CONFINED has mapped the ways in which literary and dramatic representations of coercive confinement have shaped Irish national memory. Examining prose, poems, plays and drama about prisons, asylums, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, mother-and-baby homes, direct provision centres and carceral domestic spaces, the project has sought to investigate how literary and dramatic works impact upon political and social discourse on incarceration, or – as has happened more often – how literary and dramatic accounts of coercive confinement have been ignored and blocked in carceral memory discourse.
CONTEXT
In recent decades, a series of state reports has revealed systemic patterns of institutional abuse in Ireland. From the work of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (1999), reports north and south of Ireland's border have uncovered widespread instances of abuse in institutions such as industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes. However, it has been argued that literary and cultural works acted as an 'early-warning system' long before these state reports were published (Kiberd, 2017). CONFINED has sought to investigate this claim by carrying out a longitudinal analysis of how literature and drama was used (and ignored) in the shaping of Irish 'carceral memory' during the 20th and 21st centuries.
OBJECTIVES
With this political and social context in mind, CONFINED set out to identify a representative sample of literary and dramatic texts written from or about carceral institutions, identifying common aesthetic strategies employed across genre, period and form, while also demonstrating the distinct characteristics of work about different institutions. Through the investigation of media archives, the project aimed to track the reception and remediation of a set of case studies in Irish culture, as well as tracing the engagement of official state history with narratives of confinement that have been sidelined.
INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Drawing on concepts from the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, as well as recent sociological innovations in the field of literary and cultural studies, the project was necessarily drawn into collaboration with those in the fields of psychology, geography, criminology and psychiatry.
