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Local conditions, global environment and transnational discourses in memory work: The case of Bloody Sunday (1972)

National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland, brian.conway{at}nuim.ie

Within the collective memory literature, very few scholars have sought to examine commemoration through the lens of globalization theory even though it poses challenges to understandings of time and space that underpin memory studies. This article examines the local political conditions and global institutional environment influencing memory discourses. Drawing on the case of Bloody Sunday (1972), I examine the role of memory choreographers in constructing universalizing commemorative idioms and the local conditions and global setting influencing this memory work. I argue that the mid-1990s was characterized by an increasing emphasis on Bloody Sunday's globally `chic' qualities that seemed to liquidate its earlier localized meaning, and that this was achieved through drawing analogies between the Bloody Sunday experience and other global casualties of injustice and oppression. This narrative reframing of the event is explained in terms of Irish, British, European, American and global influences as well as political, economic and demographic shifts, which came together in the mid-1990s, to create a propitious environment for a global turn in Bloody Sunday memory.

Key Words: commemoration • Derry • Northern Ireland

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