SINGING IDEAS

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation Maire Bhui Ni Laeire Yellow Mary O39Leary 17741848 was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song As an oral arts practitioner Maire Bhui composed songs whose ecstatic radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenthcentury Irish anticolonial thought This provocative and richly theorized study explores the recreative liminal aspect of song treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation thus reimagining the history of ideas in society