"Culture" has undergone such a drastic redefinition that it no longer has any difficulty in absorbing arson or even infanticide, Prof W.J. McCormack told the John Hewitt summer school in Carnlough, Co Antrim, yesterday.
Prof McCormack, professor of literary history at Goldsmith's College, London, argued that perceptions of literature and culture in Northern Ireland had developed slowly. Illustrating this with a Stormont government handbook published in 1946, he said that that government found "The Ulster Character" to be rooted in the "concrete, practical, administrative or scientific".
Delivering a paper entitled The Politics of Cultural Commemoration, he said Stormont had attempted to define a Northern sensibility which was distinct from that of the South. Eire had suffered a marked recession. . . under censorship, tariffs, the pushing out of the Protestant Anglo-Irish elements and other adverse conditions".
The adademic academic argued that Shearman's work illustrated two tendencies in North-South relations.: "The reluctance of the Stormont establishment to acknowledge cultural activity, especially outside the English language and the Protestant community", and secondly, "to characterise the South in terms of culture, albeit of cultural repression".
The growth of cultural studies in British universities occurred with the decolonisation of Africa, but the growth of racial tensions in British cities and that of the civil rights movement in the US had a profound effect on the way in which culture was viewed and defined. Cultural studies offered and offer "a radical critique of society and the so-called concepts popularised by the communications industry", he added.
Cultural studies had just taken root in Ireland, and less had been heard of that radical critique. Thus, "notions of ethnicity, of the `two cultures', `the two nations', `the two communities', have flourished all too readily, with an implication of at least quasi-racial differences, while the programme of civil rights has long ago been hijacked by knee-cappers."
"Nothing more clearly illustrates this . . . than the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday at which speakers regularly substitute a rota of nationalist complaints for the social objectives of the marchers in 1972."
We did not have to sit idly by while history was rewritten, he added. History had been replaced by "commemoration and heritage, pseudo concepts of past and present, commercial or ideological commodities rather than social processes.
"The south of Ireland is dotted with heritage centres where visitors can lay hands on the past, but never reflect upon it . . . Painful events can only be commemorated if it is possible to blame an agency sufficiently remote in time, or space, or conception, from both viewers and the displayers. We are as unlikely to see a Fethard-on-Sea festival devoted to sectarian boycotting in 1950s Wexford as we are to see the Arms Trial of 1970 rerun on satellite TV."