The politics of mourning, victimhood and martyrdom are central to the self-images of Armenia and Ireland, and yet in the context of this special issue resilience emerges as a powerful metaphor that was previously absent from contemporary narratives of Armenian and Irish nationhood. The readings on resilience offered in this volume differ greatly in methodological focus and theoretical context, but all offer a critical view on how resilience is performed and imagined in Armenia and Ireland around the hundred-year mark. They show that resilience, much like vulnerability, is indeed “part of resistance” (Butler 2016, 26). This dual vision can replace our previous conclusions about resilience with a more nuanced understanding of what it means to resist in our world – in the past, present and future.
The ten essays, responses and artistic interventions in this issue show that the notion of resilience can provide us with a unique way to explore and read Armenian and Irish history, alongside and in connection with each other. In the centennial landscape we survey, resilience comes in many forms and occurs in a variety of situations and historical moments: in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development on the one hand, and dreams of independence on the other (Carlo Maria Pellizzi and Aldo Ferrari); in the margins as well as at centre stage in Great War national politics (Marc Levene); in surviving archival documents chronicling the birth of modern human rights law and activism (Patrick Walsh); in diplomatic reports from Armenia by Irish emissaries commenting on Armenia’s trajectory as a peripheral republic of the Soviet Union (Maurice J. Casey); in the form of counter-memories of the “generations after” who struggle to find their voices and identities in a post-colonial global context and post-traumatic nation-building discourse around the hundred year mark (Sevan Beukian and Rebecca Graff-McRae); in literary works (drama and novels) and films that make us painfully aware of the limits of our own language and imagination (Claudia Parra and Donatella Abbate Badin); and in contemporary artistic interventions and performances (Mkrtich Tonoyan and Phelim McConigly) that add yet another imaginative layer to the silence that is necessarily always part of conversations about war and violence.
Despite the promising, and often original, uses of resilience in the contributions to our issue, the notion has a troublesome and complicated history (Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady 2012). Resilience is widely used in the language of neoliberalism, national security and defence, and it has served as a form of rhetorical shock absorber when “climate change, the War on Terror, and economic crises affect livelihoods around the world, and disproportionally those of the poorest” (Bracke 2016, 58-59). Talk of resilience in order to survive, bounce back and recover quickly from adverse circumstances and situational exigencies contributes to an understanding that to be resilient is to merely survive. Such discourses of survival and self-mastery are culturally and politically charged, as a public poster from the Louisiana Justice Institute seen on a mural in Belfast shows:
Stop calling me Resilient. Because every time you say ‘Oh, they’re resilient’ that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.
We challenge these common conceptions of resilience and argue that an alternative perception of this concept is crucial to understanding how the people of Armenia and Ireland mobilize (and in the past have mobilized) resilience for the purposes of asserting their existence, claiming the rights to memory and equality, and resisting police violence, security and military actions. The concept of resilience, we find, illuminates our present moment and resonates with the recent political and social debates surrounding fundamental questions about political representation and personal freedom spurred by the 2018 Armenian velvet revolution and Ireland’s historic referendum ending the country’s ban on abortion.
TABLE OF CONTENT
Issue InformationIssue Information (pages 1–12) Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-8
Monographic Section
Daredevils of History? Resilience in Armenia and Ireland edited by Dieter Reinisch, Suzan Meryem Rosita
Thinking about Resilience: Introduction (pages 15-17) Dieter Reinisch, Suzan Meryem RositaVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23372
A Nation Once Again? Continuità e discontinuità nel nazionalismo irlandese (pages 19-68) Carlo Maria PellizziVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23310
L’Armenia moderna: rinascita nazionale e risorgimento mancato (pages 69-103) Aldo FerrariVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23314
Speaking about Resilience: Interview with Mkrtich Tonoyan (pages 105-107) Mkrtich Tonoyan, Suzan Meryem RositaVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23315
From Armenian Red Sunday to Irish Easter Rising: Incorporating Insurrectionary Politics into the History of the Great War’s Genocidal Turn, 1915-16 (pages 109-134) Mark LeveneVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23316
Sir Roger Casement on the Ottomans and Armenians in Britain’s Great War (pages 135-151) Patrick WalshVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23373
An Irish Diplomat Reports from Armenia, 1983 (pages 153-156) Maurice J. CaseyVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23318
Trauma Stories as Resilience: Armenian and Irish National Identity in a Century of Remembering (pages 157-188) Sevan Beukian, Rebecca Graff-McRaeVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23374
The Genocide and the Rising: Drama withstanding the past (pages 189-205) Claudia ParraVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23319
“Resilience is performed in our very own imagination”: An Artistic Intervention (pages 2017-210) Phelim McConiglyVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23320
“Our revenge will be to survive”: Two Irish Narrations of the Armenian Genocide (pages 211-228) Donatella Abbate BadinVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23375
1916 and other commemorations: Foreword (pages 231-232) edited by Fiorenzo FantacciniVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23376
“Invention gives that slaughter shape”: Irish Literature and World War I (pages 233-258) Carla de PetrisVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23322
SIGNATORIES: First performed on 22 April 2016 and published by University College Dublin Press (pages 259-262) Richard Allen CaveVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23323
"All hail the mob!" (pages 263-272) William WallVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23377
The History of My Family: W.B. “Leda”, her Murder and Why he Abandoned his Son (pages 273-302) Patricia HughesVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23378
Memory of the Rising and Futurology in the Same-Sex Marriage Referendum Debate (pages 303-318) Andrea BinelliVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23379
THREE ICONS: A Door; a Book; a Tomb (new approaches to Wilde’s work and life fostered by two recent exhibitions) (pages 319-324) Richard Allen CaveVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23380
Miscellanea
“No idle sightseers”: The Ulster Women’s Unionist Council and the Ulster Crisis (1912-1914) (pages 327-356) Pamela McKaneVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23381
W.B. Yeats and the Introduction of Heteronym into the Western Literary Canon (pages 357-375) Hamid Ghahremani Kouredarei, Nahid Shahbazi MoghadamVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23382
How Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneac Took the GPO: Parody in James Stephens’s Deirdre (1923) (pages 377-392) Audrey RobitailliéVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23383
Silence and Familial Homophobia in Colm Tóibín’s “Entiendes” and “One Minus One” (pages 393-406) José Carregal-RomeroVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23384
From High Hopes of the Celtic Twilight to Last Hurrahs in Inter-war Warsaw: The Plays of Casimir Dunin-Markievicz (pages 407-415) Barry KeaneVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23385
Introducing Countess Constance Markievicz née Gore-Booth: Aristocrat and Republican, Socialist and Artist, Feminist and Free Spirit (pages 417-427) Carla de PetrisVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23386
Voci / Voices
The Duty and Pleasure of Memory: Constance Markievicz (pages 431-453) Loredana SalisVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23387
Scritture / Writings
In Place of a Foreword: Encounter with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (pages 457-460) Giovanna TalloneVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23388
The Kingfisher Faith (pages 461-469) Éilis Ní DhuibhneVersion of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23389
Recensioni / Reviews (pages 471-511)Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23390
Libri ricevuti / Books received (pages 513-516)Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23391
Autori / Contributors (pages 517-523)Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2018 / DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-23392