Nuala Johnson

: Cast in stone: monuments, geography and nationalism

Since the 19th century at least public monuments have been the foci for collective participation in the politics and public life of villages, towns, and cities. They have acted as important centres around which local and national political and cultural positions have been articulated. I argue that monuments are an important, but underutilised, resource for the geographer interested in debates surrounding national identity. Through a variety of examples, I explore the ways in which examinations of the sociology, iconography, spatialisation, and gendering of statues reveal important ways in which national ‘imagined communities’ are constructed.

Framing the past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland

Abstract Recent work has emphasised that heritage tourism is not just a set of commercial transactions, but the ideological framing of history and identity. While some commentators celebrate heritage as a complementary or alternative way of mediating the past to popular audiences, others regard it as little more than bogus history. Through an examination of a planning strategy devised by Bord Failte, the states tourism board, this paper addresses the relationship between time and space in the development of heritage attractions in Ireland, and emphasises the mechanisms through which space is privileged over time in a manner that loses sight of the complexities of localised historical processes. This argument is illustrated through the example of an open-air museum which focuses on the display of material culture independent of the historical contingencies of its creation. By contrast, an examination of a stately home, opened to the public by an independent trust, demonstrates how the past can be provocatively explored to a mass audience by being anchored in local historical geography and eschewing an approach that reifies local events into national processes.

Sculpting heroic histories: celebrating the centenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland

In this paper I explore the role of public statuary in constructing a heroic analysis of the past through an examination of the centenary celebrations staged to commemorate the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Monuments entered the arena of public, secular space in Ireland mainly during the nineteenth century. It was not until the latter decades of that century that nationalist statuary, which sought to elaborate Irelands quest for political independence, emerged. The significance of these monuments rests, I argue, in their popular appeal and the debates that surrounded their construction and unveiling. Although an alliance of nationalist interests was achieved during the centenary celebrations, this paper emphasizes the tentative nature of that alliance and the gendered iconography and discourse surrounding the statues themselves.

Mapping monuments: the shaping of public space and cultural identities

On writing of the Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes (1964) observed ‘the Tower is the only blind point of the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference’ (p. 237). In speaking of the power of this public monument to capture the tourists’ and locals’ imagination both as a viewing spot for structuring the panorama that is Paris itself, and as symbolizing the city in a single sign, Barthes draws our attention to the significance of public monuments in the constitution of individual and collective meaning. Not all monuments have the iconic status of Paris’s chief visual symbol, but our urban and, to a lesser extent, rural landscapes are replete with public sculpture and monumental architecture. While statues and the attendant grande architecture are found in cities of the ancient world, the massive proliferation of public statuary that accompanied the nation-building projects of the past 200 years has become the principal focus of scholarly attention. These spaces of public display and ritual are what Boyer (1994) refers to as ‘rhetorical topoi ... those civic compositions that teach us about our national heritage and our public responsibilities and assume that the urban landscape itself is the emblematic embodiment of power and memory’ (p. 321). Rather than treating public monuments as innocent aesthetic embellishments of the public sphere alone, recent scholarship has emphasized the political and cultural meaning attached to them. Indeed there is increased attention being paid to the spatiality of public monuments where the sites are not merely the material backdrop from which a story is told, but the spaces themselves constitute the meaning by becoming both a physical location and a sight-line of interpretation (Johnson, 1994, 1995). Maurice Halbwachs (1992) observed that, in the earliest religious rituals, the most successful ones had a ‘double focus’ – a physical object of veneration and a shared group symbol superimposed on this object. Barthes (1964) claims a ‘double movement’ where ‘architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of convenience’ (p. 239). Similarly, when speaking of landscapes, geographers have noted their

The contours of memory in post-conflict societies: enacting public remembrance of the bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Paul Ricoeur this paper investigates the geographies of public remembrance in a post-conflict society. In Northern Ireland, where political divisions have found expression through acts of extreme violence over the past 30 years, questions of memory and an amnesty for forgetting have particular resonance both at the individual and societal level, and render Ricoeur’s framework particularly prescient. Since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, initiating the Peace Process through consociational structures, discovering a nomenclature and set of practices which would aid in the rapprochement of a deeply divided society has presented a complex array of issues. In this paper I examine the various practices of public remembrance of the 1998 bombing of Omagh as a means of understanding how memory-spaces evolve in a post-conflict context. In Omagh there were a variety of commemorative practices instituted and each, in turn, adopted a different contour towards achieving reconciliation with the violence and grief of the bombing. In particular the Garden of Light project is analysed as a collective monument which, with light as its metaphysical centre, invited the populace to reflect backward on the pain of the bombing while at the same time enabling the society to look forward toward a peaceful future where a politics of hope might eclipse a politics of despair.

Fictional journeys: paper landscapes, tourist trails and Dublin's literary texts

Recent geographical analyses of literary texts have broadened the scope of inquiry from descriptive to critical interpretations of literature. Building on these existing insights in this paper I seek to focus on James Joyces Dublin. Specifically, I wish to address how the navigational matrix presented in his novels provides a means for interpreting the city. This paper focuses on how the Dublin of Joyce intersects with travel accounts about Ireland and the city in particular and how his novels can be used to engage with the complex geographies of the modern city. While global cities like London, Paris and New York have well‐established credentials as centres of literary creativity and literary tourism, the fact that Dublin forms the anchor for one of the twentieth centurys most experimental writers makes it an interesting case from which to address the geographies of the novel.

Grand design(er)s: David Moore, natural theology and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, 1838-1879

Geographers have increasingly been investigating the role of space in the regulation and constitution of a range of scientific discourses from historical studies of natural history societies and zoological gardens to analyses of contemporary biotechnology industries. It is abundantly clear that geographical location and the spatial relationships underpinning such institutions form more than the material stage on which scientific activity takes place. These socially produced spaces themselves, and their internal and external connectivities, play an important role in the establishment and warranting of knowledge claims to specific interpretations of the natural world. Moreover, historically institutions such as botanical gardens not only displayed prevalent systems of taxonomic regulation; they also became sites for the investigation of order in the natural world. This paper investigates the relationship between David Moores role as curator of Dublins botanical garden and his delivery of an anti-evolution lecture in Belfast in 1874. For Moore, the structuring of the scientific garden and the botanical discourse attending plant life there revealed the workings of a beneficent designer and thus was a material expression of a natural theology. The classifying of plants into families, the orderly fashioning of the beds, the display of exotics in the hothouses all facilitated a particular reading of designed nature which confirmed his commitment to the existence of a divine designer, and this reading of nature was popularly translated in his Belfast lecture.

The Cartographies of Violence: Belfast's Resurrection Man

In this paper I seek to examine the relationships between fiction, violence, and the geographical imagination through an analysis of Eoin McNamees debut novel Resurrection Man. In dealing with a universal theme—the will to kill—but set in 1970s Belfast and narrating the existential journey of a gang of Loyalist killers in their campaign of violence across the city, I suggest that this novel presents the modern city and the characters who inhabit its streets as individuals journeying through familiar and alien territories in search of a stable set of identities. Through an examination of the narrative style employed by McNamee–the structural devices, the metaphorical engagements, the linguistic tropes—I suggest that the novel reads the city beyond the scientific or social-scientific imagination. For geographers interested in the connections between cities, violence, and modernity, the novel invites us to establish a dialogic relationship with the literary text not to advance our own theories but to take seriously those which in structure, form, and content are radically different to our own.

Nation-building, language and education: the geography of teacher recruitment in Ireland 1925-55

Abstract The achievement of Irish independence in 1921 raised the question of the definition of a national cultural identity. Although this identity had been debated in a pre-independence context and an effective counter-hegemony to the dominant cultural values of the British state had been established, once independence was achieved it was necessary to put into practice many of the cultural ideals expressed earlier. This paper examines how the Irish language emerged as one of the foundations of Irish identity and how the education system became the cornerstone of the states language policy. Using the concepts of hegemony and ‘organic’ intellectual as developed by Gramsci, I argue that there was a clear geographical bias in the implementation of a scheme of language revival through the primary schools. This bias favoured the Irish-speaking (Gaeltacht) regions of the country. The teachers recruited from these areas formed a stratum of ‘organic’ intellectuals and acted as mediators between the state and the society that constituted it. In this context, nation-building is treated as a dynamic process where views of national identity are contested and debated before particular state policies are adopted.

An Analysis of the ‘Friends and Neighbours’ Effect in an Irish Urban Constituency

The literature on the ‘friends and neighbours’ effect on voting behaviour has focused almost exclusively on the analysis of predominantly rural constituencies. This paper examines the influence of a ‘friends and neighbours’ type of voting in Dublin West, in the 1981 General Election. Dublin West is an urban constituency, and this analysis suggests that a ‘friends and neighbours’ analysis offers some insights into the basis of electoral support for individual candidates in an urban context.