ENCORE! TRAVELS WITH THE GHOST OF MARGARET SHEEHY:
Memory work and the politics and performance of life storytelling
"The Sheehy Sisters, Dublin, 1905. Left to right, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Mary Sheehy Kettle,
Kathleen Sheehy Cruise O'Brien, Margaret Sheehy Culhane Casey."
This presentation considers archival records, scholarly literature, photographs, interviews, family stories and my ethnographer’s diary as an assemblage of materials with which I endeavour to create a life story. I interweave a reading of selected “letters home” written by my grandmother, Margaret Sheehy, from Montreal between 1922-1939 to her sister, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, in Dublin with debates in contemporary scholarship on memory work, life storytelling, ethnography, and interdisciplinary performance studies. These letters include Margaret’s reflections on everyday family life in self-described exile, commentaries on political movements in Quebec and Ireland, her ambivalent yearnings for “home”, and her desire for continuity of familial relationships with her sisters. Considering Margaret’s writing of these letters, and my reading and re-presentation of them as affective, embodied, gendered work invites analysis not only of the letters’ contents, but also of letter writing and letter reading as performative practices, and of research, re-presentation, communication and reception of such research as integral. In this way, I explore the ethical/political potential and problems that emergent approaches to memory work and the politics and performance of life storytelling generate. I look forward to your responses, questions and critiques.
Dara Culhane is a Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada. She is author of two books, An Error in Judgment: The Politics of Medical Care in an Indian/White Community (1987), and The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations (1998); and, co-editor with Leslie Robertson of In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (2005), winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Issues in Literature. Culhane’s work has been published in professional journals including American Anthropologist, Anthropologica, American Indian Quarterly, Native Studies Review, and B.C. Studies. In addition to text-based publications, Culhane works in the field of imaginative ethnography, performance studies, dramatic storytelling and solo performance. She is a founding member and co-curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (www.imaginativeethnography.org), and co-editor of the new journal Performance Matters.
Culhane is currently working on two projects: “Encore! Travels With The Ghost of Margaret Sheehy,” is a life story of a woman who lived in Dublin and Montreal during the first half of the twentieth century, and is based in family stories and archival research in Ireland. "Hear Me Looking At You" is written and performed by Culhane, and drawn from letters and memory work. This solo performance explores exile and return, fathers and daughters, pride and loneliness. Hear Me Looking at You has been performed in Vancouver (2012, 2013), Galway (2012), Los Angeles (2013) and Toronto (2014).