Voicing the concerns of our generation: The affective charge of the Irish Spoken Word movement in mainstream media
Helen Lane is a second year PhD candidate at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Her interest in the spoken word focusses on the exploring the affective experience of video recorded performance poetry through the lens of affect theory.
Historically, a renewed interest in oral literature coincides with periods of social change or upheaval. This paper addresses the resurgence of the Irish Spoken Word movement in the 21st Century, taking affect theory as the overarching theoretical approach. Along with broad critical theory, the work of Sara Ahmed (2014) is referenced to reveal the affective nature of Spoken Word Poetry. Formal study of broadcast Irish spoken word performance through the lens of affect theory has a not yet been undertaken, and the material in this paper forms part of an ongoing PhD on this subject.
Selected performance pieces from Irish Spoken Word artists such as Stephen Murphy, and Natalya O’Flaherty for example, will be explored in this paper. Each of these artists is what Theodore Adorno (1988, 32) described as an immanent critic of contemporary life, where their experiences and observations reflect the challenges facing society on a greater scale. Providing accessible examples of contemporary oral history, reflecting issues such as the aftermath of the Irish economic crisis and failed efforts by the recent Irish governments to foster better living conditions for young people, their spoken word pieces echo the tradition of bardic and oral culture. Furthermore, the work that has been chosen for this paper is made more accessible given that each of these performers have gained recognition through mainstream Irish broadcast media. For that reason, they can potentially reach, inform, and affect, a far wider audience than those who perform exclusively on the live spoken word circuit.
Works Cited:
Adorno, T. (1988) Prisms, Translated from the German by Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition, Routledge: New York.
