Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster

Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants -- and in particular Presbyterians -- repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.

About the Author :
Guy Beiner is a professor of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specializes in the study of remembering and forgetting, with a particular interest in the history of Ireland. He was a Government of Ireland scholar at University College Dublin, a Government of Ireland Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a Government of Hungary scholar at the Central European University, and a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the multi-prize-winning book, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory.

Review :
"I am immersed in Guy Beiner's riveting Forgetful Remembrance ... Beiner is an astonishing scholar whose dissections of Irish historical memory have already made his name. His new book looks at the processes of historiographical amnesia regarding the 1798 Rebellion in the north of Ireland, employing a huge intellectual range, and in extraordinary detail - while remaining intensely readable, with a Borgesian quirkiness." --Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement "In addition to its immense scholarship, Forgetful Remembrance is notable for its theoretical sophistication... there can be no doubt that this impressive landmark volume confirms the author's status as the foremost exponent (and advocate) of memory studies in its Irish formulations." --Jim Smyth, The Irish Times "This is possibly the most important book that has been written to date about the very particular, politically inspired, social remembering and social forgetting of our history in the north of Ireland." --sluggerotoole.com "Guy Beiner has contributed to opening a new page in the history of memory, that of forgetting. He writes about the particular case of Ireland but the perspectives which he opens concern all historians of memory." --Pierre Nora, editor of Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory] "This book is 'bottom-up' history at its best, a sustained and subtle reflection on the enduring shadow of the failed rising of 1798 in Northern Ireland. Using a vast array of sources, Beiner shows shrewdly how for over two centuries ordinary people in Ulster and elsewhere have told this tale of a rising and its suppression through whispers, words, deeds and silence."--Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning; Remembering War; and War Beyond Words: Languages of Memory from the Great War to the Present