Round table: Decolonising Irish history? Possibilities, challenges, practices

Abstract

The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.

Introduction: New Histories of the Irish Revolution

“…74 This 'global' turn in the historiography is, of course, reflective of broader trends in our discipline and, in common with other fields, historians of Ireland have begun to explore what 'decolonising' Irish history might entail. 75 The recently concluded Global Irish Revolution project sought to place the Irish Revolution in dialogue with the histories of contemporaneous global movements and move beyond the diasporic lens that dominated transnational Irish history for so long. Drawing on groundbreaking work on transnationalism in Irish historynotably, Fitzpatrick published an article entitled 'We Are All Transnationalists Now'the Global Irish Revolution project has juxtaposed Irish revolutionary activists with Russian, African-American, Korean and Caribbean political movements, and explored how revolutionaries in Algeria, another liminal colonial space on the edge of Europe messily integrated into a great European metropole, continued to reinterpret the message of the Irish Revolution across their own long struggle for national liberation.…”