Imaging the Great Irish Famine by Niamh Ann Kelly;

Author:Niamh Ann Kelly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786724274
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Artistic Intention, Curatorial Strategies and Collective Remembrance

In 2003, Kevin Whelan suggested: ‘Irish historians are in thrall to […] [a] striking myth – that history itself is not a form of myth, and that it alone can escape the constructive element of narrative form.’57 Since then, the advent of the so-called ‘decade of commemorations’ in Ireland, central to which have been the Workers’ Lockout of 1913, World War I and the 1916 Rising, this discussion on history as myth has come centre stage, leading to diverse outputs, including an extensive programme of talks, on diverging and even contradictory accounts of this period of time. What Guy Beiner calls the ‘dustbin of Irish history’ may yet be usefully tipped up,58 as one clear outcome of the flurry of talk about commemoration has been a renewed debate around the value of folk history in, as Beiner phrased it in 2006, ‘crafting the past’. He describes folk history as

a ‘people’s history’ featuring multiple narratives that refer to numerous people and are told in different versions by various storytellers to assorted audiences. This kaleidoscope complexity amounts to democratic history that was by no means free of local prejudices and politics, though these did not necessarily correspond with prevalent suppositions about ‘traditional’ nationalist history.59

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