Event date: Thursday 13 February 2014, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“Trauma in Transition: Recollecting the Great Irish Famine in Diaspora Fiction”; given by Dr. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University Nijmegen)

“How are traumatic events reconfigured when the painful memories that migrants carry with them are ‘brought into new social constellations and political contexts’ (Assmann and Conrad)? Does trauma transferred geographically through emigration, either in the form of lived experience or ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg), become inflected by a specific diasporic consciousness? Furthermore, does the relocation of cultural identities to other geographical and sociocultural settings lead to dynamic transfers between the traditions of the homeland and those of the receiving nation, in a process which Michael Rothberg would call ‘multidirectional’?

These theoretical questions will be addressed in this paper, through an analysis of North-American fiction which recollects the painful episode of Ireland’s Great Hunger (1845-1850) and which was written by and for the Irish diaspora between 1855 and 1870. As will be demonstrated, the earliest Irish-American and Irish-Canadian novels and stories which remember the excruciating years of mass starvation use specific narrative techniques in order to distance Famine trauma from ‘narrative experientiality’ (Fludernik). These techniques can be explained in view of the problematic living conditions of the transatlantic Irish Famine diaspora which encouraged the concretion of a distinct ethnic identity that was incompatible with homeland trauma.

However, as Stuart Hall underlines,  ‘[c]ultural identity…  is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”‘, and North-American Famine fiction suggests that the changing social status of a migrant community is translated into shifts in the narrative performances of cultural trauma. This will be illustrated by an analysis of Irish North-American Famine fiction from the late 1860s till 1870 which, in reconstructing Famine trauma, intersects with other forms of North-American cultural memory.”

Marguérite Corporaal is Assistant Professor of British Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the principal investigator and coordinator of the research programmeRelocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847-1921, for which she was awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. Among her publications are Heroines of the Golden (St)Age: Women and Drama in Early Modern Spain and England (with Rina Walthaus, Reichenberger, 2008), The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790-1900 (with Evert Jan van Leeuwen, Rodopi, 2010) and various articles on the literary afterlife of the Great Hunger in such journals as Bréac, English Studies, Irish Studies Review,Atlantic Studies, and Irish Review. She is co-editor ofRecollecting Hunger: An Anthology. Cultural Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and British Fiction, 1847-1920 (Irish Academic Press, 2012) and Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives (forthcoming, Peter Lang, 2014).