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.

Table of Contents:
Figures Maps Abbreviations Epigraphs Preface: Forgetful Remembrance Introduction: Sites of Oblivion Vernacular Historiography Social Forgetting The Turn-Out Part I: Pre-Forgetting: Before 1798 1: Recycling Memory 2: Initiating Counter-Memory 3: Silencing 4: Anticipating Forgetting Part II: Amnesty and Amnesia: The Aftermath of 1798 5: Wilful Forgetting 6: Unforgivingness 7: Exiling Memory 8: Impenitence 9: The Chimera of Oblivion Part III: The Generation of Forgetting: The First Half of the Nineteenth Century 10: Uninscribed Epitaphs 11: Wilful Muteness 12: Versified Recall 13: Fictionalized Memory 14: Hesitations in Coming Out 15: Collecting Recollections 16: Postmemory Anxieties Part IV: Regenerated Forgetting: The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 17: Continued Disremembrance 18: Excavating Memory 19: Countering Neglect 20: Imagined Reminiscence 21: Cultural Memory and Social Forgetting 22: Revivalism and Re-Collecting Part V: Decommemorating: The Turn of the Century 23: Infighting 24: Iconoclasm 25: Rowdyism 26: Comeback 27: Rewriting and Staging 28: Historical Disregard 29: Re-Commemorating Part VI: Restored Forgetting: The Short Twentieth Century 30: Partitioned Memory 31: Breaking Silence 32: Unperceived Remembrance 33: Troubled Forgetting 34: Nonconformism Part VII: Post-Forgetting: Into the Twenty-First Century 35: Remembrance and Reconciliation 36: Dispelling Forgetting 37: Countering Disremembering 38: Disparities of Esteem Part VIII: Conclusion: Rites of Oblivion 39: Dealing with the Past 40: Social Forgetting Beyond Ulster 41: Rights of Forgetting Select Bibliography

About the Author :
Guy Beiner is a senior lecturer of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specialises 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. Beiner is the author of the multi prize-winning book,  Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory .

Review :
Genuinely innovative work As a case study, Forgetful Remembrance is exemplary, but its significance goes well beyond Irish historiography. Beiner has not merely written a history of the afterlife of the rising. He provides a sophisticated and useful theoretical framework that grants insight more generally into the "mechanics of social forgetting", the question of how silence and absence are culturally constructed. Forgetful Remembrance demonstrates that the notion of public amnesia is in fact highly ambiguous. This is an exceptional book which charts the Northern Irish county of Ulster's 'social forgetting' of the Irish rebellion in 1798...While the sheer size of the text may appear formidable, one hopes this book reaches a wider audience than just the academe. We have so much to learn from a text that exposes how memory can be systematically manipulated, weaponized, and 'forgotten', especially in a society which regularly repeats 'not in our name'....This is a groundbreaking text in the study of history, memory, and forgetting which would benefit any scholar of contemporary history. A dense but deeply fascinating book for all sorts of reasons, not least its singular insights into the complex processes of repressing and remembering our conflicts. 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. The book combines a major topic of Irish cultural history with a meditation on the paradoxes of forgetfulness. Beiner is simply encyclopaedic. He seems to have read everything. His intellectual ambition puts him in a different league from most Irish historians of his generation. There are other studies of Irish memory concentrated on particular upheavals but this is the only one that is likely to be read internationally by scholars and students of "memory" Beiner demonstrates a breadth and depth of research that is breathtaking ... His erudition and humanity make this a compelling and highly readable work. 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. Beiner's scholarship is exemplary. The referencing and bibliography is mind-bogglingly comprehensive. His writing is complex, but light in touch ... Beiner paints on a wide canvas; he interrogates the material world in particular to create a three-dimensional and vivid argument ... We're doing a lot of remembering on this island at the moment. Guy Beiner's wonderful book puts that activity into a wider context and embeds it into a deeper conceptual framework. How and why do communities forget and remember these moments of collective trauma? Beiner's ground-breaking argument offers new insights, new lines of inquiry, and some startling new conclusions. Forgetful Remembrance is a work of exquisite detail and theoretical sophistication that challenges the very parameters of the troubled intersection between history, memory, legacy, commemoration and heritage. This book is awe-inspiring in its range, its depth and its sheer imagination. 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. This is by far the most thorough, comprehensive, wide-ranging and imaginative treatment of memory and 1798 to date, and one of the very best studies of mentality in Irish history ... Underpinning the analysis is a prodigious amount of research into a staggering variety of obscure sources to unearth a 'vernacular historiography'. The outcome is the most substantial reconstruction of history from below yet undertaken on Ireland ... It will be influential, and its significance will go far beyond 1798 or the Irish experience. 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. 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.