Abstract
As previous chapters have pointed out, in periods of transition, the relations between the present and the past are reconfigured: people look to new meanings in the past to make sense of their contemporary situation and to draw lessons that they believe they can use to fulfil their aspirations about the future. This chapter extends this debate by examining how the 1981 hunger strike has been re-presented by republicans and how the particular narrative of Sinn Féin has been vindicated by Steve McQueen’s acclaimed (2008) film Hunger. I suggest that Hunger reveals and reproduces the inner dynamics of the Northern state: working through and re-inscribing ethnicised relations through its overt messages and its studied silences.
I believe that people who went through this period and had these experiences have an obligation to tell a new generation about it — to ensure that this crucial period in Irish history isn’t left to be rewritten by the ‘experts’ and academics but is actually recounted by the people who lived it.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Rogelio Alonso, The IRA and Armed Struggle (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 108.
See, for example, Richard O’Rawe, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike (Dublin: New Island Books, 2005), and the same author’s account of the fall-out from the publication of that book: Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer That Changed Irish History (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2010). See also, the ‘Special investigation’, in the Irish News, ‘The hunger strike: Was there a deal?’, 28 September 2009, pp. 1–11.
Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000), p. 152; see also Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000).
Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (London: University of California Press, 2000), p. 318.
Eric P. Kaufmann, The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 155; Dean Godson, Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism (HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 129–30.
Martyn Frampton, The Long March: The Political Strategy of Sinn Féin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Neil Southern, ‘Territoriality, alienation, and loyalist decommissioning: The case of the Shankill in Protestant West Belfast’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 20:1 (2008), p. 68.
Ibid., p. 80.
Horowitz, op. cit.
Hastings Donnan and Kirk Simpson, ‘Silence and violence among Northern Ireland border Protestants’, Ethnos, 72:1 (2007), pp. 5–28.
Ibid., pp. 6–7; see also Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Struggles for Memory (London: Latin American Bureau, 2004), trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anatavia.
Ewa Domanska, ‘Historians must have virtues: A conversation with the Polish historian and theorist of history’, Rethinking History, 15:3 (2011), p. 423.
Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 529.
See Austin Currie, All Hell Will Break Lose (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004).
Cheryl Lawther, ‘Unionism, truth recovery and the fearful past’, Irish Political Studies, 26:3 (2011), pp. 361–82.
Ibid., p. 363.
In particular, see Kirk Simpson, Unionist Voices and the Politics of Remembering the Past in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Augé, Oblivion; Kundera cited in Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2008), p. 198.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1991), trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, p. 164.
See the discussion of Oakeshott’s philosophy of history in Arthur Aughey and Cathy Gormley-Heenan, ‘The Anglo-Irish agreement: A constitutional moment?’, in the Anglo-Irish Agreement: Re-thinking its Legacy, edited by Aughey and Gormley-Heenan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 10.
Timothy Kubal, Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 3.
Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), trans. Stephen Heath, p. 44.
Bill Schwartz, ‘“Our unadmitted sorrow”: The rhetorics of civil rights photography’, The History Workshop Journal, 72 (2011), p. 143.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Cillian McGrattan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McGrattan, C. (2013). Making History: The Articulation of the Northern State. In: Memory, Politics and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33220-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29179-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)