Forgetful Remembrance Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster

by Beiner, Guy

• ISBN13: 9780198749356
• ISBN10: 019874935X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-12-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants -- and in particular Presbyterians -- repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798.

By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing.

Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.

Author Biography

Guy Beiner is a senior lecturer of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specialises in the study of remembering and forgetting, with a particular interest in the history of Ireland. He was a Government of Ireland scholar at University College Dublin, a Government of Ireland Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a Government of Hungary scholar at the Central European University, and a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Oxford. Beiner is the author of the multi prize-winning book, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory.

Table of Contents

Maps and Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Pre-forgetting, Before 1798
1. Recycling Memory
2. Initiating Counter-Memory
3. Silencing
4. Anticipating Forgetting
Part II: Amnesty and Amnesia, the Aftermath of 1798
5. Wilful Forgetting
6. Unforgivingness
7. Exiling Memory
8. Impenitence
9. The Chimera of Oblivion
Part III: The Generation of Forgetting, the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century
10. Uninscribed Epitaphs
11. Wilful Muteness
12. Versified Recall
13. Fictionalised Memory
14. Hesitations in Coming Out
15. Collecting Recollections
16. Post-Memory Anxieties
Part IV: Regenerated Forgetting, the Second Half of the Nineteenth-Century
17. Continued Disremembrance
18. Excavated Memory
19. Countering Neglect
20. Imagined Remembrance
21. Cultural Memory and Social Forgetting
22. Revivalism and Re-Collecting
Part V: Decommemorating, the Turn of the Century
23. Infighting
24. Iconoclasm
25. Rowdyism
26. Comeback
27. Rewriting and Staging
28. Historical Disregard
29. Re-commemorating
Part VI: Restored Forgetting, the Short Twentieth Century
30. Partitioned Memory
31. Breaking Silence
32. Unperceived Remembrance
33. Troubled Forgetting
34. Nonconformism
Part VII: Post-Forgetting, Into the Twenty-First Century
35. Remembrance and Reconciliation
36. Dispelling Forgetting
37. Countering Disremembering
38. Disparities of Esteem
Conclusion
Bibliography