ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides a close examination of the contested politics of inscription surrounding two larger memory-places in the Northwest of Northern Ireland: the small village of Claudy, County Derry, and the larger living landscape of Derry's Bogside. He examines of paramilitary places of close examination of the contested inscriptions that underwrite them. These paramilitary places exhibit what it refer to as a strict hegemony of form, a standardised aesthetic learned from British war memorials that would seem, at face value, to belie alternative readings and rigorously police the potentialities of possible challenge. It is not particularly difficult to decode the Bogside Artists' underlying motivation for the appropriation of aesthetic memory-space. The Artists have sought to inscribe a particular strand of social memory into the Bogside that suits their particular social and ideational imperatives. Dead children are a potent emotive means to advance a preferred social narrative.
