Remembering a ‘multicultural’ future through a history of emigration: towards a feminist politics of solidarity

This article investigates the workings of empathy, identification and solidarity across difference and argues that these represent urgent theoretical and political concerns for feminist politics today. It also points to the affective power of memory in political discourse, its potential to bolster identity, and its centrality to differentiation, all of which render the deployments of memory critical to understanding the politics of differentiation and belonging. These topics are addressed via a discussion of selected pro-immigrant discourses in the Republic of Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century and how these discourses invoke the ethical potential in memorialising past emigration from Ireland. Three questions are addressed: first, what kinds of analogies are drawn between new immigration to Ireland in the present and a past marked by emigration? Second, what can the notion of a ‘repressed national memory of emigration’ contribute to the promotion of a critical multiculturalism and solidarity with immigrants? And finally, what can debates about difference and identification within feminist theory tell us about how ethnic, familial or national ties might ground or inhibit the development of an ethical relationship to the other? The article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for feminist solidarity in contexts of the multicultural and the global.