(Inter)national Naming: Heritage, Conflict and Diaspora

In May 2009 a new bridge was slowly maneuvered into place in the center of Dublin, Ireland’s capital city. The latest addition to the succession of bridges that span the river Liffey, it is known as the Samuel Beckett Bridge in honour of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish author and dramatist. When opened in 2009, this new bridge joined the James Joyce Bridge and the Sean O’Casey Bridge, unveiled in 2003 and 2005 respectively, and so-named to commemorate two more of Ireland’s most famous literary figures. The attachment of this literary triumvirate to three of Dublin’s most recent, large-scale infrastructural developments stands in sharp contrast to the names that were in vogue in the decades that followed the achievement of Irish political independence in 1922. It is also richly suggestive of a new trend at work in the practice of place naming, one that compels us to interrogate more closely the links between the contemporary commodification of the past and its representation in street and place names.