Intervention of Sìle Maguire 27 de maio de 2021
Intervention of Sìle Maguire
The discourse of silence, in all its varieties, underlies and permeates not only textual and cultural practices but has powerfully disrupted and shocked the very pillars of Irish contemporary society which, over the past several decades, has witnessed the upheaval in public opinion before the discovery of conspiracies of silence hiding many unspoken and unimaginable “inconvenient truths”. Unsurprisingly, notions of silence loom large in the background of considerations about how to appropriately revise Ireland’s past, approach the present and think about the future (how to break the walls of silence) on the part of many contemporary historians, journalists, cultural critics and artists.
The 19th AEDEI Conference “Silences and Inconvenient Truths in Irish Culture and Society” seeks to address the complex and multifaceted topic of silence by exploring how it is embedded in language, culture, society and institutions and provide a forum for the debate of alternative ways to discuss uses (and abuses) of silence in the Irish context.
