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This essay locates the film Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002) within the framework of a growing body of literature on historical trauma and memory studies in order to explicate the ways in which it discursively "works through" a historical event of traumatic magnitude.

This article examines the local political conditions and global institutional environment influencing memory discourses. Drawing on the case of Bloody Sunday (1972), I examine the role of memory choreographers in constructing universalizing commemorative idioms and the local conditions and global setting influencing this memory work.

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In the years since 1972, Irish nationalists and Republicans developed and sustained an annual Bloody Sunday commemoration in Derry as a public arena from which to challenge this official memory, through the articulation of an oppositional narrative, or counter-memory, that asserts the innocence of the victims and denounces both the violence and injustice inherent in the British military occupation of the north-eastern corner of Ireland. This essay examines the politics of memory established by these competing narratives about Bloody Sunday.

The recovery of truth has become one of the abiding concerns of the resolution of conflict in the modern era. Those who have suffered as the result of conflict look to law as a means of asserting their grievances and achieving accountability for the wrongs done. Yet the question remains whether law is capable of providing that accountability and arriving at some form of truth.

The overarching aim of this paper is to sketch the journey of an everyday vernacular landscape through a time of conflict to its more recent history in that conflict’s aftermath.

The article presents a case study on the approaches of the symbolic memorialization of Bloody Sunday in Ireland. The data were gathered through an in-depth, semi-structured interviews of the members of the victims' families, memory choreographers, former civil rights activists, and community leaders. It notes that it is possible that two various forms of perspective can be drawn from a single event.