Scholarcast 17: Professions of English diaspora

UCD Scholarcast - Series 4: Reconceiving the British Isles: The Literature of the Archipelago

In '"I have only one culture and it is not mine": Professions of English diaspora', Julian Wolfreys engages in acts of memory-work, to recover, through a focus on the voice as mnemotechnic and anamnesiac trace, the occluded and marginalized cultural differences of the regional English. Through a reflection on the work of the literary as archive and and the role folk song and folk culture play in the spectral maintenance of different Englishnesses over a thousand year period, Wolfreys argues that at a time when a national agenda for national identity is more urgently damaging than ever, turning to the embedded traces of different, pre-industrial pasts, offers modes of perception and representation that are based on equalities, rather than hierarchies of difference.