Scholarcast 30: Memory Studies and Famine Studies: Gender, Genealogy, History
UCDscholarcast
English - August 20, 2013 11:00 - 34 minutes - 1023 Bytes - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsEducation ucd scholarcast art culture literature english dcu paige reynolds frank mcguinness claire wills Homepage Download IPFS Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
This lecture identifies and examines a number of trends in recent historiographical work on the Great Famine including their striking appropriation of narrative and fictive tropes. It explores the existence – or perceived existence – of an 'affective gap' in existing historiography, which is seen to justify this wave of new publications, a gap reinforced by the failure of most famine scholarship to reflect in depth on its own affective and emotional register. The related absence of gender as a category of analysis within studies which have emphasized national and regional scales of enquiry is highlighted in the lecture's second part, and it concludes by proposing a re-examination of gender as a lens through which, in Marianne Hirsch's words, 'through which to read the domestic and the public scenes of memorial acts'.