Politics and Narrative in Ireland's Decade of Commemorations

Tuesday, 23 October, Keynote, 17:00-18:30 Emilie Pine (University College Dublin) ‘The Memory Marketplace: Gender, Witnessing and Performance’: This talk will focus on the recent upsurge in memory activism and the ways the social turn in commemoration culture enables us to answer perennial questions about how power and memory intersect – who owns memory, how is it traded, and how is it consumed. The Waking the Feminists movement, and emerging policies on speaking up and calling out inequality and harassment across the arts, demonstrate how the past can be mobilised in progressive ways, and how commemoration can serve as a moment in which communities reflect on the past in order to galvanise present and future action. Memory activism depends on different kinds of performance – from the initial energy of the first voice being raised to the effort of long-term collective campaigning. It also depends on the idea that as producers and audiences of commemoration culture we can take up agentic roles as witnesses. Witnessing is a fundamentally limited role as producers and audiences work within the framework of a larger and change-resistant marketplace infrastructure, as well as being impacted by the limits of their own subjectivity and the current dominance of both empathy and presentism as the leading modes of engagement with the past. However, activism offers us another perspective on the performance of witnessing – and hope for how we can overcome the limits of commemoration fatigue. Activism calls on memory actors to pivot away from the idea of suffering being ‘over there’ or in the past, and instead to work towards solidarity and change, to conceive of memory work as a performance of accountability, and to insist on the utopian possibilities of witnessing the past.