Taking the History out of the Decade of Centenaries: Narratives, Rituals, and Symbols in British Identities in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In 2010 I wrote a rather speculative paper exploring the “labour of representation” of a British identity constructed by unionist and loyalist groups entitled “Forget 1690, Remember the Somme.”2 It mapped an apparent shift in identity politics, manifested through rituals and symbols, away from commemorative practices around the Battle of the Boyne (1690) toward recognition of the Battle of the Somme (1916). That same year Rebecca Graff-McRae published a book noting some of the same processes that occurred after the 1998 Belfast Agreement.3 Since then the Decade of Centenaries in Ireland has provided what might be described as a supercharged field for commemorative practice providing spaces for negotiation and contestation over the symbolic and political capital invested in forms of