The <i>Chronicles of Long Kesh</i>: Provisional Irish Republican memoirs and the contested memory of the hunger strikes

Hopkins, Stephen

doi:10.1177/1750698014523442

Cited by 32 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…(Graff-McRae, 2010, p. 59). Although memory work often functions as an intra-community unifier, this particular case shows the potential for such collective engagement with the past to act as a focus for virulent contestation within the political community (Hopkins, 2014;. Geoffrey Cubbit contrasts social memory with collective memory, arguing that the latter is a 'species of ideological fiction' that is generated by the former, which is 'a set of processes …that within any community are likely to generate a diversity of understandings both of what pasts ought to be evoked or described or celebrated, and of the particular contents that representations or evocations of each of these pasts should incorporate or articulate (2007, p.18).…”

Section: Intra-bloc Memory Competitionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration?

McGrattan

Hopkins

2016

Ethnopolitics

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Collective memory, broadly conceived, has long been held to be an essential component within ethno-national belonging. For example, as Anthony Smith explains, a sense of historical continuity and common heritage is essential to some form of group cohesion and identification (1991). The idea that memory is intrinsic to processes of binding, bonding and 'othering' has been the subject of research across a number of disciplines. Often this work focuses, implicitly or explicitly, on the conflictual and divisive processes that memory mobilization triggers. Abdelal et. al. (2006), for instance, describe how identity consists of content and contestationmeanings are broadly shared about identity, what it does, what it looks like and why it is important within groups; but those meanings can often be subject to differences of emphasis and interpretation. Given this fluidity, particular aspects of group belonging and identification become salient when they are triggered by changing circumstances (Chandra, 2006). As John Gillis points out, 'we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities'. As such, memory and national identity are congruent and symbiotic: 'Memories help us make sense of the world we live in', he goes on to argue, '"memory work" is, like any other kind of physical or mental labour, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end (1994, p. 3).2 Yet, in each instance of the politicization or mobilization of identity an act of depoliticization occurs -other elements, other memories, other experiences are muted, displaced or deferred. In each instance of contestation, an act of what Michael Freeden (1996) (in specific relation to ideology) calls decontestation can be glimpsed -in other words, the very meanings that attach to identities (for example, the interpretations given to purportedly critical historical events) are overwritten and overdetermined so as to elide difference and distinction in such a way as to offset or pivot away from conflictual readings. As Graff-McRae points out in her article in this Special Section, often, this glimpse takes place at oblique angles because the act of depoliticization or decontestation depends on silencing or 'ghosting'. The countermemories of non-dominant groups (in Graff-McRae's paper, for instance, gendered experiences of the Northern Irish Troubles) may be forgotten, ignored or pushed aside when they are not easily assimilated into the overarching group-understanding. This special section draws together papers by Rebecca Graff-McRae and Adrian Littleand Mark Macmillan that seek to problematize critical and under-studied aspects of these notions; the overarching idea is to explore the roles that memory may play in overcoming division. It is also the case, however, that memory work has the potential, particularly in societies attempting to grapple with long-standing and deep-rooted ethno-national identities, to be used by protagonists to perpetuate or accentuate such ...

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Section: Intra-bloc Memory Competitionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration?

McGrattan

Hopkins

2016

Ethnopolitics

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“…These allegation have the effect of weakening the master narrative of the Republican memory (McGrattan, 2017: 493), and goes as far to challenge the conventional wisdom that there is a homogeneity and consensus about the group’s communal memory. For instance, when IRA veteran Richard O’rawe decided to publish his memoirs on the story of the hunger Strike in Long Kesh prison, being one of the hunger strikers, he was warned that challenging the narrative set by the leadership of Sin Fein would lead to his exclusion (Hopkins, 2014: 433). Those challenging the master narrative of Sinn Fein are now referred to as dissidents, who seem to fall in the category of mnemonic resistance in trying to demonize the internal‐other by rejecting the attempt to homogenize the memory of the Republican faction through the interpretation of the hunger strike.…”

Section: Ibn Khaldoun and Communal Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Building and Istitba’ in Divided Societies

Tabar

Aboultaif

2023

Studies Ethnicity & National

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This paper studies collective memory in divided societies. To do so, we begin by studying national memory in civil societies, where the nature of this memory is hegemonic. We use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to explain national memories in civil societies and differentiate it from that of contested memories in divided places. In order to explain memory in divided societies, we apply Ibn Khaldoun’s concepts of ‘aAsabiyah and Istitba’. Societies deeply divided tend to have contested memories at two levels: within a community which creates an internal other and outside the community where groups compete to impose their memory at the state level. We use examples from Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Bosnia‐Herzeogvina to explain the memory dynamics from a Khaldounian perspective.

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“…Their memory was carefully stage-managed by the leadership of the provisional republican movement as a source of political legitimisation (although the leadership has since been criticised in a number of memoirs). 34 In an age of growing globalisation, Irish memory was inherently transnational. For most of the twentieth century, there was a continuous outflow of disillusioned emigrants who left Ireland in search of a better life abroad.…”

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confidence: 99%

Irish Foreign Policy: 1919 to 1973

Kennedy¹

The Cambridge History of Ireland

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On the cusp of the twentieth century; Ireland was obsessed with memorialisation. This condition reflected a transnational zeitgeist that was indicative of a crisis of memory throughout Europe. The outcome of rapid modernisation, manifested through changes ushered in by such far-reaching processes as industrialisation, urbanisation, commercialisation and migration, raised fears that the rituals and customs through which the past had been habitually remembered in the countryside were destined to be swept away. The future of memory was deemed uncertain. Preoccupation with memory is pervasive in the writing of the period. It is apparent, for example, in the philosophy of Henri Bergson-namely in Matter and Memory [Matiere et memoire (1896)], the psychology of Sigmund Freud (as evident in several of his landmark essays) and, perhaps most famously; in Marcel Proust' s classic novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past. 1 Writing in the early-twentieth century; the sociologist Emile Durkheim maintained that group identity requires a sense of continuity with the past. 2 This embryonic notion of social memory

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The Chronicles of Long Kesh: Provisional Irish Republican memoirs and the contested memory of the hunger strikes

Abstract: This article analyses the recent struggle for control of the Provisional Irish Republican movement's collective memory of the 1980-81 hunger strikes, during which ten Republicans

Cited by 32 publications

References 14 publications

Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration?

Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration?

Memory Building and Istitba’ in Divided Societies

Irish Foreign Policy: 1919 to 1973

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