address the ways that memory functions at the "conjunction" of an institutional critique of historiography and the rise of postcolonialism, often incorporating the theoretical frame of Trauma Studies to engage what Frawley calls the "historical group trauma" of Ireland's past. The first in an anticipated four-book series, Memory Ireland inaugurates a careful investigation of "the conception of Irish cultural memory" through the multiple lenses provided by disparate fields: literature most prominently, but also religion, sociology, political science, and archaeology. The result is a comprehensive introduction to the field of Memory Studies as a mode of social and historical critique.

The collection is divided into an introduction and two roughly chronological sections, though as Frawley notes, the essays are intended to challenge the "linearity of traditional historical narratives," so as to emphasize the "uneven quality of cultural memory and the way that it can appear to exert its own agency and hone in on particular subjects without regard for others." As a result, the two largest portions of the book—"Remembrance and Forgetting in Early and Pre-modern Irish Culture" and "Modernity, History, and Memory"—address how cultural, personal, and historical memories meet and, at times, how they conflict within the context of a disparate array of subjects, among them the image of the harp; archaeological preservation efforts in the nineteenth century; Eamon de Valéra's presidency; the Abbey Theatre; and a 9/11 hoax. The impressive scope of the collection is also potentially chaotic; Frawley's inclusion of two introductory essays, which map out the history and theory of Memory Studies, provides a crucial definition of terms that prevents the volume from losing focus.

Barbara A. Misztal's "Memory and History" deftly lays out the underlying conflict between "history" and "collective memory"—that is, the concept of a past that is "commonly shared and collectively commemorated." By outlining the evolution of this tension, born from memory's relatively modern place as a "basis of collective identity" and a "resource for the construction and defense of cultural identities" for historically oppressed societies, Misztal illustrates the ways in which such attitudes have shifted over the past century. She pays close attention to how history and memory have been understood to differ—the former often cast as more reliable, although also more vulnerable to state or national censorship, and the latter emerging as an attempt to create "continuity through the preservation and alteration of the past in terms of the concerns of the present"—which in turn sheds much-needed light on the role that memory plays within the construction of Irish identity. Misztal petitions for an interpretation of the past that accepts "the interrelations of history and memory and has to rely on both methods of inquiry." Such a position is enacted throughout the remaining essays.

Where Misztal establishes the generic debate between history and memory, Frawley's own contribution to the collection delineates the theoretical framework of Memory Studies, in the context of Trauma Studies and postcolonial recovery. In "Toward a Theory of Cultural Memory in an Irish Postcolonial Context," she specifically constructs a methodology for engaging the distinctions and overlaps between kinds of memory, which proves particularly useful for readers unfamiliar with the field. Working toward an understanding of the role of memory in shaping postcolonial identity, Frawley makes explicit the tension at its heart: the "inability to forget that has been so often noted by cognitive scientists studying the impact of trauma, and...