Fine-combing the past: frames, patterns and metaphors (Études Irlandaises, French Journal of Irish Studies, Spring/Summer 2021 issue)

Issue editors: Nathalie SEBBANE et Mathew STAUNTON

The raison d’être of this thematic issue is to showcase innovative, experimental and disruptive approaches to transforming the traces of the Irish past into evidence and narratives from as broad a range of perspectives as possible.

Feeding the processes involved in working through the past that are expressed by the German word vergangenheitsbewältigung through an Irish Studies prism, we reinscribe the Irish expression mionchíoradh an am atá caite (fine-combing the past) as a prompt for engaging with and processing the time before our perpetual present and organising the articles in this volume.

As in the German, the Irish phrase implies the evolution, renovation or creation of methodologies to disentangle and sift the traces of the past and carefully work towards healthier narratives. Simultaneously, Cíoradh also implies disturbing, shaking things up, harassing and aggravating, and we are particularly interested in subjects that are generally avoided: the difficult, unpopular, awkward, inconvenient, undocumented, invisible and impossible.

As Ireland moved into modernity concerted efforts were made to turn a page on its past without having fully examined issues such as child and institutional abuse, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and colonialism. Some see no contradiction in advertising a track record in human rights even though a thorough and proper examination of a past (and present) of human rights abuses has not been undertaken. This task has often been left to journalists and politicians, who have offered partial, partisan and altogether unsatisfactory narrative starting points that historians have been slow to engage with. Unhappily, many issues impacting the lives of ordinary people remain unaddressed and the past is aestheticized as what should have been rather than what was and was not.

The aim of this publication is to question existing narratives of the past and explore ways and means of achieving more truthful, joyful, playful, irreverent and, ultimately, more satisfying versions by engaging with experimental methodologies and unexplored sources.

Contributions are welcome on (but by no means limited to) the following issues:

• Archival research
• Archeological assessment
• Genealogy
• Literary criticism
• Memory and commemorations
• Visual/material culture
• Evidence, traces, visibility and invisibility, shame
• Representations, perceptions
• Narrative(s)

Articles, along with an abstract and a list of keywords, should be submitted no later than October 15, 2020, to:
nathalie.sebbane@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
mathew.staunton@gmail.com