The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity

by Stuart McLean

The Event and its Terrors undertakes a critical reimagining of one of the major events of Irish history―the Great Famine of the 1840s―and of its subsequent legacies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, past and present, it considers the emergence of the Famine as an object of historical knowledge and controversy with reference both to the experience of modernity and to the production of academic and nationalist histories in colonial and post-independence Ireland. In doing so, it explores the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with the past via contemporary eyewitness accounts, oral histories, literature, folklore, and present-day commemorative events.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published July 9, 2004

About the author

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Reviews

[Joeji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stuart McLean is a professor of anthropology and this book tackles the Irish Potato Famine, an 'event' of incredible 'terror' that disrupted the categories between the wild and civilization. McLean also reflects on the placing of the Irish Potato Famine within a continuum of progressive history, to somehow 'explain' it and draw lessons from the horror - seen, quite oddly, in the use in the neoliberal era of the potato famine as a lesson for relieving hunger worldwide, which only ends up excising the perpetrators from the story. Most of the book is about the break-down caused by excessive death from a theoretical perspective. What happens to society when no one can be buried?

McLean is a great writer and this book is good for those interested in Irish history, theories of modernity, or how to analyze the past.