This posts reflects on two research seminars held at University College Cork in November 2022. The first of the two took place November 2nd, delivered by Dr. Heather Laird and titled “Commemoration and Decolonisation – Reflections on the Centenary of 1922.” Dr. Michael G. Cronin presented the second, titled “Hopeful and Homoerotic Spaces in Irish Writing,” on November 16th.
For something that is ingrained into most human’s education and understanding of the world, the idea of history goes often unchallenged. In secondary education we will likely experience history in the format of neatly packed facts and narratives. These narratives will moreover emphasise agents and events of the political arena as the driving factor of a continually onwards movement. Educational curricula select which events were ostensibly the most important in shaping our present. History becomes about a selective cause and effect. My German secondary school’s curriculum of 20th century history drew a relatively direct narrative from Bismarck’s 19th century politics through the two World Wars to the present as the outcome of the influences and allegiances of the Cold War. As soon as any political agent’s role is concluded (e.g. German fascist or socialist movements), their name disappears from the history book.
Now, it is not my intention to deny that events of the past shape the present society in which we live. I also do not intent to imply that only the minority engage with history more complicatedly than their foundational education. I myself refigured my attitudes about history immensely after interacting with the subject at Third Level, being especially drawn to the way in which historiography is uncertain, biased, and subjective. I want to instead establish an example of the ways in which history is naturalised across society; as confined to certain agents and spheres, and to selected events of impact.
Dr. Laird’s and Dr. Cronin’s Talks in University College Cork’s autumn research seminar series showed a fascinating commonality in suggesting different imaginings of historical temporality and influence. Heather Laird reflected upon ways of Decolonisation in which we can reflect on the future by looking towards events within the past that offered an alternative outcome. She discussed Agrarian Land Unrest as an example of Anti-Colonial and Socialist Action that ran contrary to the form of Irish Nationalism that succeeded in informing our current society. Land Unrest in this argument became a vision of an event that could have resulted in a different, less property-focused Irish society. It is an example of a glimpse into different possibilities, disrupting a narrative that frames our contemporary society as the inevitable outcome of the historical events that preceded it and society generally likes to commemorate.
This is a thought-provoking argument. It disrupts this edifice of cause and effect discussed above, the linear construction of history commonly taught.
In comparison, Dr. Cronin’s talk was of a literary nature. He detailed his research into novels of the Irish Queer Movement emerging in the 1990s. In his case studies, homoeroticism served as a spectre of hope and possibility. Through style and narrative, texts provided ambiguous spaces of imagination; spaces in which the future can be rife with possibilities, as we disconnect from the neoliberal hegemonic values that have permeated our being.
Both talks then shared a fascinating and relevant commonality. The speakers through different approaches suggested a disruption from historical fixed narrative. Furthermore, this break from linear narrative serves as the instrumental tool in re-imagining and re-shaping our future. Such a thought feels extremely relevant. Being fed a linear narrative of progress within history for instance, in which oppressed minorities fought for their rights, gained them, and thus gained equality, falsely suggests progress as linear. Current events in countries such as the United States or Poland, as well as continued discrimination and systemic oppression, violently shatter this illusion. What is left is a need to re constitute an understanding of history that better accommodates struggle.
While discussing Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistras Flying in a previous blog post, I contemplated the concept of Capitalist Realism. This concept strikes me again as relevant. A fixed temporal imagining of history can make it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. One of the most common counterpoints to critiques of neoliberal capitalism is that it is the system which has survived and been favoured by historical events. In contrast, most alternative ways of organising society, be they communist, socialist, or anarchist, have failed. The hegemonic fixed historical knowledge can constrict and limit the mind’s imagination for alternatives, and what remains is despair. Applying the insights from the research seminars could pose an entirely different approach. A failed Socialist state could instead become a historical possibility that, instead of failing did not succeed, an insight into a different possible present. And queer or subcultural spaces could become ambiguous spaces, disruptions to temporality that allow for imagining alternative futures, bursting mental constriction.
I would not dare pretend that this is a moral call to action or easy task. Rather, it is a theoretical reflection. Nonetheless, I regard it as relevant and not coincidental that such a shared interested in disrupting and re configuring history would crop up in contemporary academic research. One could suggest that we live in a cultural moment in which we are ever more focused on our intellectual biases and limitations. Even when applied to specific topics, such concerns reflect a drive of awareness that can illuminate any topic, an awareness of the narratives in which humans are embedded in society.
