Moving towards Multidirectionality: Famine Memory, Migration and the Slavery Past in Fiction, 1860–1890

Abstract

What happens to memories when migrants carry their pasts with them to their receiving countries? How do these migrated memories of a past originally connected to the native country develop when they intersect with the cultural legacies of other communities? Fiction which remembers Ireland's Great Famine and which was written between 1854 and 1890 provides an interesting case study to explore these questions: many novels and short stories which recollected the bleak years of mass starvation were written and published in North-America, the continent where the largest percentage of emigrants of the Famine generation settled. As this article will demonstrate, these early works of Famine fiction frequently testify to the ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg 2009) nature of memory in cultural transfer, in that reconfigurations of the Famine past interact with memories of the Middle Passage and current as well as past debates on slavery in the American South.