Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer que Fiona McCann a obtenu un financement PRC de l’ANR (CE 54 2025) pour son projet: « Literature and the Arts as Spaces of Negotiation for Ireland’s Future ».  Toutes nos félicitations à elle!

Ce projet est coordonné par Fiona McCann, professeure de littérature britannique et irlandaise des XXe et XXIe siècles (VALE), et ses principaux partenaires sont Hélène Lecossois, professeure de littérature irlandaise à l’Université de Lille (CECILLE), et Alexandra Poulain, professeure de littérature et d’arts contemporains britanniques, irlandais et postcoloniaux à l’Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (PRISMES). Parmi les autres partenaires figurent Lara Cuny, PRAG à l’Université d’Aix-Marseille et spécialiste du financement du Arts Council of Ireland, Nora Hickey-M’Sichili, directrice du Centre culturel irlandais (CCI) à Paris, deux chercheurs postdoctoraux et un doctorant (qui sera recruté en septembre 2026), ainsi que deux doctorantes, Martina Balassone et Valentine Lerouge (VALE), qui travaillent respectivement sur le roman contemporain de la diaspora libanaise et sur la notion de la frontière dans la littérature irlandaise et indienne.

The aim of this project is to investigate the place of the arts and literature in the current negotiation of Ireland’s political and social future, particularly in relation to the island-wide discussion about a border poll in the near future. Just over 100 years after a partial independence obtained after a war of independence (1919-1921) and which then triggered a civil war (1922-1923), exactly 100 years after the Boundary Commission which entrenched the limits of the border, and just over 25 years after the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement which, ostensibly, put an end to the Northern Ireland Troubles (1968-1998), the moment is ripe for the ongoing conversation about Ireland’s future, both in political and social terms.

The main objective of this research is to consider the specific role occupied by literature and the arts (i.e. visual and performance arts, music) in this conversation, both as a way of reflecting the different positions and, potentially, of shaping attitudes to both the constitutional question and the various issues subtending it. The specific art forms under scrutiny will be novels, poetry, music, theatre and dance performances, paintings, installations, and exhibitions. The central hypothesis is that contemporary literature, music, visual and performance arts from both sides of the border are currently actively contributing to the project of re-imagining Ireland, sketching out new political, social and environmental futures from an all-island perspective, and inviting reflection and debate on the contours and risks at stake in a potentially seismic political reconfiguration of the island. The specific role of literature and the arts in reflecting and diffracting views on the future of the Irish border has not yet been the subject of research and this project is the first to engage with it. Beyond the actual art works themselves, this project also aims to provide a space for artists and writers, as public intellectuals, to convey their opinions on and visions for Ireland’s future in the context of a possible border poll in the coming years.

This project starts out with the premise that contemporary Irish literature and the arts have always been spaces in which changes in Irish society are writ large long before the general public and political actors become aware of them, and where various political and social configurations are contested, re-imagined, narrated, visualized, and performed. The border in Ireland is not just a line demarcating the six counties of the North and the twenty-six counties of the South; it is not just, since Brexit, the only land border between the European Union and the United Kingdom; it cannot be reduced to political and geographical jurisdictions, waxing and waning cellphone cover, as marking the shift from signposts in kilometers to signposts in miles and vice versa. This is because, even if the materiality of the border has diminished in the post-Agreement era as British Army checkpoints were dismantled, customs removed, and cell phone cover harmonized, and even if there are an estimated 72 million vehicle border crossings and 110 million people border crossings each year (NISRA 2021), the border still occupies an important place in Irish imaginaries. The “present indefinite” of “the unification project” (Bell & O’Dowd 2024) has become more pronounced since Brexit in 2016 and this project aims to fill several gaps in Irish research by stretching well beyond the modalities chosen in literature to represent the border to include an analysis of island-wide artistic collaborations in music, theatre and the performance arts, cross-border arts funding (Aosdána, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland), the development of all-Ireland environmental art-activism, and the intersection of Law and the arts on this question. Authors and artists from both north and south of the border will be studied and interviewed and their ambivalence, opposition to, or support for a reconfiguration of the whole country as it transpires in their creative work will be discussed and analyzed, as will the reception of their work. As Professor Colin Harvey has recently stated, “a time is coming when imaginative and deliverable options must surface” (Harvey 2025) and therefore the time is ripe for an investigation of these imaginaries as they are produced in the arena of the arts.

This project will run over a term of 48 months. It will include discourse and literary analysis, socio-cultural qualitative research methods, as well as public engagement events and media involvement.

The project aims at responding to a considerable gap in contemporary research on the relationship between Irish literature, the arts and politics and the research methodologies are firmly transdisciplinary, anchored as they are in literary studies, performance studies, economics, sociology, political science, queer studies, environmental studies and reception theory.