Famine As Colonial Reckoning: Re-Membering Marx on the Enclosure of Land, Knowledge(s), Bodies and Ways of Being in the Colonial Ecology of Modern Ireland

Nation states require forms of collective memory. Such forms of remembering produce (national) identity and ensure social cohesion and integration, primarily through practices of commemoration. Commemorative practices tend to bestow legitimacy to the state, its institutions, beliefs, elites, and dominant interests. This paper argues that we need to reassess dominant modes of remembering Ireland’s past, considering calls to decolonise cultural institutions, heritage, and universities. Whilst recent cultural and political mobilisations around environmental damage and the rise of the far right in Ireland, both North and South, have situated their interventions within a postcolonial frame, I argue that Ireland’s historical colonial governance by Britain is absent from dominant practices and narratives of commemoration and identity construction. Our understanding of the present relies on narratives of the past. A broader and more diverse view of the colonial past opens the possibility of living a different future. Attending to the ‘public use(s) of history’ and their role in processes of legitimation and/or critique, this paper begins to outline the contours of a critical re-appraisal of the founding of the Irish state in the wake of a colonial and ecological disaster: the Great Famine (1845-50). It asks: what would it mean to situate the Famine as a singular, yet comparable event within the longer structure of colonial enclosure and ecological violence? Taking Marx as a social theoretical entry point into this conjuncture, this paper begins to develop a holistic understanding of the nature of Irelands colonisation in all its facets (power, knowledge, being, ecology). Bringing together historical and environmental sociological theorising, it argues that nationalist and imperial narratives of the hunger, and its social and political aftermath are inappropriate to understanding contemporary politics in postmodern postcolonial Ireland.