Irish Diaspora, Postmemory, and Intertextuality in the Graphic Novel Gone to Amerikay

Speaker: Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (Maynooth University)
21st April 2016 – 4pm – Room E424 Checkland  Building, University of Brighton – ALL WELCOME

Trauma theorist Marianne Hirsch advocates the potential for the graphic novel genre to provide an ‘adequate representational structure’ for postmemorial artistic expression (Hirsch: 1997). It is a concept which ‘describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up’. Her theorization of postmemory is grounded within the field of Holocaust Studies, and the event of the Holocaust remains a touchstone for work on postmemory within other contexts of mass historical trauma.

The talk will investigate representations of Famine postmemory among the Irish diaspora in the graphic novel Gone to Amerikay (2012), written by Derek McCulloch and illustrated by Colleen Doran. It will discuss the novel’s spectralization of the Famine. It is a transgenerational tale of Irish immigration to America that is haunted by the ghost of a Famine migrant. The novel’s intertextual elements will be explored, for it originated as a literary adaptation of the song ‘Thousands are Sailing’ (1988) by the London Irish band The Pogues. Other intertexts include an article from the London Illustrated News(1849), Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow (1954), and Irish narratives from the aisling and nationalist traditions.

This is a free public lecture organised by Century 21 at the University of Brighton