Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire

Abstract

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire Sara Dybris McQuaid (bio) Ireland is at a key moment of rethink. Between 2012 and 2022 Ireland is officially marking a "Decade of Centenaries" in which the country reflects on seminal events that led to the birth of the state. The Third Home Rule Bill passed in the British Parliament in 1912, effectively paving the way for Irish independence (albeit within the empire). After a tumultuous decade, 1922 saw the final establishment of the Irish Free State, with the island having been partitioned in 1921. The most significant single event in this decade was arguably the Easter Rising of 1916. At that point Ireland was still governed under the Union with Great Britain, and the constitutional path to Home Rule had been postponed because of the outbreak of World War I. In this context the Easter Rising was staged by a relatively small group of radicals who took over key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish republic. A short week of fighting with the British Army ensued, during which Dublin was completely devastated and the leaders of the Rising were imprisoned. The subsequent execution of the leaders outraged the public and rallied more widespread sympathy for a radical agenda. The historiographical agreement—to the extent it exists—has largely been that as a military maneuver, the Rising was a spectacular failure, but as a symbolic performance of blood sacrifice it was a roaring success.1 While the Rising itself failed to achieve its goals of a united, Gaelic, and socialist republic, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has argued that it came to be seen as the point from which all subsequent Irish history begins.2 [End Page 110] Prologue In 2016 the state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising, and in April of that year I brought a group of MA students on a fieldtrip to do participant observation of the commemorations in Dublin. Getting to an old friend's house out near Kilmainham Gaol (where the leaders of the rising were executed in 1916), I asked the taxi driver whether he was already tired of "remembering the Rising"; he said, "Not at all!" On the contrary, he had enjoyed it immensely, with so many new aspects of the Rising being explored. I asked him what he had been especially impressed by, and he said the RTÉ radio documentary An Easter Re-rising about a 1930 uprising in Chittagong in prepartition India (now Bangladesh) apparently modeled closely on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.3 I downloaded the radio program, which was made by Pranjali Bhave, an Indian woman who had lived in Ireland for ten years.4 The idea for this article began to take shape. While the Decade of Centenaries is about reaffirming and recharging (and to some extent critically reassessing) the national community, imperial and postcolonial relationships have also been pivotal points of renegotiation. One dimension of this is how commemorations are used to position Ireland in relation to the imperial experience, which it may be understood to be both part of and subjected to. Another emerging dimension relates to how commemorations are used to come to terms with other former colonial populations, now living in Ireland, and how they and the transnational, imperial pasts they represent are incorporated in local and national commemorations. At the same time certain forms of remembering, particularly those rehearsing antagonistic relations to Great Britain, have been submerged as a wide variety of other focuses have risen to the front of official remembrance. In this article I consider An Easter Re-rising in the context of these wider forms of remembrance, spurred by the Decade of Centenaries, to show how it at once brings a globalizing and transnational dimension to remembering the Easter Rising, while at the same time through a series of displacements reenables a narrative that has largely been eschewed in national commemorations. [End Page 111] Introduction Centenaries are occasions in which all remembrance is necessarily disembodied (since almost none of the people who lived the historical experience are still alive) and therefore must be reembodied by new generations and populations through their participation in memorializing and imagining the nation.5...