CMNH Joint Book Launch and Presentation
Weds 26 October, 5:30pm – 7:00pm (BST)
G4 City Campus, University of Brighton
The Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton, invites you to join Dr Fearghus Roulston and Dr Struan Gray in celebrating the publication of their books.
Joint launch includes authors’ presentation chaired by Professor Graham Dawson with an opportunity for Q&A.
This event is free and open to all in person. Places are limited, so please register in advance via Ticketsource.
For general queries, please email: memorynarrativehistories@brighton.ac.uk
CMNH blogsite: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/
About the books and authors:
Struan Gray, Picturing Ghosts. Memories, Traces and Prophesies of Rebellion in Postdictatorship Chilean Film (Peter Lang, 2022).
How can the afterlives of anticapitalist and antidictatorship resistance enliven contemporary imaginaries of social justice? Where can the legacies of authoritarianism be spatially located and challenged? And what roles can film play in reckoning with these spectral inheritances?
Picturing Ghosts addresses these questions in relation to postdictatorship Chile, a country that has become a nodal point in global geopolitical narratives about the obsolescence of socialism, the birth of neoliberalism and ‘the end of history’. Exploring how the Chilean ‘transition to democracy’ has been narrated in film, the book focuses on stories of haunting and rebellion that unsettle hegemonic temporalities and frameworks of memory. Engaging with the idea of haunting as a trope, a conceptual metaphor and a structure of feeling, it considers different approaches to reckoning with the present past as an emancipatory presence – a multiplicity of unfinished projects and unanswered questions that the cultural imaginary of late capitalism hastens to smooth over.
Through a cartographic approach to analysis, this study looks beyond established landscapes of memorialisation in Chile, encountering rebellious subjects and stories in houses and haciendas, poblaciones, the presidential palace, the Atacama Desert, shopping malls, public schools and university campuses. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging field of research that problematises the dominant spatial and temporal imaginaries of ‘post-conflict’ transitions, striving to construct more inclusive and transformative conceptions of truth, justice and emancipation.
Biographical note: Struan Gray is a lecturer in the School of Film and Television at Falmouth University. He completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton, and has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of London. His research engages with debates about representation, haunting and the politics of time in ‘post-conflict’ and postdictatorship societies.
Fearghus Roulston, Belfast punk and the Troubles: An oral history (Manchester University Press, 2022).
Belfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk – how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees.
Adopting an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail. Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk, the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene. Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime Belfast.
Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.
Biographical note: Fearghus Roulston is a lecturer in the history department at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton before working there as an AHRC-funded research fellow on a project about migration from the north of Ireland to Britain. His research uses oral history to think about questions of subjectivity, memory, temporality and politics.
