Seeing it Through with Newer Hands

My title suggests, I guess, that the lyric from the Frames's song is hanging around in my head. In any event, I hope your sense is that Eureka Street fit in well with the pursuits of our course, and that you enjoyed the novel. We rightfully praise it for creating space for non-bigoted and politically skeptical subject positions, for showing that identity is dynamic and processual (think, for example, of Peggy and Caroline's mid-life, transgressive assertions) rather than birth-given and static, for showing in the tenderest of ways (at times) that sectarianism defines neither the city of Belfast nor Northern Ireland as a whole. In terms of the broader contexts of our course, certainly we can say that the situation in Northern Ireland has forced the English to ask still more questions about themselves, as ever more hyphenated and hybrid identities supplant the more backward looking British and English identities.

Remembering Carter's point in class on Friday about the importance of looking forward, I thought I'd share this quote from Seamus Deane; once you read it a couple times and unpack it, you realize how insightful it is: "“We stand in servitude to history if we insist upon it as an explanation for the future we might have had but won’t have. Freeing ourselves from that, we can begin to anticipate, not remember our future.”