3 - 1913–1916–1919: Yeats’s Dates
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Summary
Ten years of centenary commemorations of the events from 1913 to 1922 that led to Ireland's very partial decolonization have highlighted the importance of memory and historical record to the politics of the present. Commemoration, generally an institutional practice of the state, has the capacity to awaken memories at odds with the official narrative or to generate counter-histories that summon up occluded events that contained the potential for other futures. The contested space that arises calls into question the intent of commemoration, asking both what drives commemoration and in what direction it tends as an act of historicization as well as one of remembrance. Self-evidently, the period of 1913–16 is commemorated as a kind of historical watershed. From the singular cluster of events that occurred in those years—the passing of the Home Rule Bill, the Dublin Lockout of 1913, the slaughters on the battlefields of the Great War, and the Easter Rising—can be traced the turbulent dynamics that shaped the Anglo-Irish war and the founding of both the independent Free State and the devolved parliament of Northern Ireland. This is without doubt a history that has marked us all down to the present, one hundred years later—if only in so far as it has shaped the unchosen conditions in which we make or remake our own history. To this series of events, my own title adds another set, one whose significance was more immediately determined by 1913 and 1916, that of the year 1919: the year of the commencement of the Irish war of decolonization that seemed to stem with virtual inevitability from the events of Easter 1916 and even from those of 1913. I list this series of dates partly in the spirit of Ciaran Carson's remark in Belfast Confetti, that in Irish history “there's any God's amount / Of Nines and Sixes,” but no less in the interest of denoting another trajectory and sketching another, counter-commemorative constellation. That ideal constellation marks unrealized possibilities and potentials through which Irish events and debates resonate with a wider frame, that of Europe at least, if not also of the global scene that by 1913 had already emerged as the sphere of operations of a fully imperial capitalism.
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- Counterpoetics of ModernityOn Irish Poetry and Modernism, pp. 65 - 89Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022