Negotiating the 1981 Hunger Strike (original) (raw)
Related papers
Political Imprisonment and the Hunger Strikes: Some Recent Publications
Saoirse, 2015
William Murphy: Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921, OUP, Oxford 2014. Thomas Hennessey: Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher's Battle with the IRA, 1980-1982, IAP, Dublin 2013 Laura McAtackney: An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison, OUP, Oxford 2014. Seán McConville: Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962. Pilgrimage of Desolation, Routledge, Oxon/New York 2014.
Who clamours for attentionand who cares? Hunger strikes in France from 1972 to 1992
La Lettre de la Maison Française d'Oxford, 1999
Year 1996 was famous in France because of the protest of many undocumented migrants asking for their regularisation. Their protest movement climaxed with the break in of the police into the church Saint-Bernard 1 on the 23rd of August. As I have shown in other works (Siméant, , 1988, hunger strikes have been, since the early 70's, the main way of protesting for undocumented migrants. But of course, other social agents use this means, both in political and non political actions.
Hunger Power: The embodied protest of the political hunger strike
Interface, 2016
An enduring form of protest, the hunger strike features in numerous historical and contemporary political and social movements. Yet its simple denial of food is belied by its numerous contradictions. Undertaken by those denied voice it nevertheless can be extremely powerful. It deftly interiorises the violence of the opponent within the body of the protester, affirming and undermining the protest simultaneously. It can be undertaken for highly strategic and rational reasons and yet it is often affective because of the emotional response it provokes. This paper attends to the hunger strike, focusing upon the three historical examples of political activism provided by the Suffragette, Irish republican and anti-apartheid movements. In particular, it highlights three political aspects of the hunger strike: 1) the facilitation of non-verbal communication 2) the embodiment of collective identifications 3) the disruption of the dominant order. The paper considers how the hunger strike challenges the omission of the body from political theory, displaying the body to be both political instrument and political actor. It also challenges the prioritisation of deliberative discussion over embodied protest.
Memory Studies, 2014
This article analyses the recent struggle for control of the Provisional Irish Republican movement's collective memory of the 1980-81 hunger strikes, during which ten Republicans died. 2 It proceeds through an examination and interpretation of the published memoir-writing of some of the key protagonists within the broad Irish Republican movement. In particular, it examines the controversy surrounding the allegations made by Richard O'Rawe (former Public Relations Officer for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners at the time of the 1981 strike), in his two volumes of memoir, Blanketmen (2005), and Afterlives (2010). The article addresses the role of dissent in the movement's collective memory, and the specific role of 'memory entrepreneurs' (Jelin, 2003) in the contestation of the Irish Republican 'official' memory of the hunger strikes.