Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia

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Ireland and Postcolonial Studies Theory, Discourse, Utopia

Eóin Flannery

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Ireland and Postcolonial Studies

10.1057/9780230250659 - Ireland and Postcolonial Studies, Eóin Flannery

ENEMIES OF EMPIRE: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography (co-edited with Angus Mitchell) IRELAND IN FOCUS: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (co-edited with Michael Griffin) THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann (co-edited with Susan Cahill) VERSIONS OF IRELAND: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture



Also by Eóin Flannery

Theory, Discourse, Utopia

Eóin Flannery




© Eóin Flannery 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22406–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22406–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


To my parents, Mary and John


Reading and writing words encompasses the reading of the world, that is, the critical understanding of politics in the world.

A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the wrong eye. It is such pictures that are saddening rather than the tropics itself. These delicate engravings of sugar mills and harbours, of native women in costume, are seen as a part of History, that History which looked over the shoulder of the engraver and, later, the photographer. History can alter the eye and the moving hand to conform a view of itself; it can rename places for nostalgia in an echo; it can temper the glare of tropical light to elegiac monotony in prose. Derek Walcott, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, What the Twilight Says: Essays



Paulo Freire, Literacy: reading the word and the world

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: Ireland: ‘A Supreme Postcolonial Instance’?

1

1 Field Day and Irish Postcolonial Criticism

19

2 Irish Postcolonial Criticism and the Utopian Impulse

48

3 Postcolonial Metacriticism – The ‘Second Wave’

102

4 Ireland, Gender and Postcolonialism

146

5 Fanon’s One Big Idea: Revising Postcolonial Studies and Irish Studies

182

Conclusion: Postcolonial Studies and Contemporary Politics

233

Notes

241

Bibliography

246

Index

263

vii



Contents

The research that went into this book has its roots in my doctoral studies at Mary Immaculate College at the University of Limerick, and I am especially grateful to my supervisor Eugene O’Brien for friendship and stewardship during my time there. Also I want especially to thank my long-time collaborator Angus Mitchell, who contributed hugely to the completion of this research. Likewise, Luke Gibbons has been of immense help over the years and was a sympathetic examiner of my doctoral thesis. John McDonagh, Glenn Hooper, Sean Tadhg Ó’Ghairbhí, Colin Graham, Kevin Whelan, Eamon Maher, Michael J. Griffin, and Tom Moylan are all deserving of sincere thanks. I also wish to record my gratitude to my former colleagues in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick, and to my current colleagues in the Department of English at Oxford Brookes University. On a personal note, my wife Ruth Clifford has been unwavering in her support and love throughout the process of researching and writing this book, for which I am deeply grateful. My family, too, have always been a constant source of encouragement: my brothers Conor and Darragh, and, as the dedication indicates, particularly my parents, Mary and John.

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Acknowledgements

I am so grateful to Ireland, especially for its literary and cultural example. You have had many more years of imperialism than we have had, and you have produced a fabulous culture of resistance and an extraordinary spirit, which I desperately hope we [the Palestinian people] can measure up to by about 10 per cent ... There are three places that have meant a great deal to me; one is South Africa, another is Ireland, and the third is India. These places have meant a great deal to me culturally, not just because there was always a spirit of resistance, but because out of it, there is this huge cultural effort which I think is much more important than arms, and armed struggle.1

Mimesis and postcolonialism The critical pioneer of contemporary postcolonial studies, Edward W. Said, notes in his introduction to Orientalism that ‘what I learned and tried to present was that there was no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them’ (1978: 16). Thus, in a critical survey of Irish postcolonial studies, there is no natural starting point. Equally, when I trace the genealogical roots of theoretical postcolonial studies to Said’s 1978 intervention, it is a matter of contingent selection. There is no natural beginning, or for that matter consecrated telos, in the discourse of critical analysis; the contingency of critical interrogation is matched by the contingency of the selection of texts. My ‘beginnings’ are dictated by a conviction that Said’s Orientalism provided, and provides, an extraordinary stimulus and precedent to more recent Irish postcolonial criticism. In asserting 1



Introduction: Ireland: ‘A Supreme Postcolonial Instance’?


Said’s precedence I am not diminishing the import of Atlantic historiography; subaltern studies; Marxism; feminism or post-structuralism or postmodernism, but, as Luke Gibbons remarks in discussing the legacy of Edmund Burke: ‘An exemplary text or event, to adapt Seamus Deane’s formulation, is both a culminating moment in a process or series of events already under way, but is also a disruptive, originating moment in the subversion of that process, an omen of things to come’ (2003b: 5). Whereas Said’s text enabled, indeed some would argue created, a lateral field of discursive resources in the form of postcolonial studies, it is my intention to elucidate the diffuse and often conflictual dynamics of a particular declension of postcolonial studies, namely Irish postcolonial studies. In isolating gestures of cultural or critical invention, then, we do not legitimate them as practices, but, on the contrary, we alert societies to the systems and mechanisms of invention that structure and bind their cultural, political, economic and philosophical texts and institutions. Invoking the German philologist and critic, Erich Auerbach, these systems of invention materialise in, depend upon and foster ‘the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis’ (1953: 549). Auerbach begins his great work of literary history, Mimesis, with the premise that ‘to write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the techniques of legend [my emphasis]’ (1953: 20), and he ends with the conclusion that ‘he who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrarily [my emphasis]’ (1953: 548–9). What Auerbach achieves is the realisation that the canon of Western literary representation is subtended by ‘the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis [my emphasis]’ (1953: 549). In gesturing towards the techniques and arbitrariness of literary and historical representation, Auerbach, one of Said’s foremost critical influences, nourishes Said’s critical re-presentation of the Western literary canon within postcolonial studies. Mimesis emphatically dramatises the ‘methods of interpreting human events in the literature of Europe’ (1953: 554), and Auerbach’s dialectic facilitates Said’s later interrogation of the accreted layers of geopolitical interest in Western, imperial literary, philosophical and historical representation. Accounting for a series of intellectual debts, including Auerbach, Said reflects: There was no discernible connection between Auerbach and Istanbul at all; his entire attitude while there seems to have been one of nostalgia for the West, which gave him the spirit to sit down and write



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this great work of Western humanism, Mimesis ... because I admire the effort nevertheless, [I tried] somehow to extend their work into areas that interests me ... I’m not exactly answering them, but I’m extending their work into areas they avoid by adopting some of the modes of examination, their attention to texts, their care [original emphasis]. (Viswanathan, 2004: 127) Auerbach continues, ‘we are constantly endeavouring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, to our surroundings, the world in which we live’ (1953: 49). He touches on two crucial issues in this exposition of historical representation: firstly, alerting us to the inherent temporal and spatial demands of representation; stressing that matters of representation structure the time of space and the space of time. Equally he acknowledges that every representation of the past is intimate with the needs of the present and the possibilities of the future. The consecration of orders and meanings through historical representation is subtended by the aspirations of history’s authors. The issue at stake within Saidian colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory is what precisely is edited from this coordinated process of order and meaning, and the reasons that underlie such editing. Order and meaning are necessarily arbitrary, but this does not evacuate languages or symbols of specific material significance or specific identitarian import. Reading through Auerbach, and subsequently Said, the ethical initiative of postcolonial studies is to be found in re-presenting, re-appropriating and re-distributing access to the modes of order and meaning within literary and historical representation. The Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, offers the following summative remarks on Said’s political project: His concern is justice, not identity. He is more interested in emancipating the dispossessed than bending genders or floating signifiers. One of the major architects of modern cultural thought comes across in this book [Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said] as profoundly out of sympathy with its cerebral convolutions, which – as he shrewdly sees – are largely a symptom of political displacement and despair. (2004: 48) While Eagleton’s review comments betray his own suspicious attitude to current postcolonial theory, nevertheless, he captures the presiding ethical force of Said’s literary critical project. Though Said may have, as Eagleton alludes, laid the foundations of an increasingly dense, and not



Ireland: ‘A Supreme Postcolonial Instance’?


unproblematic, critical–theoretical discourse, his own critical project was underwritten by a commitment to the ethical value of egalitarian humanist literature, art and scholarship. It is in this context that we can further divine Said’s critical debt to Auerbach. Likewise this ethical investment provides a wedge with which to initiate a discussion of Irish postcolonial studies. Eagleton’s review of Said’s concern for the politics of justice rather than the politics of identity is a matter that is of interest to the present discussion. As will be made apparent in later chapters, fixation on the spiraling idioms of ‘theory’ is often tethered to depoliticised circuits of identitarian convolution. And, while the legacies and tropes of ‘postal’ theories have and will continue to play informative roles within postcolonial studies, it is more urgent to formulate emancipatory political projects that are concrete but that do not revert to hapless relativism, and that can be universal without assuming authoritarian voices (Geoghegan, 1997: 29–30). The critical compass of the project, then, is guided to an extent by Said, but equally coheres with the editorial manifesto issued by the editors of a recent volume entitled Postcolonial Studies and Beyond: The key question addressed here is whether postcolonial studies can assert a specific method, interest, or political insight that can illuminate issues either ignored, marginalized, or depoliticized within the discussion of globalization ... we think of postcolonial studies as a critical strain posed within and against, as well as antecedent to, dominant notions of globalization ... [Simon] Gikandi emphasizes a different orientation for postcolonial studies – one that does not prematurely overleap the nation, nor simply wish away Eurocentrism, nor accede to the image of a syncretic global village or to the neoliberal idea of a rising tide lifting all boats in the global economy. (Loomba et al., 2005: 8) Many of the critical and historiographical engagements of postcolonial studies have been trained on the historical processes, impacts and legacies of European Enlightenment thinking; ‘white mythology’, as Derrida remarks (1971: 213). Equally Irish postcolonial studies, in particular many of the critics discussed below, have undertaken to prospect the margins or alternative times and spaces of the Enlightenment. Just as Said does not, indeed cannot, jettison the long humanist literary tradition, Irish postcolonial studies has not responded in a reductive, reactionary fashion. As I discuss, it is a question of expanding the temporal and spatial maps of modernity to embrace marginal or alternative



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In fact, Said was all along a humanist of the old school, and declares this unfashionable allegiance without the slightest sense of embarrassment. If he fought for the extension of the literary canon to peoples and nations that it shunned, it was not, in his view, a canon to be derided callowly ... but he also saw his work as extending the work of the great European humanists, drawing upon their scrupulousness, rigour and erudition. (2004: 48) Moreover, in Said’s fealty to the value of a liberatory humanism, we can see his disapproval of an ethically contingent ‘postmodern ritual of romanticising the Other’ (Eagleton, 2004: 49). Again, Eagleton’s terms may be excessively glib, yet they are suggestive of Said’s trust in art’s celebratory, and of the intellectual’s liberatory, capacities. Said’s expansion of the literary canon within an ethical liberatory humanist framework rejects any notion of unqualified and/or exponential celebrations of hybridity or marginality. Linking his project to Irish postcolonial historiography is his trust in language’s liberatory potential. Specifically, there are echoes of Said’s ethical animus in Kevin Whelan’s recent historiographical invocation: ‘The historian is ultimately a witness, who provides testimony: his ethical position depends on trust, trust in the word of another. This trust in testimony, in the expressive function of language, in the moral power of narrative, enables “an ethics of discourse” ’ (2003b: 108). All in all, what unites Irish postcolonial criticism to Said’s project, in spirit if not always in practice, is a utopian commitment to the problematisation of the naturalising exertions of empire, which in an Irish context includes the country’s coerced insertion into the political, economic and cultural machinations of capitalist modernity. And the utopian exertions of much Irish cultural, historical and political commentary over the past thirty years provide of the philosophical backbone of my ensuing discourse on Irish postcolonial criticism.

Ireland and postcolonial studies In a recent special ‘Irish’ issue of the journal Third Text, the Irish art historian Mick Wilson provides a cogent, and at times pugilistic, reproach



modernities. In adopting such an approach, recession into opposition or essentialism is strategically, and necessarily, prevented; such positions merely retain an economy of exclusion and prejudicial edition. As Eagleton notes:


to the apparent naturalisation of Irish studies as a predominantly ‘postcolonial’ discipline. Wilson’s essay suggests that Irish postcolonial scholars have, in various ways, become colonising as they shift, along with their theoretical and political baggage, from discipline to discipline. His argument goes further and resolves that, rather than critiquing dominant political and critical agendas, Irish postcolonial criticism has assumed a hegemonic role, which is in danger of delimiting the range of current, and future, readings of Irish culture. For Wilson this proves especially urgent for his own fields, Irish visual culture and art history. As we shall see, Wilson’s dogged interrogation of the aggrandising movements of Irish postcolonial studies blends with many similar international efforts, and bears the hallmarks of a Bourdieu-inflected reading of Irish academicians. Furthermore, Wilson draws the ‘academic’ orthodoxy of Irish postcolonial criticism into the economic domain, again an issue accented in previous critiques of the field. Specifically, Wilson charges that: There is a widespread and energetic institutional and professional drive to frame a critical project in terms of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irishness’ and to market this as a category of academic inquiry. This academic enterprise, which in some variants derives much of its critical momentum from postcolonial studies, also proposes new subdisciplines ... in a rush to capture market shares in the increasingly commoditised academic enterprise. (Wilson, 2005: 536) A cynical market-oriented (and market-propelled) process is detected by Wilson, in which ‘attractive’, usually ‘nation-centred’, packages of Irish identity are developed in order to accrue preferential market positions for both academic institutions and academic faculty. One of the ironies latent in Wilson’s essay – perhaps a contradiction in his view – is the willingness of postcolonial criticism to lend its critical intelligence to the manufacture and retail of a brand of ‘Irishness’, while at the same time performing critical interrogations of the limits of Irish nationalism in an historical context. And on this point Wilson has precursors within Irish studies, particularly in the work of Colin Graham. But, as we shall discuss below, the relationships and possibilities that exist between postcolonial criticism and nationalism(s) are more complex than are often imputed. Wilson’s rejection of a nationally-bounded paradigm for reading Irish culture stems from his commitment to an internationalist, and thereby more liberated, subversive, and emancipatory plane of aesthetic



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practice. In terms of Irish art history, the co-option of Irish artists such as Sean Hillen and Margaret Corcoran by Irish postcolonial scholars David Lloyd and Luke Gibbons, respectively, into their postcolonial frames of theoretical reference diminishes the political and aesthetic voltages of the artwork, according to Wilson. Simply, by refracting these artists through a postcolonial lens, critics usually reach preconceived conclusions, or, as Wilson outlines: ‘What is established by the literature is not its value within the discourse of art, but rather its serviceability to certain prior cultural positions that prioritise notions of representation and the value of cultural text as resources for commentary on problems of nationhood, national culture etc ...’ (2005: 537–8). Wilson’s concerns for Irish art history, then, seem to echo many of the criticisms levelled at postcolonial studies generally, most especially that they represent a regressive cultural politics. Irish postcolonial criticism, under this view, is perceived as an exercise in ‘thematising Irishness’ (Wilson, 2005: 539) rather than responding to dynamic, ‘living’ cultural practices. Wilson’s art historical metacommentary on Irish postcolonial criticism, then, demonstrates the persistence of scepticism towards postcolonial criticism within Irish studies, but also indicates that the impact of postcolonial studies has spread beyond the verbally representational, from which much obloquy has stemmed, to visual critical culture. Wilson’s polemical defence of Irish art history against the embrace of postcolonial criticism is, partly, a rebuttal of a previous intervention in the same journal earlier in 2005 by another Irish art critic, Lucy Cotter. Cotter’s essay strives to divine a suitable critical framework through which Irish art criticism might be mediated. Expressing dissatisfaction with existing deference to European contextualisations, Cotter turns to postcolonial criticism via the work of Joe Cleary, Colin Graham, and Luke Gibbons. Picking up on Cleary’s point that Ireland; its colonial history; and its traumatic experience of accelerated modernisation under colonialism cannot be viewed within the same critical continuum as its European neighbours, Cotter suggests that a similar critical trajectory might prove apposite for readings of contemporary Irish art. Essentially, Cotter is unwilling to jettison the ‘Irish’ dimensions of Ireland’s contemporary art practice, and in this she sympathises with much of the work within Irish postcolonial criticism. As will be explained in more detail below, Irish postcolonial criticism is antagonistic to the homogenising impulses of unfettered capitalistic modernisation, and Cotter’s argument finds support in just such appraisals. But, equally, Irish postcolonial critics do not revert to





any form of deterministic discourse of cultural ‘authenticity’ in their recession from the politics of international capitalism. And, likewise, rather than reverting to a reactionary and insular nationalism in her defiance of a rootless international art practice, Cotter invokes Colin Graham’s imaginative critique of Irish authenticity. Glossing Graham’s extended argument, Cotter writes: His idea of ‘authenticity’ as a means by which to reread Irish cultural developments avoids the culturally essentialist ‘salvage’ mentality. It simultaneously interrupts any belief in ‘an ability to utter authentically,’ which negates the continuing existence of power-structures as after-effects of colonialism, as well as the teleological tendencies of postcolonial theory, reassessed by using a marker, which is both changeable and capable of self-preservation. (2005: 25) Not only does Cotter’s argument draw on Cleary and Graham, but one can equally detect the earlier work of Gibbons as a latent presence in Cotter’s conclusions. This influence is revealed in Cotter’s effort to canvass for a subversive Irish art practice, which might provide critical space for the processes of ‘transculturation’ (Cotter, 2005: 24). Owing a clear debt to Gibbons’s example in Transformations in Irish Culture, Cotter posits the idea that ‘cultures never exist in a pure state but are constituted in and through negotiation with other cultural practices, by which “foreign” elements are introduced into the native culture’ (2005: 24). On the surface Cotter’s assertion rehearses the well-trodden postcolonial theoretical ground of cultural hybridity, but there is more to her argument. Firstly, she is self-consciously cognisant of the reductive, and disabling, capacities of such critical labelling, and again this airs similar metacritical caution to that displayed by critics such as Graham and Richard Kirkland, discussed below. Secondly, there is a political consequence, it seems, to Cotter’s reading, and it is here that she is indebted to Gibbons. Specifically, the intercultural transactionalism that she envisages for Irish art practice has a logical extension into the realm of postcolonial solidarity, or the ‘laterally mobile’ ethical economies of postcolonial gender studies and/or subaltern studies. Cotter’s mobilisation of postcolonial methodologies within Irish art practice, then, is an attempt to retain a degree of resistant identitarian anchorage in an endlessly proliferating global semiotic system. This brief disquisition on the tense relations between Irish art history and practice and Irish postcolonial criticism indicates the contemporaneity of postcolonial critical debates in Ireland. The ensuing survey of Irish postcolonial criticism



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Ireland, modernisation and postcolonial studies In his book, Facing up to Modernity, the sociologist Peter Berger underlined the urgency of critical engagement with modernity. Proposing a generous critical framework, Berger concludes: I believe that the critique of modernity will be one of the great intellectual tasks of the future, be it as a comprehensive exercise or in separate parts. The scope is broadly cross-cultural. It will be a task that, by its nature, will have to be interdisciplinary ... It will also be the task linking theory and praxis, touching, as it does, certain fundamental philosophical as well as highly concrete practical-political questions. The task is also of human and moral urgency. For what it is finally all about is the question of how we, and our children, can live in a humanly tolerable way in the world created by modernization [my emphases]. (1977: 111–12) And, in confronting the legacies and contemporary manifestations of both modernity and the practical–political consequences of modernisation theory, Berger’s intellectual programme deeply informs our understandings of the postcolonial–modernisation dialectic that has been manifest in recent Irish criticism. Similarly, and here Berger betrays his sociological roots, in canvassing a conjoined theoretical and practical methodology, Berger’s rhetoric is firmly draped in Pierre Bourdieu’s scientific philosophy of sociological research. Berger’s critical manifesto vocalises many of the theoretical and political objectives of contemporary postcolonial studies. His imprimatur cites the valence of interdisciplinary interventions in the interface between postcolonial studies, modernity and modernisation theory. In theorising the constitution of so-called ‘nationalisms against the state’, David Lloyd concludes: The sense of the state depends on the relegation of other modes of sociality to the domain of non-sense; its rationality requires the production of irrationality as the form of that which must exceed its modes of interpellation ... The state must expunge, through ideological or repressive state apparatuses, cultural or social forms which



might seem, on first glance, eulogistic to some, but, as the preceding summary signals, postcolonial criticism still bears significant relevancies to the present and future vectors of Irish studies.

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The rational stable subject is the key microstructure of modernity; the progress of modernisation, likewise, is nourished by the rational decisions of a suitably interpellated subject. In its pursuit, and consolidation, of political and economic modernisation, the state is instrumental in ideologically choreographing the interpellation of its citizen– subjects. And, as Lloyd impresses, seizure of both legitimate discourse and the organs of state-historical narration is elemental to the achievement of such stability. Elsewhere the Marxist commentator Francis Mulhern summarily narrates the discourse of modernisation in similar terms: ‘Yet it persists as a general form of understanding, promoting a determinate mode of representation, of social structure, dynamics, interest and agency. Modernising discourse homogenises social formations and reinscribes their differences as sets of technical functions ... which, once quantified, indicate relative states of backwardness and progress’ (1998: 22–3). His précis of modernising discourse, again, underscores the veneration of temporality, or perhaps more precisely chronology, which is a crucial feature of its rhetoric. Mulhern continues: ‘the complex timespace of social relations within and among states resolves itself into a simple narrative whose actors are moving ... towards a common end, the pragmatically “modern” condition’ (1998: 23). Modernisation theory cleaves to, and enforces, the crude binarism of tradition and modernity, and it subscribes to the naturalised dichotomies of a Manichean Weltanschauung. In as much as it accents the primacy of economic forces in social and political development, modernisation theory intersects with classical Marxist theory. However, the retailing of the inalienable merit of economic progress in the form of market-capitalism marks the limits of this theoretical intersection. Likewise, it can be legitimately viewed as a philosophical inheritor of a dominant strain of Enlightenment thinking, as it elects the rational citizen–subject to mediate its reified conceptualisations. The progressive certainties of modernisation, largely based and justified on an economy of basic binarisms, require paradigmatic rationalisations of both space and time: a task that is undertaken by what we might call ‘the narrative legislators’ of the modernising/modern nation state. The vexed issue in an Irish context is that Ireland’s enforced insertion into imperial modernity under a British colonial regime, contradictorily, preceded any process of domestic modernisation. The profound colonial concussion of Irish history is, in part, attributable to this paradoxical



are in excess of its own rationality and whose rationality is other to its own. (1999: 35–6)

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historical development. In its use as a ground for colonial experimentation, Ireland was enjoined to participate in global modernity in the nineteenth century. However, a concerted process of vernacular industrial and economic modernisation was not evident until the late 1950s and 1960s. In the Irish context ‘modernisation theory assumes the fundamental stability of the social, economic and political system in which it is deployed. It cannot deal with a situation in which that dispensation is open to question, hence its tendency to shut out alternative thinking’ (McCarthy, 2000: 22). According to many critiques, and as we shall see in Chapter 5, the advocates of modernisation are principally identified as ‘revisionist’ historians or cultural critics. In particular, forms of atavistic Irish nationalism have been assailed, and caricatured, by revisionism in its efforts to purge Irish political and cultural debate of what are perceived as retrogressive, debilitating and anachronistic political excesses. In effect, in its philosophical affiliation with modernisation theory, such revisionist commentary has been driven to excise Irish society of a diagnosed predilection for ‘the backward glance’. Confirming this point, Jim MacLaughlin concludes: ‘In Ireland, revisionism and modernisation theory literally marked the coming-of-age of a new institutionalised and state-centred Irish intelligentsia who have sought to break from what they perceive as the “narrow nationalism” of the nineteenth century by embracing the narrow logic of cost-benefit analysis’ (1994: 44). McCarthy moves on to record the state-securing disciplinisation of historical writing. In its institution of ‘mythophobic’ historical narrative, revisionist historiography, in McCarthy’s view, serviced ‘the elaboration of the nation’, which in itself is ‘[an] enabling possibility of the state’ (2000: 38). Thus one of the principal arenas of contestation between postcolonial studies and the advocates of modernisation has been the fraught terrain of historical writing. To an extent, guided by the philosophical reflections of Walter Benjamin, then, Irish postcolonial studies eschews the monocular gaze of modernisation theory’s developmental and historical trajectory. In McCarthy’s terms, there was a collusion-in-representation between the state’s need to foster a modern ‘imagined community’ and the scholarly/critical projects of revisionist historians and critics. Reading through Benedict Anderson, McCarthy portrays the co-imagination of a modernised/modernising and historically ‘mature’ nation state.2 He asserts: These imaginings achieve social and political authority through their relationships to the dominant means of communication and





cultural reproduction in the community – newspapers, publishers, the electronic media (radio, television and film), advertising, the entire system of education. So the nation tends to be imagined via the mediation of powerfully centralising forces in society, organs of civil society and of the state, that tend to have been organised in terms set by the national state. (2000: 39) McCarthy’s is an overtly Gramscian idiom; he reflects on the construction of a hegemonic structure that maintains lateral ideological and self-perpetuating representational control. Equally the ‘imaginings’ are of a decidedly spatial nature. The realisation and consolidation of authority are effected in space, but also through the sequestration, in representation, of physical and psychological space. McCarthy diagnoses an inadequate theorisation of the processes and effects of Irish modernisation, and the recent postcolonial cathexis within Irish studies stems from these unsatisfactory, trammelled conceptualisations of Irish modernisation. McCarthy continues by arguing that ‘the blockage to critical views of Irish modernisation has worked on the level of ideology, where a particular set of ideas has been accepted as “common sense”, and very little space is available in which to assess the adequacy of this theory to the Irish case, or to suggest alternatives’ (2000: 15). Broadly speaking, then, McCarthy characterises both recent sociopolitical and intellectual history as collusively revisionist and in thrall to the impulses of economic modernisation. Indeed there appears to be an active homology of political and intellectual discourses, whereby the tropes of traditional political nationalism are alienated in favour of a deeply conservative breed of modernisation. In this sense ‘ “revisionism” is not only an historians’ argument but is the historiographic outrider of the discourse of modernity as it has come to be understood in Ireland’, and a politically conservative nexus of intellectual and media influence has sanctioned ‘a rather attenuated discourse of modernisation theory’ (McCarthy, 2000: 18). McCarthy’s diagnosis intimates that revisionist historians actually inveigh against a consciously devised, discursive fiction. In other words, ‘in relation to an attenuated and restricted tradition, it is easy to appear “modern” ’ (McCarthy, 2000: 19); or, as Mulhern concludes: modernity as such has no necessary social content: it is a form of ‘temporalization’, an invariant production of present, past and future that ‘valorizes the new’ and, by that very act, ‘produces the old’, along with the characteristic modes of its embrace, the distinctively modern phenomenon of traditionalism and reaction. (1998: 20)



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Perhaps it is at this point that postcolonial theory enters contemporary cultural dialectics; put simply, we can figure modernisation theory as the real discursive opponent of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory emerged in the 1980s as a discursive alternative to modernisation theory, becoming a means through which the putative progressive certainties of modernisation could be dislodged or, at least, contested.3 ‘From the perspective of postcolonial studies’, in Cleary’s view, ‘modernisation discourse is simply a contemporary variant on the nineteenthcentury bourgeois ideology of evolutionary progress, the occluded side of which has always been European imperialism and the colonial subordination of the greater part of the world to metropolitan domination’ (2006: 14). Postcolonial theory assumes the discursive responsibility in ‘suggesting alternatives’ to modernisation theory, and it exhibits a distinct advantage by not relying on a rather crude and attenuated dichotomy between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Thus, where modernisation theory evangelises on the unilateral merits of economic and technological progress, with its gaze firmly fixed on the future, postcolonial theory proposes a non-prescriptive transhistorical and transgeographical perspective. Again, according to Cleary, there are divergences in the critical and historiographical foci of postcolonial discourse and modernisation discourse as they respectively broach the Irish situation. On the one hand, ‘revisionist historiography and modernisation studies have both been obsessed with the “high” history of nation and state formation, with the narrative of political elites that shaped Irish state apparatuses’; while ‘postcolonial discourse, in contrast, has sought to develop a more critical understanding of the various forms of subaltern social struggles largely written out of dominant modes of Irish historiography, whether in bourgeois nationalist or revisionist versions’ (2006: 14). The distinctions drawn by Cleary underscore Fanon’s influence on Irish postcolonial methods, but also impress the underlying utopian and contestatory impulses of these same methods. By entering Ireland’s colonial experience into a framework of aggrandising capitalist expansion, Cleary short-circuits the purblind perspectives of revisionist historiography. Not only had revisionism created its own fetish of mythic nationalism as discursive ‘strawman’, it had also projected a disingenuous composite profile of the ‘Third World’. This incriminating composite served one function: to disabuse Ireland of its postcolonial pretensions. Cleary inserts Ireland’s colonial long durée into a protracted process of systematic capitalist enterprise both within an intra-European context and also beyond the ‘land’ empires of the European landmass. Ireland, then, belongs exclusively neither to the




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Those who contend that Western Europe represents the appropriate comparative framework for the evaluation of Irish society assume an essentially homologous relationship between the country’s location, socio-economic composition and culture ... The postcolonialist perspective, in contrast, suspends the notion of homologies, and attempts to investigate the discrepant ways in which Irish socioeconomic composition and political and cultural templates overdetermine each other. (2003: 24) While Cleary canvasses postcolonial theory as an effective interlocutor of modernisation theory, this should not be perceived as a theoretical posture of diametric opposition. Postcolonial theory’s remit is not to ensure that ‘its application assumes and underwrites the triumph of the independent post-colonial nation’ (Graham, 1999: 3–4). An effective cultural theory radically interrogates the contemporary structures of both nation and state, as well as the mechanics of their liberation and/ or foundation. Graham continues, ‘the increasing institutionalisation of the practises of Irish Studies seems likely to cement rather than diffuse the critical assumptions through which Ireland has been understood until now’ (1999: 3). The roles of political and cultural representation, then, remain the crucial issues at stake within postcolonial analysis. Is postcolonial theory merely constitutive of a nouveau form of hegemonic reification, or in reality can, as Foucault demands, there be a seizure of the discourses? Similarly, as the process of academic institutionalisation proceeds, what exactly becomes institutionalised? Casting a suspicious materialist glance at the field of postcolonial studies, Eagleton argues, ‘ “postcolonialism”, like postmodernism in general, is among other things a brand of culturalism, which inflates the significance of cultural factors in human affairs’ (1998a: 26). Such an interdiction is entirely consonant with Eagleton’s Marxist credentials, but to a certain extent it does provide a prescient point of criticism, if it does simultaneously border on the reductive. Irish political, cultural, and economic histories have never undergone a protracted Marxist examination. Therefore, to return to McCarthy, Irish modernisation has largely been exempted from any form of sustained exogenous critical examination: he notes, ‘modernisation was understood in a manner separated from the discourses of critical modernism, in the social, cultural or political sense’ (2000: 27). The intellectual mediation



genealogy of European Enlightenment modernity nor to a matrix of traditional, colonised societies. As Cleary suggests:

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of an evolving socio-political landscape was abdicated in favour of a ‘non-ideological, technology-led’ conception of modernity, a modernity that proactively eschewed forms of critical thought that sanctioned ‘the influence of theory, ideas or ideology’ (McCarthy, 2000: 27). Thus Cleary’s dialectical relation of postcolonial and modernisation theories assumes its urgency from this stated exigency to interrogate the ideological fabric and applications of cultural discourses. As we will outline at length below, and contra Eagleton, then, there are critics within international and Irish postcolonial criticism who take representative account of the impact of cultural factors on politico-economic development in order to make explicit its ideological constitution.

Theoretical approach Ireland and Postcolonial Studies is partly conceived of as a critical genealogy of the most significant developments within Irish postcolonial criticism over the past three decades but it is also designed as a forum through which recent international neo-Marxist materialist polemics can be placed in dialogue with Irish postcolonial criticism. Equally, the discussion introduces the work of a range of postcolonial feminists to the often vexed debates that rage between postcolonialism and feminism within Irish studies. In these ways, Ireland and Postcolonial Studies allows previously absent critical conversations to ensue between Irish literary criticism and historiography and some of the most advanced international theorisation that operates within the orbit of postcolonial studies. Many of the critics introduced in the discussions below (Neil Lazarus, Graham Huggan, Pierre Bourdieu, Chandra Mohanty, and Epifanio San Juan Jr, to name a select few) are rarely if ever invoked at any length in Irish critical debates, whether under the umbrella of postcolonial theory or not. Not only do these critics, and a host of others, broaden the parameters of discussions within and surrounding Irish postcolonial criticism, but they also facilitate, even demand, a level of critical self-reflexiveness about the relative ‘position’ of ‘Irish’ postcolonial debates. Such self-reflexiveness is not confined to the various political allegiances attributed to strains of cultural criticism and historiographical practice within Irish studies, but equally impacts on the mechanics of our educational institutions and our practices as critics and academics. The postcolonial dialectic between Ireland and international postcolonial studies, then, can create a traffic of ideas that has the potential to enliven both critical constituencies. And this is absolutely necessary when we consider Ireland’s historical





and contemporary implications as both subject and object of forms of imperial hegemony. There is a concerted debate with respect to the legitimacy of Irish claims to postcolonial status; Ireland often seems akin to a pleading First World refugee, seeking asylum in a haven of Third World theory. The facts of Ireland’s geographical location and of its relative economic prosperity are ritually garnered as preclusions to its status as definitively ‘postcolonial’. The very idea of a bona fide postcolonial society, whatever that means, residing within the borders of a modernised continent is abhorrent and/or nonsensical to many revisionist critics. Yet, despite this, postcolonial theory has been, and remains, one of the dominant modes of literary and cultural criticism within the broader discourse of Irish studies. Contemporary academic history is notable for the extensive proliferation of postcolonial methodologies in Irish studies; my project is concerned with tracing this development and with providing a comprehensive and evaluative critique of the discipline of postcolonial studies in Ireland. To this end, a proto-genealogy of contemporary critical interventions that have engaged with the contentious notion of Ireland as a postcolonial society is provided through a discussion of both the theoretical particularities and the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial theory. This book will provide a theoretical interrogation of the development of such critical discourse in Ireland. Equally, it will trace the mutual theoretical exchanges between international postcolonial methodologies, canonically embodied in the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, and the forms of postcolonial critique operative within Irish studies. In performing such an interrogation the modalities through which postcolonial theory has assumed such an integral disciplinary location within contemporary Irish academia will be illuminated. Postcolonial criticism will be evaluated as an academic discourse by cursorily applying the work of Pierre Bourdieu to recent academic interventions in Irish cultural theory. My intervention is located within the current debates on Irish ‘postcoloniality’, and the discussion represents an invested perspective on the evolution, application and potential of postcolonial methodologies within Irish cultural criticism. Bourdieu argues, with characteristic protraction: [the critic] can use the objectification of a world in which he participates at least by analogy ... in order to reinforce the defence mechanisms of his bad faith, by accentuating the differences which particularize the species [homo academicus gallicus]; or, alternatively,



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he may use it to lay the foundations of a self-analysis, either by concentrating on the invariants of the genus homo academicus, or, better still, by educating himself with what he may discover about himself through the objectification, however harsh at first sight, of one of the positions of homo academicus gallicus which is homologous to his own position in his own field. (1996: xv) My intervention, then, is designed to provoke further debate on varieties of postcolonial critique within the broader discourse of Irish Studies. But equally I hope to contribute, in parvo, to the modes in which we conceive of academic disciplinarity; the politics of academic culture; the role and function of the academic within and beyond textual analysis; and, following Bourdieu, to elucidate my own position within the sphere of postcolonial studies and Irish academia. The confines of the discussion at hand sanction only an interrogation of the institutional matrix of a single, yet ascendant and provocative, academic discipline: postcolonial studies. As I shall develop at length, there have been an increasing number of interventions in the theoretical specificities of postcolonial taxonomy. However, a satisfactory and comprehensive critical genealogy of the field as it has developed, and is developing, in Ireland has yet to emerge. Following Bourdieu’s motivation in producing his masterly survey of the French academic field, Homo Academicus, my work corresponds with his intention to establish the social derivation not only of the categories of thought which it consciously or unconsciously deploys, such as those pairs of antithetical terms which so often inform the scientific construction of the social world, but also of the concepts which it uses, and which are often no more than commonsense notions introduced uncritically into scholarly discourse. (1996: xii) While postcolonial analyses are frequently assailed as literary fashion accessories, or as nationalist apologias or second-hand Marxism, as I have urged, a concerted and lateral critique of the discipline has never materialised. In fact, there is a sense in which the ability to sanction the necessity of a self-conscious examination of postcolonial theory and/or of Ireland as even potentially postcolonial is to explicitly acknowledge its legitimacy as an academic and critical resource. In recent times, it seems that postcolonial criticism, in both its international and Irish guises, has been easier to attack and to polemicise against rather than to defend or constructively modify. This desire to marginalise postcolonial





studies within Irish studies explains the attenuated and derisory interventions of many revisionist critics; if it is ignored or barbed occasionally it will deflate and disappear. The logic of my critical genealogy is not to surf a wave of academic modishness, of which postcolonial theory is the apparent contemporary embodiment, but rather, to return to Bourdieu, in order to furnish an ‘increase in epistemological vigilance’ (1996: xiii). Critical self-examination does not necessarily terminate in narcissistic self-lionisation or in foundational destruction but can serve in a process of critical reinvestment through which both the theoretical microdetails and the critical macrostructures of intellectual analysis can be ameliorated. It would be manifestly reductive simply to allow Bourdieu’s theory and methodology to ‘travel’ to a study of Irish postcolonial studies without considering the fact that all tourists/visitors arrive with baggage. And, rather than reduce the discussion to an exercise in the application of ‘rigid concepts’ (Lucas, 2001: 97), I conceive of Bourdieu’s relevance as one in which his work provides ‘thinking tools’ (Lucas, 2001: 97) through which an interdisciplinary but contextually alert critique may proceed. Indeed, the necessary caveat that subtends my limited employment of Bourdieuian theory underwrites my particular discussion of the diverse deployments of postcolonial theory within Irish literary and historical writing. In either case it can never be a matter of grafting theoretical resources developed in alternative contexts onto the corpus of Irish cultural criticism.



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Field Day and Irish Postcolonial Criticism

Ireland, Field Day and postcolonialism Postcolonial theory has been, and remains, one of the dominant modes of literary and cultural criticism within the broader discourse of Irish studies. A range of internal factors complicates readings of colonial occupation, in which notions of language, nationality, ethnicity, faith, class, and gender were drastically affected. Indeed, the depth and protraction of Ireland’s colonial experience, together with the vanguard initiative of its anticolonial agitation, are judged as both instrumental to and informative of subsequent Third World anticolonial movements. A recurrent criticism of postcolonial studies is its reliance on literary/textual material rather than on what is perceived as more concrete or quantifiable historical data. The legacy of such an internecine academic dispute is that there has rarely been ‘constructive’ critical dialogue between Irish literary critics and historians with respect to imperial histories, anticolonial histories or postcolonial theory. Irish literary and historical studies, then, seem to offer propitious material with which to profitably explicate the temporal and spatial differentials of imperialism, anticolonialism and postcolonialism. The debate surrounding Ireland’s ‘putative postcolonial condition’ (Lloyd, 1993: 155) has, to a large extent, been centred on the work of the Field Day Theatre Company. Together with several other leading Irish artists and intellectuals, including Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Stephen Rea and Tom Paulin, the critic and writer Seamus Deane has been centrally involved in the evolution and machinations of the Field Day enterprise. As the de facto spokesperson for the Field Day conglomerate, Deane has effectively set the tone and trajectory of much Irish critical, literary, and historiographical debate in recent years. 19



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In the 1999 interview with Kevin Whelan and Andy Pollak cited above, Said lauded Ireland’s history of anticolonial political and cultural resistance, in effect, corroborating Declan Kiberd’s contention that Ireland was at the vanguard of, indeed pioneering among, decolonising nations. Later in the same interview he was asked to evaluate the Field Day Theatre Company’s contribution to Irish cultural history, replying that: It is enormous; Irish people do not sufficiently realize it. I see Field Day as a revisionist literary movement of the highest order. I associate it with similar groups in the Arab world, in India, subaltern studies, in the United States ... Most of the other movements involve historical scholars, but these people are a combination of scholarship and creativity that is unparalleled in the world today ... Global on a very high level. I do not know any other movement like it. (Said, 1999) Thus Field Day, as a cultural force, is exemplary in its own right; it is a series of progressive, postcolonial events. And it is in this context that I believe understandings of the impact of the Field Day Theatre Company should be achieved. As I will demonstrate, criticism concerning the political temperament and/or animus of Field Day has been, and is, too frequently reduced to a worn currency of oppositional or strategic argumentation. The major issue of debate, as we shall see, has been the imagination of an ‘Ireland’, as the spectre of Irish nationalism reappears as a contested term and force within the intellectual ferments of late twentieth-century Irish criticism. Despite the undeniable centrality, and instrumentality, of Field Day in the elaboration of postcolonial criticism in Ireland, its critical energies have, at least, some of their roots in the earlier initiatives of The Crane Bag, which was published under the editorial auspices of Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hederman from 1977 to 1985. Many of the ideas and the personalities that were attached to The Crane Bag became, in various ways, aligned with the later Field Day project – particularly the interrogation of Irish history and the propagation and ascendancy of binary mythologies in structuring the terms of conflict in the North of Ireland. The Crane Bag, like Field Day and many of the later postcolonial critiques of Irish history and society, was fuelled by insistent utopian impulses as it sought ‘to supply challenging visions on Irish culture, history, tradition and identity and to fill the gaps between the overused binary oppositions that dominated previous approaches



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to cultural discourse in Ireland’ (Szabo, 2005: 1). Characterised by a catholic range of critical interests, including: literature; politics; theatre; philosophy; gender politics; the Northern ‘Troubles’; and the Irish language, the editorial direction of The Crane Bag offered deconstructive readings of ingrained and divisive political and cultural positions in Irish society. The theoretical, and in many ways idealistic, spirit of The Crane Bag was, notionally, provoked by the political conditions of contemporary Irish society. Yet, as Conor McCarthy explains, while the focus on the factional identity politics of Irish society during the late 1970s and early 1980s may have provided the editorial impetus for The Crane Bag, in practice its concerns remained resolutely idealist, even Romantic (2007a: 79–82). The Crane Bag was an inescapably aestheticist enterprise, which held to the Romantic notion of art as a transcendent and undefiled alternative to the gross practicalities of the political. Of most significance when one considers such a philosophical viewpoint in relation to The Crane Bag is its concept of the ‘fifth province’ – a liminal location that is untouched by the deformations of sectarian identity politics and their attendant myths and histories. The ‘fifth province’ is one of the major points of continuity between The Crane Bag and Field Day, as we shall discuss below. In the end, as McCarthy concludes: The Crane Bag eventually collapsed under the burden of its own contradictions and those of Irish public intellectual discourse. Deprived of Arts Council funding because of an interview with Seamus Twomey, then Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA, the journal closed itself down in 1985, just as it showed signs of shaking off the invidious legacy of identity thinking, with its ‘special issues’ on development, ideology and Latin America. But its idealism and culturalism had already found a new outlet in the Field Day project. (McCarthy, 2007a: 81) Under the aegis of the Field Day Theatre Company, with its combined theatrical and publishing initiatives, a formidable body of critical work on Irish literary and colonial history has emerged. Taking Ireland’s traumatic colonial history as its impetus, this loosely federated cohort of scholars has published critically sceptical appraisals of Ireland’s relation to Western historiographical notions of progress and modernity. Besides the monumental five-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, this work is principally embodied in the now complete Critical Conditions series of monographs, and it is an important reflection of the reconfigured ‘radical nostalgia’ that has come to characterise





much of the theoretical interventions within Irish postcolonial studies. In many respects, then, the differentiated projects and discursive modus operandi of Deane’s, Field Day’s and others’ postcolonial criticism are underwritten by the urge to divine, ‘a means of accessing the creative possibility of a future promised in the past; a radical backward look’ (Richards, 1999: 108). In effect, the Irish postcolonial ‘turn’ has recalibrated the stale dichotomies of ‘the modern’ and ‘tradition’; tradition in Ireland is no longer seen as a regressive force of atavism or conservatism. Tradition and the past are recast as vehicles through which egalitarian, postcolonial futures can be imagined or sourced. As we shall see below, this debate is most acutely observed with respect to the revisionist model of Irish historiography, which disputes Ireland’s co-option into debates on postcoloniality. Reflecting on the impact of Orientalism in 1994, Said wrote: My aim, as I said earlier, was not so much to dissipate difference itself – for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relations between human beings – but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out of those things. (1994 [1978]: 350) It is apparent that Said’s ‘aim’ has become the critical methodology for Irish postcolonial studies. As I will discuss with respect to Deane’s criticism below, differences are not bleached under the theoretical optic of postcolonial reading. What is affected, though, is ‘a reappropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-formulation’ (1994 [1978]: 351). Deane’s critiques are trained on the politics of representation within a manifestly colonial Irish history. They aim to represent the multifarious historical and literary narratives that have arisen within, and/or sought to represent, Ireland. Deane’s work, in effect, has sought to impress the multiplicity of Irish history and to accent the contradictory nature of Ireland in the face of British efforts to subdue and conscript the country into the linear narratives of developmental historical progress. And for Deane it is not a question of oppositional confrontation or the ordination of new theoretical or historical orthodoxies, but, as Said argues, ‘of rethinking and re-formulating’ (1994 [1978]: 351). Through his initial pamphlet contribution to the Field Day series and subsequently through his general editorship of the Field Day Anthology



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of Irish Writing, and most recently through the pages of The Field Day Review, Deane has focused the lens of Irish identitarian dialogue upon issues such as origins, identity, the politics of memory-constitution, modernity, bourgeois nationalism, colonialism, and discourses of national character; effectively the politics of cultural and political representation in a colonial context. Deane, and Field Day, nourished not only a rereading of Irish literary paradigms, but also the qualitative nature of Irish historiographical writing in the light of Ireland’s colonial heritage. Prefiguring the work of Lloyd, Gibbons and Whelan, Deane inveighs against attenuated, facile manifestations and legitimations of Irish nationalism. Indeed, such ‘an essentialist version’ entraps itself within an imitative dialectic; in Deane’s reading formalised bourgeois nationalist expression became merely an inverted, and vacant, copy of its British counterpart; in other words, a critical approach that accents the ideas of strategy and deconstruction in its interrogations of debilitating essentialisms, but equally that unmasks the political misuse of essences in colonial contexts. While denying the transhistorical rigidity of political and cultural identities, Deane divines a legitimate currency in the use of such strategic identitarian politics. It is not a matter of empirical facticity that is the sole legitimating criterion; essentialist notions of identity manifest in myth, folklore or oral culture retained a singular valence in conceptions of communal and national identity. And these are positions that he summarised in a 1994 interview with Dympna Callaghan, in which Deane conceded that ‘most of what I have been doing with Field Day, and occasionally in Ulster, has been to argue against an essentialist version of Irish nationalism. To say this is not to deny the need that people have to construct an historical identity or the viability of essentialist arguments as political strategies’ (Callaghan, 1994: 40). The cultural and political projects of Field Day were concerned with decoding the debilitating nostalgia of a sectarian society in Northern Ireland, but also with re-presenting representations of Ireland’s colonial history. Deane has identified the moment when ‘the Republic [of Ireland] surrendered the notion of identity altogether’ and coterminously ‘the North began its internecine conflict’ as the point at which Field Day locates itself (Deane, 1990: 13–14). The resurfacing of the issues of ‘communal identity, colonial interference, sectarianism and racial stereotyping’ warrants a lateral programme of analysis that is concentrated on the notions of ‘place, identity and selfrealization’ (Deane, 1990: 14). Deane’s project within Field Day was to initiate awareness in people of the pressing need for a re-evaluation of the traditions that have provided divisive sustenance for the protracted





sectarian conflagration in the north of Ireland. The essentialist drives of narrow-gauge Irish nationalism merely sustain the asphyxiating limits of bourgeois society. In pursuing a priori claims to the island of Ireland, or by canvassing the idea of a continuous history of the Irish ‘nation’, such simplistic declensions of Irish identity remain within the constrictive boundaries of liberal, bourgeois historiography. In articulating the present absences of the past, Deane, and postcolonial historical readings at large, dissolve the teleological and textual sequestration of historical records. What crystallises, then, is precisely this ‘institution of boredom’ (Deane, 1997: 181), or what Eagleton terms ‘homogenous history’ (1981: 45), through which the nebulous, recondite and/or ‘strange’ are represented or elided on the basis of ‘disciplinary consensus’ (McCarthy, 2000: 100). Central to the equilibrium of such consensus is a firm eschewal of interdisciplinary or crossdisciplinary reading or theorisation. Critical theory, particularly in its ‘postal’ manifestations, has had self-evident influences on Irish cultural and political criticism. But Irish historians have been slow to engage in any self-reflexive theoretical negotiations. Deane concludes: Any activity of interpretation that refuses to accept the autonomies so constituted is reified as ‘theory’, that fancy and fashionable discourse that applies the ‘foreign’ theories of Marx, or Gramsci, or Derrida to a native history that is insusceptible to their charms because it, unlike them, is free from ideological investments – whether as literature or as history. (1997: 190) Consequently, the inherent narrativity of historical representation is quarantined from the reading strategies of the literary. From this posture of objectivity, then, a non-ideological and discrete alignment of literature, politics and history is construed, through which a valuefree ethical narration is articulated. The theoretical negotiations of postcolonial studies are concerned with the ethics of representation and with the practical political, economic and social ends to which these are put. As Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘both history and fiction are cultural sign systems, ideological constructions whose ideology includes their appearance of being autonomous and self-contained’ (1988: 112). Deane’s cultural criticism intersects with and avails of a diverse range of postcolonial, historiographical and philosophical theory, from Benjamin to Adorno to Said. His conceptual framework is unwavering, however, as he maintains the centrality of Ireland’s colonial relationship with Britain. This colonial relation is interrogated



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through the politics of representation, in the forms of literary fiction, travel writing, historical writing and political philosophy. Both the colonial framework and the continued development of the field of postcolonial Irish studies have, Cleary maintains, ‘served to dis-locate Irish studies in ways that many find counterintuitive and disconcerting’ (2003: 21). Just as the respective theoretical developments within subaltern historiography and postmodern history dispute the linear narrational possibilities of historical representation as facilities of ideological control, postcolonial Irish studies, as manifest in the work of Deane and others, regards such representations of closure, continuity and ‘boredom’ (Deane, 1997: 156) as disingenuous. In this respect, perhaps Guy Beiner provides an adequate approximation, in the field of historiography, of the critical/ethical project of postcolonial Irish studies: In the framework of ‘living history’ time operates on many different levels and is not necessarily limited to the standardized linear chronological time of ‘scientific’ history. Additionally, alternative criteria for assessing the importance of historical data is required, as folk histories constantly question the conventional selections of what is trivial and what is central. (2000: 170) In one of the more equable assessments of Field Day’s project, the literary critic Eamonn Hughes conceded that Field Day was never as prescriptive or inflexibly programmatic as many other commentators had contended. For Hughes Field Day exhibited an awareness of, and openness to, the theoretical and philosophical influences of international criticism. Accordingly, ‘what the identification of Field Day as a project informed by structuralist and poststructuralist theories allows us to do is, however, to recognise it not as a doctrinaire enterprise but as an enterprise which is alert to the world beyond the constriction of Irish cultural debate’ (Hughes, 1990: 69). Field Day was diagnostic of a crisis in Irish political and cultural debate – a crisis that was nourished by the perpetuation of debilitating oppositional mythologies in the North of Ireland, and by the stagnation of the South, with its acquiescent modernisation process. Ranged across history, the binaries that fed the Northern crisis were founded on the hoary stereotypes that underlay skewed versions of the Irish–British colonial relationship. Field Day, then, laboured across a broad historical continuum – intervening in the contemporary crises of the Northern sectarian conflagration, but, equally, re-presenting and challenging





the naturalised metanarratives of the Irish colonial and anticolonial nationalist histories. The two vectors, of course, were never mutually exclusive and both were informed by the sophisticated critical scepticism alluded to above by Hughes. Postcolonialism is not simply a temporal marker or a vacant typology, but offers a politics of reading and action to those critics intent on diagnosing and redressing historical and contemporary oppression and disenfranchisement. It is imperative to view Field Day’s project in just such a light – an interventionist postcolonial project, which is focused, not on the establishment of new unassailable orthodoxies or traditions, but on the formulation of a polyphonic liberationist nationalism. Arrayed across a spectrum of creative and critical outlets, including theatre, pamphleteering, anthologising, and monographs, Field Day manufactured a powerful counter-hegemonic critical mass. The project encompassed both the historical and the contemporary, offering sustained critiques of the homogenising cultural and political effects of ideological reification. In Cleary’s terms: ‘Given the imbrication of liberal feminist and modernisation discourses in Ireland, the most sustained critique of the current modernisation orthodoxy has stemmed from the Field Day enterprise’ (2005: 17). Field Day’s theoretical grounding in undertaking such critique is eclectic and clearly has affiliations with the writings of Adorno, Benjamin, Fanon, Said, Jameson, and the Annales School. Such a parade of intellectual influences may seem contradictory, but in combination what emerges is a series of forceful, differentiated critiques. What is remarkable, however, and this is a point highlighted below, is a persistent flaw of the Field Day enterprise: the relatively minimal impact feminist theory has had on its diverse outputs. Field Day, then, located itself as a counter-hegemonic enterprise in its tackling of the embedded mythologies and ideologies of Irish politics and culture. Explaining the original ambitions of the Field Day Theatre Company, Stephen Rea, one of its two founding directors, admits that the company did ‘accrue all sorts of ideological positions. But they were just a matter of voicing things, heightening the language in which things were debated ... or asserting that there had to be a language in which things could be debated, because everything was being fought over rather than discussed’ (Keating, 2006: 16). Rea’s comments centre on two defining features of Field Day: crisis and language – both crucially important to political and cultural criticism. Given the material historical events surrounding, and subsequent to, the foundation of Field Day, together with their diagnosis of the persistence of British



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colonialism on the island of Ireland, it is easy to comprehend how and why Field Day fed upon, and sustained, the notion of an Irish society in crisis. The counter-hegemonic role assumed by Field Day was, as Kirkland details, undertaken with a view to mediating and interrogating the structural agents of the ‘crisis’. Drawing on Gramsci, Kirkland explains the underlying logic of Field Day’s engagement with the politics of crisis: Firstly the existence of established counter-hegemonic activity as created by the expansive organic intelligentsia, and, secondly the moment of vulnerability when the ruling (colonial) power’s own hegemonic practice has failed at some strategic and significant moment, thus revealing the forces of physical coercion to the oppressed ... It is at this point of focus that Field Day offered itself while reading the sense of crisis as fundamentally one within the sphere of authority. (1996: 124) Nevertheless, the second point raised by Rea, language, has been taken as evidential of a non-materialist trajectory of the Field Day enterprise, what McCarthy has identified as ‘a resolutely idealist/culturalist operation’ (2007a: 82). In this view Field Day intersects with much of the idiomatic circuitry of international postcolonial criticism. Cleary, as Rea mentions, Field Day did become embroiled in the negotiation of discourse within Irish political and cultural debate, and to this extent it has been bracketed as a project that was preoccupied with ‘style’ and abstraction rather than with the material politics of the ‘crisis’. In other words, Field Day became an idealist enclave of critical theory and literary history peopled by academics. In fact, contrary to the counterhegemonic status attributed by Kirkland, Field Day remained removed from marginal constituencies and engaged at a discursive distance in real political crises. This does not invalidate the theoretical and literary historical achievements of Field Day in its critiques of British imperial modernity; of bourgeois Irish nationalism; and of latter-day Irish modernisation, nor does it demean the evident intellectual eclecticism and internationalism of the project. Yet, while Field Day did embrace various strands of international ‘postal’ theory in servicing the critiques just cited, it did not lapse into facile relativism, easy pluralism, or vacuous postmodernism. These hollowed-out varieties of postmodern identity politics lack any sense of identitarian anchorage and were disowned as Field Day, among other later postcolonial projects in Ireland, demonstrated ‘an appreciation of the need to mobilize identity as a





site of resistance to its erasure while remaining constantly conscious of the provisional nature of that which was to be defended’ (Richards, 1999: 108). Deane explicitly stated as much in his concluding remarks to his ‘Introduction’ to the pamphlet Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Here Deane stakes a claim for the validity of identitarian rootedness and specificity in a contemporary context in which pluralism, relativism and rootlessness have been consented to as provisional, yet dominant norms. Deane argues that these transient, modish designations are inherently disorienting and disempowering, and constitute insidious forms of remastered epistemic control. For Deane ‘the postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism supplants the search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin, and in these circumstances individuals and communities simply pass from one kind of colonizing experience into another’ (1990: 19); the reason being that, according to Deane, ‘such pluralism refuses the idea of naming; it plays with diversity and makes a mystique of it; it is the concealed imperialism of the multinational, the infinite compatibility of all cultures with one another envisaged in terms of the ultimate capacity of all computers to read one another’ (1990: 19). Again, in many respects, this dramatises Deane’s and, by extension, Field Day’s dialectical relationship with nationalism, as well as explaining how Deane’s and Field Day’s accommodation of a renewed version of nationalism coheres with Fanon’s and, latterly, Lazarus’s conceptualisation of liberationist nationalism that escapes the limits of bourgeois nationalism and its monumental stagnation in the state. Field Day’s critique of Irish nationalism is an extension of their critique of contemporary Irish society. It contests the essentialist, and politically opportunist, historiographical portraits of Irish nationalism as always exclusionary and extremist. Field Day adhered to the Saidian belief that national identities can be enabling, coherent and liberatory, and eschewed the revisionist line that nationalism is merely synonymous with militant sectarianism and anachronistic traditionalism. What Field Day recognised was that nationalism is as much a product of modernity as imperialism and capitalist modernisation, and that it is a viable political and cultural resource in polemical engagements with these phenomena in an Irish context. Although we will address Neil Lazarus’s valuable critical work on nationalism and postcolonialism at greater length below, his ideas bear on our consideration of Field Day’s invocation of a liberationist nationalism in Ireland. As we have seen, Field Day was roundly vilified and chastened for its apparent rehabilitation of nationalism, and, with the



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publication of the Field Day Anthology, for producing a monumentalisation, or a crass nationalist metanarrative. Field Day’s apparent adherence to a narrowly imagined Irish nationalism is, then, showcased as further incriminating evidence of its contradictory politics. While it claims to expose the hypocrisies of oppressive ideologies, its critics highlight that this return of the ‘nation’ within Field Day’s theatrical and critical outputs re-establishes identitarian hegemonies such as patriarchy and ethnicity. Much of the currency of these critical attacks on Field Day, even on nationalism as such, and on the intersection of both, gains its buoyancy from the suspicion that nationalism was held in during the 1980s and the early 1990s in Ireland on foot of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Indeed, nationalism as an international discourse has seen its stock depress during the same period; it seems it became an intellectual de rigueur to disavow and/or homogenise all forms of nationalism. Yet, as Lazarus clarifies, such unconditional opposition to nationalism under the current politico-economic conjuncture is counterproductive. For now, then, I want to propose briefly that Field Day’s critique of modernity, and Irish modernisation, via discourses such as language identity and history, is intimately bound up with its approach to Irish nationalism. In other words, following Fanon, Field Day’s critique of nationalism is directed against a bourgeois nationalist strain, which itself was a willing agent of capitalist modernity. As we shall see, and contrary to Graham’s analysis, it was not necessary for Field Day to jettison nationalism as a political discourse. Nationalism became, and remains, a principal site of critical contestation within postcolonial studies, as even anticolonial nationalism is figured ‘as not only an elitist and authoritarian but also a mimetic discourse – that is, as a metapractice, one modeled – in certain key aspects, at least – on diverse metropolitan nation-projects and subordinate, for this reason, to their forms and protocols’ (Lazarus, 1999: 121). Certainly many of these critiques are warranted, and we can enumerate Field Day’s readings of post-Independence Irish FreeState nationalism among them. However, to claim the entire Field Day project as a counterfeit of this earlier conservative ideology does not stand up to full critical examination. Rejecting the accusation that Field Day did not respond sufficiently to the contemporaneous sectarian conflict in its theatrical productions, Deane argued in 2006 that Field Day ‘sought to create contexts for the local conflict, not by remaining immersed in it, but by discovering from what perspectives it could be viewed that would allow for a more nuanced fertile reading of it’ (Keating, 2006: 16). Deane’s language





here reveals the dialectical character of the Field Day enterprise, which exhibits a ready concern for the particularities of internecine tensions based on oppositional identitarian heritages, but which is also attentive to the broader international modes through which these cross-cultural political differences might be productively mediated. Addressing the ‘crisis’ (Kirkland, 1996: 121–48) through a reconceived, inclusive prism of a liberationist Irish nationalism does not mean a reiteration of the presiding antagonistic mythologies. The specificities of the local cannot be eschewed, but neither can cultural or political solipsism endure. As Lazarus argues, drawing on Guha: For it follows from Guha’s reading that no de-differentiated characterization of ‘nationalism,’ ... is justified. It is necessary, instead, to situate every particular movement or discourse in terms of its ideological and political tendency, its practical bearing with respect to the total (that is, local and global) social order within which it falls. (1999: 127) This point chimes with Deane’s defence above – both underscore the legitimacy of the national particularity, but equally both position the ‘national’ and the ‘local’ within a stream of international ideational exchange. While bourgeois nationalism is critiqued by Field Day as an impotent imitation of colonial ideology, it does not follow that recalibrated liberationist nationalism, such as that traded by Field Day, can be profiled in the same way. Polemical critiques of nationalism frequently cast it as a universalistic discourse, one that bleaches gender, class, and faith, for instance, from the political spectrum. But, ironically, these critiques are frequently articulated in equally universalistic terms, very often reprivileging one or other of the bracketed terms above. What Lazarus, via Fanon, and in my estimation, in its own way, Field Day urge is that nationalism can be a vehicle for anticolonial expression and liberation; that nationalism’s reputation as a universally divisive, non-egalitarian and firmly Eurocentric apostle of imperial modernity is not beyond contradiction. It is in this frame that we should, then, view both Field Day’s nationalist agenda, and also the various critiques that have sought to undermine Field Day’s creative and critical projects. Relating the politics of translation, performance and the representation of the past, W.B. Worthen offers the following appraisal of Field Day’s critical and imaginative project: ‘Translation is a powerful instrument for resistant theaters like Field Day, not least in its ability to use



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performance to articulate a critique of how “translations” can help to form and maintain certain versions of agency, by imagining and producing the cultural categories of the past in new and striking ways’ (1995: 35). Transcending the purely textual, then, both the philosophical ‘fifth province’ of Field Day’s cultural imagination and its physical means of enunciation in theatrical performance were largely conceived of in spatial terms. The spatial conceptualisation, or what Paul Carter calls a way of thinking of history in metaphorical dimensions (1987), is evident in Deane and Kearney’s 1984 interview, in which the unifying image of the fifth province is approximated as ‘an equivalent centre from which the four broken and fragmented pieces of contemporary Ireland might be seen in fact as coherent’ (Deane and Kearney, 1984). It is a dramatic and political image which, as Tom Paulin argues, ‘offers an invisible challenge to the nationalist image of the four green fields’ (1984: 17). Significantly, we note the representation of Irish space, but this time in terms of an equalising, almost liminal space of the imagination. The very idea of a ‘fifth province’ or ‘secret centre’ accents the constitutive spatial animus of the Field Day enterprise. Without drawing ahistorical analogies, we can trace the differential spatial representations of Ireland. Across his oeuvre Deane traces such representation from the Act of Union to the Irish Literary revival, from Spenser to the hunger strikes of the early 1980s; likewise, in other areas of Irish postcolonial studies, Kiberd and, more recently, P.J. Mathews conceive of the revivalist, self-help initiatives as spatially reimagining Ireland’s alternative modernities. Field Day, then, valorised Irish cultural space in its imaginary realm of the ‘fifth province’. Irish bourgeois nationalism was, in Deane’s view, as much a product of British colonialism as unionism, based as it was on the underpinnings of stereotype and essentialism. In critiquing, and ultimately rejecting, this form of nationalist discourse, Deane not only allied himself with postcolonial criticism but also, as Michael Böss argues, indicates his broader intellectual project. This project constituted ‘a radical reappraisal of the Enlightenment tradition and its philosophical, political and social implications – rationalism, liberalism and modernisation’ (2002: 146). The philosophical ‘fifth province’, then, is implicated in Deane’s and Field Day’s discourse on Irish nationalism. As it transcends the geographical confines of the island with its abstract and imaginary quality, the fifth province is a potent site of alternative ‘philosophical, political and social implications’. Indeed, its abstracted or invented quality expresses Kiberd’s contention that futurology is a historical necessity of Irish society. But also, and contrary to Böss’s conclusion, it is not an





attempt ‘to rewrite the past’ (2002: 147); rather, the fifth province is a imaginary location wherein pasts and histories can compete, negotiate and affiliate beyond the structures, and strictures, of attenuated versions of essence, nostalgia, tradition, rationalism and modernisation. Field Day’s concern with constricted versions of Irish nationalism, and with the processes of cultural invention which have historically underwritten it, according to Colin Graham, ‘accorded with developments in post-colonial criticism’, which have turned ‘against nations and nationalism as repressive, ideological reproductions of the colonial regime’ (Graham, 2001: 87). Deane’s articulation of the failure of Irish nationalism, Graham argues, intersects with Ranajit Guha’s and Subaltern Studies’ critique of Indian state nationalism. In effect, both cite the imperial heritage of nationalism and latterly its failure to formulate an adequate and heterogeneous postcolonial national identity as indices of its limitations. Graham refers to ‘the necessary denigration of the nation as a political ideology’ (2001: 88), replacing discussions of future Irish nationalisms with what he calls ‘a notion of Irish culture which views the dialogic hybridity of Irishness in empowered ways’ (2001: 98). However, while Graham’s appraisal of Deane’s critical legacy is largely sympathetic to the project of deconstructing the oppressive mechanisms of nationalism, Graham concludes that Deane, and Field Day, are unable or unwilling to imagine beyond the nationalist paradigm. In other words, Field Day might reject the disabling and sectarianised strains of Irish nationalism but the alternative is merely a more inclusive and representative form of Irish nationalism. For Field Day, and indeed for the shorter-lived journal The Crane Bag, confronting cultural and political history was not exclusively a question of re-presenting the ‘what’ of historical narration. There was a complementary urgency to interrogate the ‘how’, the representational modalities through which colonial, and of course postcolonial, identities are forged. Expressing these combined aspirations, Kearney argued: ‘To say that while we must construct new social, political and economic models, we must also look at these particular stereotypes which very often condition our ways of looking at politics and economics. So we have to look at religion and the arts and psychology and education’ (Deane and Kearney, 1984). Significantly, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing extended the notion of spatio-temporal configuration, and equally it collated and re-presented the multifarious representational discourses that, as Deane says, ‘have achieved prominence as the official version of the true history, political and literary, of the island’s past and present’ (1991: xix).



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In the theater, the central preoccupation has been with a particular experience of what we may call translation. By this I mean the adaptions, readjustments, and reorientations that are required of individuals and groups who have undergone a traumatic cultural and political crisis so fundamental that they must forge for themselves a new speech, a new history or life-story that would give it some rational or coherent form. (1990: 14) Just as David Cairns and Shaun Richards relate Foucault’s reading of language as an exercise of hegemonic discourse, Deane’s analysis identifies the political fabric of linguistic assertion and exchange. Referring to Foucault, Cairns and Richards argue that ‘our point of reference ... should not be language and signs but war and battle’ (1988: 16). The transparent interpretive cast of language, then, is compromised by its complicity with, indeed necessity to, differential power relations. Deane makes a related point in a more recent essay; he links language to the experiences of authority, displacement and loss. Language is not solely a medium of exchange, or a benign cultural indice, but, as Deane asserts, ‘English is not merely the language of a country or an empire or of an invading culture; it is the language of a condition – modernity. It is in relation to modernity ... that Irish linguistic behaviour is best examined’ (2003: 113). Responding again in interview to Callaghan, Deane argues that the Field Day Anthology articulates necessary questions about the nature of Irish identity, Irish writing and the relationship between the two. The anthology asks ‘what kind of identity formation attaches to certain kinds of writing and how are these identities recruited for certain purposes’ (1993: 41). Deane, then, explodes the tenuous demarcation of politics and culture; following Said’s reading of Orientalist cultural politics, Deane’s reading of Irish colonial history locates the ideological grounding and mobilisation of cultural discourses, including literature, philosophy and historiography. Indeed, Deane’s summative remarks regarding the anthology recall his earlier pamphlet, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, in which he concludes: Political languages fade more slowly than literary languages but when they do, they herald a deep structural alteration in the attitudes which sustain a crisis. Of all the blighting distinctions which



In his ‘Introduction’ to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, Deane summarises the critical and artistic manoeuvres of Field Day’s theatrical wing:

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Similarly, Claire Connolly, speaking on Field Day, notes: The seeming unavailability of any answer to the protracted violence in the North propelled many critics into a search for new kinds of questions; and towards the discovery that, in cultural theory, the shibboleths of the Irish debate were being held up for analysis, read as strategically deployed terms and discussed as constructs rather than truths. (2001: 301) The mediation and confrontation of acute political and historical circumstances in terms of post-structuralism and postcolonialism further accent Deane’s point that language was at the core of Ireland’s political and cultural crises. As he argues, ‘the crisis we are passing through is stylistic. That is to say, it is a crisis of language – the ways in which we write it and the ways in which we read it’ (1985b: 46). Theory, then, is manifest as a latter-day stylistic intervention in the representation of Irish society. The revelation of the constructed fabric of traditional or nostalgic truths through Field Day’s critical and artistic interventions is, then, influenced by the work of Derrida, Foucault and Said, but, I would contend, tends towards the latter in terms of a commitment to political transformation. As Connolly further concludes: ‘theoretically inspired or informed readings of Irish writers originating outside Ireland have not always been welcome’ (2001: 307); the significance of these contributions, however, lies in their participation in ‘a concerted effort to dislocate Ireland’ (2001: 307). The projects of Irish postcolonial studies are located within a broader nexus of conceptual and theoretical transaction, and it is significant that Field Day was primarily responsible for opening Ireland’s critical borders to such ideational exchange. Countering the political and historical leanings exhibited by Field Day and writing in 1996, John Wilson Foster diagnosed an explicit nationalist conviction within the operations and publications of Field Day. Confirming its radical co-option of international critical theory to Irish political and cultural debates, Wilson Foster offers a somewhat reductive conclusion that such theoretical internationalism nourishes ‘a stern, rather puritan republicanism’ (1996: 87). Wilson Foster continues: Tenured radicals in the advanced English-speaking university systems routinely seek to subvert the canon, traditional western values, the very



govern our responses and limit our imaginations at the moment, none is more potent than this four hundred year-old distinction between barbarians and civilians. (1985a: 42)

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idea of literature, the idea of the author, the idea of genius, liberal humanism and Christianity, all in the name of post-modernism; but in the name of post-colonialism and multiculturalism, they mount tediously routine attacks on colonialism and imperialism, finding not the United States but Britain the most convenient: this championship of the historical victim can easily in any given ethnocultural situation become proxy nationalism. (1996: 86–7) Such a conclusion consummately reveals Wilson Foster’s own tenured academic priorities; continuity, canonicity and the integrated text emerge as sacrosanct. Perhaps more alarming is his deflection of attacks on imperialism; surely the political and cultural disparities and excesses of colonialism warrant critical interrogation. Further, and this seems to be the crux of revisionism’s lacunae, what is the nationalism to which Wilson Foster refers? As the interventions of postcolonial critics and subaltern historians reveal, nationalism is never a homogenously transhistorical or transgeographical entity or process. Equally, critics such as Wilson Foster necessarily construct their own version of traditional Irish nationalism, which is then conflated with, or collapsed into, the theoretical project of postcolonial theory; a tactic designed to deflate the possibilities and legitimacy of both nationalism and postcolonial theory. As is well documented, Ireland’s situation as a postcolonial society has been laterally contested within Irish literary and historical studies. Decried as either empirically misguided or as a theoretical strategy of traditional Irish nationalism, Irish postcolonial criticism has been continually rejected by revisionist literary scholars and historians. The critical internationalism and comparative theoretical frameworks of postcolonial studies, then, are adjudged to be unsuitable to Irish history or its contemporary condition as a modernised, liberal democracy, which is geographically remote from ‘truly postcolonial’ societies. Such a critical mentality harbours an unquestioning loyalty to the progressive philosophical myths of Western modernity, and consequently disputes any theoretical or historical challenge to the narratives of Irish modernisation. Irish critical and historiographical studies, primarily but not exclusively under the aegis of revisionism, have produced consistent, and strenuous, objections to the calibration of the narratives of Irish history to the perceived parameters of colonial and postcolonial experience. In effect, it is possible to point to five principal grounds on which critics disqualify Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial pretensions. There are historical grounds with respect to Ireland’s constitutional status within the larger British polity which contest Irish postcoloniality. Further





points of disqualification include the bald fact that Ireland has been a flourishing participant in Western European market capitalism, which is itself imbricated with the island’s relative geographical location in relation to both the imperial metropole and the accepted geographical foreignness of colonies. The narration of Irish history through the lens of colonialism suggests, it is contended, an unwillingness to accept historical responsibility wherein so-called ‘postcolonial melancholy’ becomes an easy method of transferring responsibility onto an oppressive colonial heritage. And finally, because Ireland achieved independence over eighty years ago, there should have been ample time to transcend the traumas of colonial and postcolonial experience. Consequently it is both politically disingenuous and ethically indulgent to persist in framing contemporary Irish culture in terms of a redundant theoretical paradigm. Picking up on the sentiments expressed by Wilson Foster, arguing at length, Edna Longley elaborates the crucial disparity between both the historical perspectives and the methodological approaches of Irish postcolonial critics, increasingly influenced by Benjamin, and those of New Critical scholars and revisionist historians. In a reference to Field Day’s historical perspective, she writes within the literary sphere it seeks to piece together a broken past, to go back behind all deforming colonization, to return to origins (550AD), and thus to ‘clarify’ Irish reality so that we can start again. In contrast revisionism seeks to break down a monolithic idea of the past, to go back behind the revolution’s ideology, to return to origins in 1922 and understand them more empirically. In my view the former project risks the dangerous fantasy that loss and breakdown can be retrieved. Rather than start a new literary and political clock, I think we should try to tell the time accurately. (1994: 13) Longley’s idiom betrays the claims to empiricism that are symptomatic of revisionist criticism; accuracy, it seems, evacuates fantasy of historical agency. What Longley fails to appreciate is that narratives constructed on the basis of apparent accuracy depend on their own myths, and in turn become myths themselves. Echoing the philosophical principles of the Scottish Enlightenment, Longley eschews Field Day’s reclamation of the shattered fragments of the past. As Irish postcolonial studies and subaltern historiography report, it is difficult to tell the time if some of the digits on the clock face are missing or faded. Reiterating her suspicion of Field Day’s adoption of international critical theory within



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a reconfigured traditional nationalism, in 1984 Longley wrote that Field Day were ‘martyrs to abstraction’, and that their critical interface with Ireland’s colonial history and Anglo–Irish relations was ‘largely a matter of old whines in new bottles ... more part of the problem than part of the solution’ (1984: 20). While the kernel of Longley’s argument was overly simplistic, she did allude to limitations that were repeatedly confronted by Field Day. In his 1986 edition, The Battle of the Books, W.J. McCormack catalogued some of the omissions from Field Day’s pamphlet series. McCormack noted the absence of such topics as ‘the Irish language ... the role of the Catholic Church ... the whole question of social class ... the population explosion in the South ... nuclear energy, neutrality and US/British defence interests in Ireland’ (1986: 55). Field Day’s perceived concentration on the abstractions of representation, mediated through continental theory, occasioned the gaps in their critical agenda, as cited by McCormack. However, as is too often the case in Irish critical debates, Longley defaults to crass political sloganeering, issuing a ‘traditionalist’ caricature of Field Day. She explicitly overlooks what was essentially a Benjaminian, or dynamic, interaction with the past and with Irish literary and historical heritage. The political temperature of Field Day’s cultural milieu, in Longley’s view, facilitates the fermentation of an anachronistic nationalist politics. In a recent essay entitled ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’, Gibbons writes on the relations between history and trauma. Referring to the modalities of therapeutic recovery, Gibbons notes: ‘the therapeutic assumption here ... lies in the belief that the telling of a story is sufficient by itself to dispel the ghosts of the past ... But it by no means follows that all narrative structures provide such consoling fictions’ (2002: 97). Reading through Adorno on traumatic memory, he further concludes that ‘[it] is not about recovering or indeed banishing previous experiences but rather working through them, and it is this protracted, often painful process which links the lost voices of the past ineluctably with the present’ (2002: 97). In the context of Ireland’s colonial history, Gibbons’s remarks on the narrative mediation of traumatic memory seem to have a peculiar relevance to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Critics such as Longley reacted in equivocal fashion, extolling the editors’ voluminous collection of rare material, but also chastising the anthology for its ‘symptomatic yoking of Irish Literature to Nationalism’ (Longley, 1994: 23). She views the anthology as the culmination of Field Day’s nationalist ambitions and has described it as ‘the key to all of its [Field Day’s] mythologies’ (1994: 22). Longley is particularly disdainful of Deane’s input and is wary of the





‘General Introduction’, as it ‘harbours its own polemical ambitions while pretending to philosophical relativism’ (1994: 26). Deane is perceived as infusing the Field Day project with his personal nationalist vision and political agenda. However, Deane, in his capacity as general editor, explicitly advertised both its contingency and its inclusiveness, arguing that the anthology’s animus was to ‘re-present texts in relation to one another and [demonstrate], sometimes in detail, sometimes by no more than a general indication, how that constantly changing interrelationship provides for us the nexus of values, assumptions and beliefs in which the idea of Ireland, Irish and writing are grounded’ (1991: xx). Yet it would be to overstate the theoretical case to assert either that the anthology represents an insuperable monument to regressive Irish nationalism or that, as Eugene O’Brien suggests, it can never and does not wish to ever ‘achieve the plenitude of closure’ (2005: 133). It is more appropriate to conceive of the anthology, and of Field Day’s suite of creative and critical projects, as operating between the Scylla of straitened nationalism and the Charybdis of unfettered post-structuralism – in other words, Field Day avails of the resources of both discourses but coterminously critiques both positions as politically unsustainable. In another vein, Tom Herron has compounded O’Brien’s poststructuralist reading of Field Day by analogising the company’s ‘fifth province’ rhetoric with Bhabha’s notion of ‘Third Space’. Herron accents the idea of ‘in-betweeness’ as a cultural and political space of compromise, wherein conflict is quieted by a perpetual process of mutually tolerant negotiation (1998: 180–6). As we shall see below, the lack of anchorage of such poststructuralist political interventions is theoretically appealing but, firstly, retains little of comfort or value in material circumstances, and, secondly, devalues the liberationist counter-hegemonic projects that are characteristic of the Field Day venture. Francis Mulhern’s initial caustic review of the Field Day Anthology, together with his later riposte to Gibbons’s rebuttal of the claims made by Mulhern in that review, revolves around a number of key features of the anthology. Underwritten by a neo-Marxist methodology, Mulhern’s contention is that the three-volume publication was, in fact, the logical outcome of a programmatic agenda. Notwithstanding the varieties of writing housed within the anthology and the numerous editorial inputs, ‘nothing so determined is likely to be merely eclectic’ (Mulhern, 1998: 148). Despite ‘the editorial self-consciousness’ displayed, most obviously, by Deane, Mulhern reads the anthology with a neo-Marxist suspicion of the ideological force of the project. Indeed, his opening remarks resonate with the ideas of Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey’s



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seminal essay ‘Literature as an Ideological Form’: ‘Anthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics ... [they] deploy a special type of rhetorical force: the simulation of self-evidence’ (1998: 147). Contrary to the counter-hegemonic critical impulses of the Field Day initiative, Mulhern proposes that the anthology represents a textual concretization of a preconceived and conservative nationalist ideology. The anthology seems to naturalise the ‘nation’ as the prism through which all Irish history and culture are refracted, and thereby relegates other social determinations. And, of course, primary among these other sidelined social agencies that were deemed to have been ill-served by both the content and the process of the Anthology were women’s writing and feminism. As the Ur-text of Field Day’s monologic nationalism, the anthology is an act of culmination, which subsumed all other social constituencies within its programme: ‘Field Day’s intervention, as this anthology illustrates it, is adapted in advance to an unexamined hierarchy of values in which the crux of Ireland-as-unfulfilled-nation is paramount, with the consequence that culture neither civilizes nor deconstructs the national question but essentializes it as an Irish fate’ (Mulhern, 1998: 156). The grating issue for Mulhern, then, like many other revisionist critics, is that the ‘nation’, once thought to have been superseded and rendered an irrelevancy under the processes of Irish modernisation, re-emerges within Irish literary and historiographical debates. Having been consigned to obsolescence by its apparent supersession by a modernising Eurocentrism and/or internationalism, the ‘nation’ reappears, with full Benjaminian force, as a political and critical irritant. The question then arises, if the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are so irrelevant, why, firstly, do they arouse so much vituperative reaction? And, secondly, if we do pay due attention to international critical and political circumstances, it is clear that the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are clearly not extinct as viable political and cultural modalities. But in Mulhern’s view the contrary prevails and ‘nationality need not be [the] decisive term, and ... cannot be’ (1998: 157). The ‘nationalist’ script has been discarded and its alleged homogeneity has been replaced by a heteronymous social fabric. Yet, again, why should nationalism not have a role to play in this heteronomy of social indices? If Irish culture is, to invoke Mulhern’s own terminology, ‘an unprogrammed hybrid’ (1998: 157), is nationalism precluded from contributing to such hybridity? Equally, while Mulhern can apparently discharge Irish nationalism as a monocular ideology, the substitute provided is evasive, rootless, and, frankly, impotent. What exactly is ‘an unprogrammed hybrid’? What are its complementary and competing social agents? What are





the relative power differentials within such a hybrid social formation? What are the relations that obtain between the local and the global in this piebald social world? If the anthology stands as the textual incarnation of the regressive nationalist politics of the entire Field Day project, then its theoretical framework is furnished by postcolonial criticism. The ‘national question’ is smuggled onto the critical agenda in Ireland through the paradigms of postcolonial theorisation. Yet, here again, Mulhern is resolute in his dismissal of Ireland’s legitimacy as a postcolonial society. Steeping its political aspirations in the codes of international postcolonial criticism is, in Mulhern’s view, merely a disingenuous co-optation of a theoretical paradigm to a narrow nationalist agenda, and, in fact, runs counter to the evidence of historical fact in Ireland. Specifically, it is simply incorrect, and in Field Day’s case ‘confusionist and retrograde’ (Mulhern, 1998: 161), to locate Irish society within a postcolonial framework, given that the independent Irish Free-State was founded in 1922. But the problem with Mulhern’s argument is that he limits his understanding, and application, of the idea of the ‘postcolonial’ to temporality. As Anne McClintock has convincingly argued, such empirical parsing of the term is, firstly, Eurocentric in its privileging of colonial occupation as a historical marker. In addition, it fails to apprehend, or mobilise, the contemporary theorisation of postcolonialism as a form of combative, counter-hegemonic politics rather than a temporal descriptor. As we argue above, Field Day’s postcolonial project is manifest in a politics of counter-hegemonic contestation, representation, and reading. Even if one is to confront the logic of Mulhern’s temporal disqualification of Ireland-as-postcolonial, who is to say that there is a temporal statute of limitations on the political and cultural resonances of a colonial history? Can Mulhern suggest a universal temporal index for ‘postcolonial’ legitimacy? In his ‘General Introduction’ Deane enunciates the dialogic and fractious economies of historical, textual representation in and about Ireland. The ‘meta-narrative, which is ... hospitable to all micro-narratives that, from time to time, have achieved prominence as the official versions of the true history, political and literary, of the island’s past and present’ (1991: xix) is not the definitive embodiment of what Gibbons calls a ‘consoling fiction’. It is rather representative of ‘dialogic hybridity’, as well as signifying, in its laterally inclusive textual form, a radical re-presentation of and engagement with Ireland’s pasts. Traditions and anthologies operate on the basis of self-evidence; in asserting their own authority they give the appearance of natural entities. As such they



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embody acts of cultural consolation, a consolation that is exclusionary, arbitrary and tendentious. As part of the Field Day project, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing is not impervious to the limitations of its form, for which it was rightly criticised, but in its stated intention of problematising the consolations, and consolidations, of tradition, sectarianism and nostalgia it constituted a signal postcolonial event. In Gibbons’s terms, it was not designed to banish or to foreground specific constituencies of Irish literary or political history, but contrarily its representation of texts in dialogic form facilitates, possibly demands, what Gibbons calls a process of ‘working through’. Said’s influence on Irish postcolonial studies is unquestionably evidenced in Field Day’s critical project; its presiding concerns are the debilitating modalities of political and cultural representation of Irish colonial history. Indeed, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing is a monumental testament to the Saidian undertow of Deane’s and Field Day’s critical trajectories. Necessarily, then, such a postcolonial representation of the history of Irish writing was viewed as an insidious political strategy. Tying Said’s political and cultural preoccupations to Field Day’s political project, Longley claims that their critical writings exude ‘a powerful sense of Palestinian dispossession’ (1990: 12). Extending her political–historical analogies, she further concludes, ‘Field Day’s leading directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Tom Paulin – are literary kings over the water or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration’ (Watson, 1992: 402). In these terms Field Day represented a political movement, which sought redress for the colonial usurpation of Irish history; exile and homelessness underwrite their nationalistic anthologising, theatrical performance and broader critical engagement. Longley diagnoses an attenuated inflection of nationalism, which elides women’s history and agency, and whose own political agenda is foreclosed by the ever-absent restoration of the nation (1992: 119–21). In nominating volumes four and five of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which were then in progress, as ‘The Mad Women in the Annex’ (1992: 119), Longley’s ostensibly facetious comment, nevertheless, retains a degree of accuracy. While the five volumes of the anthology now represent well over a millennium of Irish writing by both men and women, the discrete separation of the volumes belies the material complexity and historical interaction of social, cultural and political representation. As Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill concludes: ‘the all-women fourth volume of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing may go some way to galvanizing and publishing hitherto overlooked energies, but it is no guarantee that women can at last





take their rightful place, and well-deserved places, no matter what their achievements’ (1996: 114). Yet the reception of the two additional volumes of the Field Day Anthology was, unsurprisingly, not unequivocally celebratory. While the work of the editorial board and their research assistants does stand as an unequalled record of scholarship into the history of Irish women’s writing, the project, it seems, was blighted in its very inception, and perception, as a gendered addendum to the ‘male’ and ‘nationalist’ volumes of a decade previous. Nevertheless, the volumes did prompt favourable reviews, provoking Gerry McCarthy to conclude that they were ‘a monumental work of collective scholarship, they represent the first attempt to bring together a substantial body of written documents by and about women since writing began in Ireland’ (McCarthy, 2002: 18). But, on the other hand, the volumes also aroused dissent from critics who saw them merely as a token gesture; a long list of women writers without any detailed, constructive commentary on the merits or historical significance of these writers. In this vein Eileen Battersby raises the issue of ‘quality’ rather than naked ‘quantity’; in her opinion ‘we don’t need roll calls or inventories at this stage of our cultural evolution. We want exploration and textual analysis. Sheer force of numbers does not necessarily confer quality’ (2002: 10). While inclusion can be, and has been, posited as an unproblematically positive tactic of the Anthology as a whole, it does raise questions, as Battersby’s review comments suggest. Equally, there is also the suspicion that these two volumes, together with their partner volumes from 1991, are just too capacious in their scope; in other words, that the sheer scale of effort to include has in fact cemented exclusion – they have become academic and/or library artefacts rather than achieving anything approaching popular or general digestion, which does seem unfortunate. Concluding her 2001 essay, ‘Theorising Ireland’, Connolly writes: As the subject of theory, postcolonial and otherwise, ‘Ireland’ must be understood as both the twenty-six-county nation-state and the six-county statelet, and furthermore, in terms of the connections and affiliations not reducible to these relatively new political creations. Postcolonial theory has to process the relation between these two units which share the same land mass, the actual or wished-for connections with other places ... and the dreams of those who see the two units as one. That this dream has the power to assume the role of nightmare in some versions of the political imagination must also be acknowledged. (2001: 312)



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To critics of Field Day, its critical and editorial enterprises, gilded as they were with postcolonial and post-structuralist theory, have signally failed to execute the project delineated by Connolly. Ironically, by failing to engage with any theoretical or historiographical self-reflection, these critics have equally failed to mediate the political and cultural affiliations and divisions cited by Connolly. Ultimately, in both theoretically and creatively rereading Irish identities in terms of their all-island and colonial histories and representations, and in executing radical critiques of Ireland’s problematic relationship to the epistemological structures of Western modernity, Field Day did at least initiate what Connolly later calls ‘the search ... for a critical idiom capable of comprehending and maybe even changing Irish culture’ (2001: 312). Elsewhere Shaun Richards alludes to the pivotal, divisive issue concerning Field Day’s critical project. As a significant postcolonial event, Field Day embodied a form of cultural politics, but, contrary to Longley, these were not of militant republican dispossession, or in Wilson Foster’s terms ‘reconstructed Catholic nationalism’ (1996: 87). Richards concludes: It is not that Field Day is a ‘nationalist’ movement in the sense of being hard-line republican, but there is a real political-cultural consequence of reading Ulster’s situation as colonial, in that there is a desire for a non-sectarian republic ... there is also a necessity of dealing with those whose sense of political/cultural-and religious-being is predicated upon the maintenance of the Act of Union. (1991: 142) Field Day’s task was, and that confronting contemporary Irish postcolonial studies remains, not the elision of these latter cultural communities (and their histories), but, firstly, the interrogation of the representational mechanisms that underwrote British imperial modernity; secondly, the continual contestation of the homogenising capacities of nationalist discourse; and thirdly, contributing to the utopian critical engagement with the startling inequalities of globalised, and militarised, capital, to which Ireland is committed. Writing Ireland A materialist counterpoint to the imputed more idealist foci of Field Day and The Crane Bag is Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture, authored by David Cairns and Shaun Richards, published in 1988. The book appeared as part of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s ‘Cultural Politics’ book series, a series that also included such seminal works as Graham Holderness’s edition, The Shakespeare Myth (1988).





Writing Ireland can be seen, therefore, as a pioneering cultural materialist narrative of Ireland’s colonial relationship with Britain. And the structure of Cairns and Richards’s text accords strongly with the principles of cultural materialism as distilled from Raymond Williams, and detailed by Dollimore and Sinfield in their foreword to their co-edited Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985). Underwriting their cultural materialist methodology is their ‘belief ... that a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis offers the strongest challenge and has already contributed substantial work’ (1985: vii). The literary text is consequently denied a traditional transcendent position and is firmly grounded in the material histories of its production and receptions. Perhaps what is most significant about the cultural materialism of Writing Ireland is its cooption of an array of international theoretical resources together with its implication of cultural products and intellectuals in the machinations of political hegemony and counter-hegemony in the Irish colonial context. Offering historicised materialist analyses of Irish cultural artefacts, Cairns and Richards expose the discursive exercise of domination of British colonialism in Ireland, but also point to the generation of resistant discourses within Irish anticolonial movements. In these respects their project is consonant with the broader impulses of the cultural materialism of Dollimore and Sinfield, who add: Cultural materialism does not, like much established literary criticism, attempt to mystify its perspective as the natural, obvious or right interpretation of an allegedly given textual fact. On the contrary, it registers its commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class. (1985: viii) The emphases placed on discourse, and on the skewed power dynamics of social relations facilitated by the imposition of dominating discourses by Dollimore and Sinfield, are directly alluded to by Cairns and Richards in the opening passage of Writing Ireland. Setting the terms for their narrative, the authors assert that their study has its origins in ‘the reality of the historic relationship of Ireland with England; a relationship of the colonized and the colonizer ... our concern is with the ways in which the making and re-making of the identities of colonized and colonizer have been inflected by this relationship; a process which has taken place through discourse’ (1988: 1). Thus in these introductory remarks Cairns and Richards signal that their work is channelled



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through both Said and Foucault. They operate, then, under the assumption that colonial authority is necessarily exerted and perpetuated through the authorship of epistemic codes. As we shall discuss shortly, Said had already been enlisted into Irish studies at the Yeats Summer School in 1985 by Declan Kiberd, but in Writing Ireland Cairns and Richards undertake an extended Saidian survey, somewhat in the tradition of Orientalism. Their historical sweep ranges from Edmund Spenser to Thomas Davis, and includes Samuel Ferguson, Standish O’Grady, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce. It moves from Free State counter-Revival writers such as Frank O’Connor and Sean O’ Faolain to contemporaries including Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Seamus Deane, together with the projects of, and responses to, the Field Day Theatre Company. In each of these discrete discursive discussions there is a commitment to Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse, and the extent to which power is wielded through discursive media. Yet Cairns and Richards are not confined to Foucault, or Said; Writing Ireland exhibits the influence of neo-Marxist thought in the forms of Gramsci and Althusser, and their respective theorisations of hegemony/counter-hegemony and ideology. Indeed, later in their first chapter Cairns and Richards neatly demonstrate the aggregation of theoretical influence in their description of the colonial relationship: The process of describing the colonized and inscribing them in discourse as second-class citizens in comparison with colonizers commenced with the invocation of the judicial and military power of the State, but subsequently the colonizers attempted to convince the colonized themselves of their irremovable deficiencies and the consequent naturalness and the permanence of their subordination. [It was] The wish of the colonizer that should be willingly accepted rather than require constant recourse to coercion. (1988: 8) Hegemony, then, is inaugurated in the colonial context through processes of discursive, ideological management, which are targeted at obliterating the self-present identities of colonised peoples and the stealthy imposition of a sanctioned ‘otherness’. Equally, in this theoretical matrix we can also hear an echo of Fanon’s writings on the necessary liquidation of the colonised’s identity. While Said and Foucault are significant presences in Writing Ireland, Cairns and Richards seem to lean towards Gramsci in their historical readings of individual Irish intellectuals. As they consider a variety of Irish critical and creative efforts to produce differential versions of





coherent Irish national identities, they ‘stress the agency of writers and activists in making and shaping discourses with a view to influencing the subjectivity, and hence the political and aesthetic ideas, of others’ (McCarthy, 2007b: 314). Contrary to the all-determining Foucauldian diagnosis of power, Cairns and Richards locate their selection of Irish writers within the ‘living stream’ of political activism and revolution. Under this historical optic Irish critical and creative intellectuals are witnessed as actors within dynamic and fraught political contexts – and likewise their respective texts are viewed as products of these same material conditions. In fact, as an indicative instance of the presiding tone of Writing Ireland we might consider the reading of Heaney’s early poem ‘Digging’ provided by Cairns and Richards. Against the backdrop of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ during the 1970s and 1980s, contemporary Irish intellectuals were enjoined to re-engage with ideas such as Irish nationalism, and with its historical groundings and resonances. ‘History’, according to Cairns and Richards, ‘so frequently the means by which Irish intellectuals sought to erect exclusive definitions of national identity, is once more on the agenda as contemporary Irish writers – North and South – engage with a process of excavation’ (1988: 142). Heaney’s work is considered in these terms, and, in reading the opening simile of ‘Digging’ (‘snug as a gun’), Cairns and Richards conclude that ‘the act of writing is neither innocent nor divorced from the subject matter of violence which the poet brings to light’ (1988: 143). British colonialism in Ireland, Irish anticolonial nationalisms and, latterly, the late colonial crisis in Northern Ireland are figured as crises of authority. Evident, then, in Writing Ireland is a survey of the differential modes in which ‘authority’ strove to exert control through discursive hegemony, but equally the modalities through which counter-hegemonic discourses attempted to ‘re-write’, or ‘write back’ to those presiding hegemonic authorities. Despite the imprint of Foucault on Cairns and Richards’s work, it is more productive to view Writing Ireland as a legatee of Said’s anticolonial humanist activism, wherein, following Gramsci, agency is restored to the individual intellectual and counter-hegemonic intervention is possible. There is little disputing McCarthy’s recent assessment that ‘Writing Ireland is a very important book, one whose ambition and reach has still rarely been matched’ (2007b: 315). Yet what is equally true is that it is unfortunate that Cairns and Richards, either individually or collectively, have not built upon this formative work in subsequent years. The importation and application of a rich theoretical seam into Irish cultural history was a pioneering step, but regrettably that initial foray has



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not been exploited as fully as it might have been. Nevertheless, Writing Ireland entered Irish cultural and political histories into a broader ideational marketplace of postcolonial studies, and redressed the misconception that Irish writers, particularly those affiliated to the Irish Revival movements, were marooned outside the material realities of their historical contexts. It demonstrated how the activist intellectual retains a material political purchase to effect changes in national consciousness through critical and creative discourse. Ultimately, through a national distillation of Said, Fanon, Foucault, Gramsci and Althusser, Cairns and Richards display the discursive mechanics of the colonial ‘process of self-fashioning [that] required the continued presence of an “other” so that the maintenance of subtle points of differentiation from the colonizer would continue to reproduce, not only the subordination of the colonized, but the superordination of the colonizer’ (Cairns and Richards, 1988: 10).




Irish Postcolonial Criticism and the Utopian Impulse

Hope is not confidence. If it could not be disappointed, it would not be hope ... Thus, hope is critical and can be disappointed ... Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers, and it is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for possible.1

Introduction The idioms and the methodologies of ‘Utopia’ have always been explicit and implicit both in projects of colonial acquisition and expansion, and in the differential projects of anticolonial theory and practice. Yet there has never been an adequate commerce of ideas established between the respective contemporary fields of utopian studies and postcolonial studies. However, in a recent essay in Textual Practice the postcolonial scholar, Bill Ashcroft, attempted to bridge the theoretical hiatus between the two fields.2 In ‘Critical Utopias’ Ashcroft essentially provides a literary–critical mapping of the modalities through which the utopian has figured in the literary art of Anglophone colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial crucibles. Ashcroft’s summary utopian/postcolonial survey takes its theoretical impetus, naturally enough, from a conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno in 1964, in which Adorno adumbrates the repressed knowledge that each individual harbours of a possible Utopia – we know that a better possible world exists, but we are ideologically persuaded that the possible is actually the impossible (Bloch, 1989: 4). In addition to foundational thinkers such as Bloch and Adorno, Ashcroft also enlists other theorists of the utopian, including Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson. The survey is 48



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not confined to theoretical utopias, however, as Ashcroft subsequently traverses a variety of historical times and spaces in divining traces of literary utopian dynamism in colonial contexts. Invoked in this generous inventory are: Thomas More’s originary Utopia; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – the latter two, of course, are representative of the utopian colonial project, but are also read as texts that are capable of producing their own utopian counter-narratives of anticolonial resistance. In contemporary terms, Ashcroft straddles the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean, specifically: Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Edouard Glissant, Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Ashcroft’s intervention, then, is distinguished by its concentration on what are, putatively, canonical texts of postcolonial literary studies. And, while the species of utopia canvassed by Ashcroft is one that seeks to undermine the naturalised centrality of ‘History’ as discourse, there is an implicit assumption in such a parade of writers of a ‘postcolonial History’, or ‘postcolonial Tradition’ within its literary branch. Regardless of this initial point of contention, the virtue of Ashcroft’s essay is its dedication to the necessary relevance of utopian literary critical, literary–historical, and historiographical strategies to debates within postcolonial studies. Yet, as I have indicated, in this speculative initiative by Ashcroft these critical strategies seem to be predominantly confined to literary horizons and there is little engagement with neo-Marxist critiques within postcolonial studies itself. These features may be consequences of the fact that the range of utopian theorists referred to may be foundational, but it is not extensive. While the employment of Bloch is naturally instructive and a contemporary utopian critic such as Tom Moylan is summarily cited, there is no reference to seminal figures within the utopian field such as: Lyman Tower Sargent, Ruth Levitas, Darko Suvin, Lucy Sargisson, Krishan Kumar, Barbara Goodwin, Gregory Claeys, Raffaella Baccolini and Vincent Geoghegan. Finally, with respect to the postcolonial aspects of Ashcroft’s piece, the essay commits a familiar error of omission, one that seems to have been redressed in many publications on postcolonial studies but that does persist. The case of Ireland as either a utopian, postcolonial or utopian–postcolonial case study is neither addressed nor alluded to at any stage. Such an oversight is disappointing given Ireland’s protracted colonial history and its exemplary role as an early twentieth-century pioneer in anticolonial theory and practice. Furthermore, Ireland has a distinguished history of utopian writing, mythology and political philosophy, which would clearly enrich any discussion of the commonalities of the fields of utopian studies and





postcolonial studies. One of the purposes, then, of this chapter is to respond to Ashcroft’s provocative critical alignment of the utopian and the postcolonial, and to furnish necessary modifications and supplements to the argument developed therein.3 In attempting to negotiate the theoretical and political imbrications of utopian thought and recent interventions in Irish postcolonial studies, it is worth rehearsing some of the seminal definitional approximations of what might constitute the utopian. The great utopian scholar Ernst Bloch suggested that ‘Reality without real possibility is not complete, the world without future-laden properties does not deserve a glance’ (1986: 223); while more recently, in her book The Concept of Utopia, Ruth Levitas argues that ‘Utopia is about how we would live and what kind of world we would live in if we could do just that ... Utopian is then not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to be pursued’ (1990: 1). Even more explicitly, Fredric Jameson urges that the concept of utopia is integral to the imagination of ‘the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from the one in which we live’ (1971: 111). From each of these précis we can conclude that the active pursuit of social and political improvement must be buttressed by a genuine faith in its possibility. Utopian thought is too often dismissed as nothing more than a semiotic maze of postponement and/or a species of political impotence, but, as these assertions clarify, it is a necessary philosophical and ethical dynamic in the contemporary political and economic conjuncture. As other scholars of the utopic elucidate, the utopian impulse is not blinded by a rigid faith in the pursuit of a perfect world, but is nourished by a commitment to a better world. The imagination of a better future is very much bound up with the reappropriation of the past and the unearthing of alternative versions of historical narratives. Referring back to Bloch, David Kaufmann details the qualities of just such a utopian vista: In fact, Bloch’s form of ideological redemption, the salvation of the excessive moment of the illusion from the limiting social relations it legitimates and criticizes at the same time, is designed precisely to make tradition a quarry of latent possibility once it has undergone the stringencies of dialectical analysis. (1997: 40)

Ireland and the need for Utopia In his polemical book, The End of Utopia, the American historian Russell Jacoby suggests that the utopian ideals that once nourished intellectual



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dissent and activated movements for radical social change have been largely abandoned in a world that is content to doze in a state of blissful consensus and comfortable political apathy. In this book Jacoby provides a general assault on the moribund nature of intellectual engagement with the presiding politico-economic conjuncture, particularly that pursued by those resident in the Western academy. Elsewhere, Jacoby has specifically chastened those who operate under the elastic rubric of postcolonial studies; who would of course be implicated in the more lateral assault mentioned earlier. In his estimation, the parameters of contemporary critical commentary have been foreshortened and there is no desire to overhaul radically the mechanisms of exclusion and inequality that are the trademark of the current world economic system: all of which, according to Jacoby, is an abdication of the utopian responsibilities and possibilities of intellectual labour. As a series of intellectual projects that trades on its antagonistic relations to the homogenising dynamics of the historical and contemporary global capitalist system, postcolonial studies is emphatically implicated in Jacoby’s polemic. As Jacoby argues: ‘The dearth of economic and sociological analyses, the inflation of cultural approaches, the assumption that cultures fundamentally diverge, the failure or inability to consider the forces of assimilation ... and the lack of any political vision or alternative’ (1999: 55–6) are depressingly familiar features of contemporary intellectual debate. Without rigorous conceptual clarity an economy of linguistic opacity has stepped in to fill the gap – an economy motored by the decentring modes of post-structuralist theories. And, while the instability and elusiveness championed and practised by ‘theoretical’ interventions can be adjudged as legitimate strategies of subversion in culturalist challenges to representational domination or elision, for Jacoby intellectual vacuity is the net result. In his conclusion such tactical ambiguity does not embody any sense of subversion, but is characteristic of ‘the timid conclusions, chalky language and toothless concepts’ (Jacoby, 1999: 60) of culturalist criticism. In the end, there is merely a cosmetic attempt to broaden the constituencies of participation and the terms of access to hierarchical wealth; an insidious domestication of dissent. Such a prospect constitutes a dereliction of a utopian intellectual vocation and stands as an aborted imaginative impulse. The content and tenor of Jacoby’s argument seem apposite to recent historical and theoretical appraisals of Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial histories, as well as to assessments of Irish social and economic histories since the ‘immaculate conception’ of the Celtic Tiger economy, and its attendant boons and burdens. As Peadar Kirby has argued





in his essay ‘Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger’, the phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger has been readily seized as an object ripe for narration; for strategic emplotment within certain legitimate hermeneutic codes. Kirby’s metahistorical interrogation of the Celtic Tiger’s pedigree highlights the extent to which this period in recent Irish social and economic history has been seized for narrative justification. The economic vigour that has been, and remains to a lesser degree, has unquestionably brought unprecedented fiscal wealth to many social constituencies to which it would have been heretofore unknown. But, as Kirby concludes, the same wave of economic buoyancy has served to exacerbate the gap between those with relative wealth and those in relative poverty. While the financial largesse of the Celtic Tiger period is often, crudely, popularly perceived as a utopian arrival – an affirmation of the progressive tenets of liberal modernisation that were invested in by successive Irish administrations since the 1960s – as Kirby suggests, these affective pleasures of desire and satisfaction are confined to sections of Irish society, while a whole raft of the population remains confined to states of anxiety and frustration. In a sense the utopian impulse belongs to the latter and has merely mutated into a hollowed-out repetition of the eternal present in the former. The Celtic Tiger has nourished a false convergent genus of desire – which is, in its truly utopian guise, a heteronymous and quite specific mode of wish fulfilment. The present has been eroticised as the apotheosis of historical progress; there is no appetite for alternatives under such dispensations, because the necessary faculties of utopian desire are easily jettisoned. Kirby’s critique, then, belongs to a Blochian tradition of utopian thought, which asserts the existence of the utopian within despair – a longing that stretches out of the present towards an unseen, imagined future. A future that, as my discussion of the work of several of the leading Irish postcolonial critics urges, is significantly moulded by the energies of the past, or, as Raffaella Baccolini suggests in a Benjaminian reading of the relationship between the past and the present, is itself reminiscent of that detailed in much Irish postcolonial writing: The utopian value of memory rests in nurturing a culture of memory and sustaining a theory of remembrance. These actions, therefore, become important elements of a political, utopian praxis of change, action, and empowerment: indeed, our reconstructions of the past shape our present and future. Memory, then, to be of use to Utopia, needs to dissociate itself from its traditional link to the metaphor of storage and identify itself as a process. As Utopia is a process, so



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Kirby specifically objects to Rory O’Donnell’s narration of the history of the Celtic Tiger; he rejects the manner in which such narrative manoeuvring becomes part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely the celebration of the continued success of Irish modernisation.4 In many ways Kirby’s critique is informed by the theoretical scepticism that is characteristic of many interventions within postcolonial studies. The ‘image’ of Celtic Tiger Ireland and its representation approaches the condition of a ‘naturalised’ system of semiotics – it is a brand, a product, a series of events that must be marshalled (narrated) in order to project and to protect a commodity. In his concern with how the Celtic Tiger is portrayed as the legacy of, and the ultimate testimony to, Ireland’s subscription to capitalist modernisation, Kirby’s work is allied to some of the most cogent critiques of the limitations of such a socio-economic trajectory. While Kirby’s essay primarily focuses upon the narrative schematisation of the Celtic Tiger period in Irish history, it is equally a version of the literary–critical methodologies that have been brought to bear on the histories of Irish modernisation under the auspices of postcolonial studies. Not only does Kirby reference Luke Gibbons and Declan Kiberd, but he skilfully exercises their differential postcolonial readings of Irish culture to perform a convincing counter-argument to that canvassed by those commentators on Irish society who adhere to the modalities and the accruals of modernisation. This cabal of commentators, then, foregrounds ‘the achievements of the last decade ... [while] the “dark side” of contemporary social life in the twenty-six counties has been consistently concealed’ (Coulter, 2003: 18). As Colin Coulter concludes: In striving to advance a systematically distorted vision of the era of the Celtic tiger, mainstream commentators have conspired to conceal and defend the interest of that small body of individuals who have been the principal beneficiaries of the boom years. The orthodox reading of the turn that the Irish Republic has taken over the last generation should be regarded, therefore, as not merely intellectually feeble but politically reactionary as well. (2003: 18) Under the aegis of this internally differentiated constituency, often referenced as revisionist, the ‘past’ is treated with a level of suspicion – it is ruthlessly narrated as contributive to, or as inhibitive of, the momentum of Irish modernisation. Similarly, the social and cultural institutions



memory needs to be perceived as a process, not fixed or reachable, but in progress. (2007: 172)


that are adjudged to have embodied outmoded or discredited social, cultural or political beliefs are subjected to unforgiving opprobrium in dismissive historical representations. Irish history, in this world view, has been diachronically moving towards such a potential economic miracle under the watchful eye of the politico-economic forces of liberal capitalist modernisation. Equally, the economic uniformity, cultural convergence and social fragmentation that these vectors of social progress entail are necessary agents of the general prosperity that prevails. Kirby’s anxiety is that the economic success that Ireland feasted upon for a decade bleaches the nation of any impulse towards a coherent sense of identity. With the historiographical and critical assaults on erstwhile social institutions, such as religion and nationalism as two major examples, now almost complete, and their relative banishment to nostalgia or historical exile, economic success now becomes the index of personal belonging and national identity. As a consequence any resources, or will, towards egalitarian social transformation in Ireland become very difficult to sustain and in many ways are bribed out of existence. The present conjuncture in Ireland evidences little or no will to equalise society; there is little motivation to reimagine in any lateral political or cultural sense, as it is far easier to luxuriate in the transient benefits of economic wealth. Kirby’s conclusion suggests that Ireland needs a transfusion of utopian critique if it is to be lulled out of this consumerist concussion: The resituating of the state in this era of neo-liberalism so that it becomes subservient to market forces fatally undermines its ability to embody a project of social transformation. This shift is clearly evident in the Irish case as the state is increasingly seen to serve the needs of an economic elite while neglecting the growing inequality that is undermining the cohesion of society. The realities of power in this society are ever more at odds with the meaning it promotes. (2002: 35) From a postcolonial perspective, then, how do such utopian ideas and ideals cohere with the variegated historical, literary and theoretical projects of its field? Initially, then, the Marxist heritage of postcolonial studies; the field’s concentration on historical and contemporary systematic oppression and disenfranchisement; and the discursive and historiographical re-representation and retrieval of what are often termed ‘subaltern’ constituencies and cultural practices chime with the ethical and material spirit of utopian thought. In the Irish case, Joe Cleary



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argues that the accumulated projects of postcolonial studies represent a forceful critique of theories of modernisation, which, he argues, are at root latter-day incarnations of the rapacity of imperialism and its own battery of legitimating narrative codes.5 Cleary’s own work is deeply influenced by Jameson and offers pessimistic readings of the social and cultural implications of Ireland’s uncritical embrace of a form of capitalist modernisation and itself intersects with both the political spirit, and many of the arguments, dealt with below in my extended discussion of the utopian impulses of Irish postcolonial studies.

Ireland and Utopia In his introduction to the recently published special Irish number of Utopian Studies, Tom Moylan, the editor, alludes to the often underappreciated fact that ‘individual scholars have written about utopian aspects of Irish culture’ (2007a: 295). Moylan’s point here explicitly refers to critics who have divined historical and literary–historical traces of a utopian impulse within Irish culture. Enumerated on Moylan’s Irish utopian roll-call are critics such as Colin Graham, Luke Gibbons, Declan Kiberd, Carmen Kuhling, Ralph Pordzik, and Michael Griffin. While pressures of space do not permit Moylan to elaborate on the specifics of each of these scholars, it is sufficient that a well-established utopianist such as Moylan acknowledges the utopian motives of some of the most progressive critical thinkers and practitioners in contemporary Irish studies. In addition, it is noteworthy that the majority of Moylan’s named critics have been instrumental in both the formative stages and the later, metacritical critique of Irish postcolonial studies. In particular, Moylan avers that Graham’s theorisation of ‘Ireland’ as a semiotically elusive designation in his book Deconstructing Ireland provides a vital interrogation of the critical history of Irish utopian writing. He endorses Graham’s critique of ‘the meanings of “Ireland” and the uses to which it has been put’ (2007a: 296). In accenting the conceptual slipperiness of ‘Ireland as sign’, Moylan’s essay references the historical utopian figurations of Ireland as an alluring, summoning idyll on the horizon of the European mainland. He further canvasses Graham’s theoretical methodology in commending the manner in which: he [Graham] interrogates the tensions and differences between apparently stable ‘realities’ of Ireland and its ‘other’ possibilities. In this perspective, his recognition of the contested meanings of ‘Ireland’ and its anticipatory possibilities points toward a way of understanding




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Graham’s intervention, then, is a theoretically sophisticated and historically inclusive catalogue of a range of Irish utopian efflorescences, spanning visual culture; literary and cultural criticism; and varieties of the Irish nationalist imaginary. Informed by postcolonial theory, as well as the high theory of post-structuralism and critical theory, Deconstructing Ireland represents the most sustained metacritical engagement with the tropes of twentieth-century Irish utopian thought and practice to date. In terms of its metacritical methodology, Graham’s work is a self-reflexive commentary on the vocabularies and modalities that have been mobilised in ‘constructing’ notions and versions of ‘Irishness’. And, while it underlines the limits of many of these projects, it nonetheless recognises the durability of utopian thought within Irish culture and politics. In this sense, what follows extends Graham’s metacritical survey of Irish utopianism, but focuses in more depth on how such utopian energies have been, and continue to be, active within Irish postcolonial studies. While many historians, literary critics, economists and sociologists in Ireland have, often legitimately, raised objections to the political temper, cultural methodologies, or historiographical procedures of Irish postcolonial studies, the utopian roots and geist of this suite of theoretical and historiographical resources has never been fully explored. Moylan’s ‘Introduction’, then, is both salutary, and overdue, in its diagnosis of the utopian spirit of many of the interventions within Irish postcolonial studies. Indeed, to illustrate further the increasing timeliness of ideational exchange between the fields of utopian studies and postcolonial studies within an Irish context, elsewhere Moylan consciously invokes a number of recent publications within the field of Irish studies, which bear the theoretical watermark of postcolonial critique. Detailing the agenda of The Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick, of which he is director, in 2006 Moylan states: Our project aims to stimulate research in all areas of Irish culture. And, as we discover the utopian nature of each of our research objects, we will also seek to understand the role that social dreaming has played throughout Irish history, so that we can see more clearly how the utopian, as opposed to the instrumental, process of ‘re-imagining’ or ‘reinventing’ Ireland (to borrow from two recent



how utopian imaginaries have, and can, work in Irish history to break open to new meanings, new concrete possibilities. (2007a: 296)


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As we shall discuss below, Moylan’s intentions are vital elements of much recent postcolonial writing about Ireland; the utopian impulse is both divined in previous moments of Irish history and deemed necessary to confrontations with the contemporary.

Ireland, Empire and Enlightenment In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon outlines the underlying violence that marks the colonial encounter and that similarly structures the relationship between the settler–coloniser and the native– colonised. He writes: Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. (1967: 28) The combined projects of Irish postcolonial studies, then, are concerned with explicating that very process through which an Irish colonial ‘native’ was brought into existence; in other words, these heteronymous critical projects interrogate the political, cultural and economic discourses through which imperial modernity imposed itself on Ireland, and how it was forced to engage with, and in many cases obliterate, indigenous forms of ‘counter-modernity’. Fanon’s violence, enacted in this extract through military weaponry, is tracked within Irish postcolonial studies by scholars who strive to unearth, and to redeem, moments and patterns of Irish ‘radical memory’, alternative modernity and counter-modern ‘tradition’. The external imposition of imperial modernity in Ireland was a laterally traumatic experience, under which the cultural resources of the indigenous population were sundered or surrendered under the demands of a coercive colonial social programme. The cultural undergirding of Irish culture, then, was consigned to history as a progressive and unrelenting teleological historical schema was grafted onto Irish society. The synchronicity of modernisation and imperialism is a primary concern of many Irish



titles) has brought us to where we are today and how it might affect where we might be going. (2006: 16)


postcolonial critics and historians. The historical process of modernisation is not homogenous, but it does strive for homogeneity. Yet, throughout the history of economic and political modernisation, there is always evidence of recalcitrance to its hegemony. Modernisation is not an inert state but an ongoing historical process that strives to achieve a sense of political and economic conformity. It is easy, then, to identify its shared interests with imperialism, which is underwritten by a similar accumulative desire. Indeed, Saree Makdisi locates an explicit link between modernisation and imperialism at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, arguably the formative period of modern ‘high’ British imperialism. In Makdisi’s view: Modernization can in this sense be understood as the purest form of imperialism; this conviction is based on the fact that modernization occurs at once in large-scale sweeps and bursts, but also in terms of the micrological, the quotidian; at once in the historic sense of reorientation towards and through the structures of Braudelian world-time and Millian world-history, and in the minute changes in daily life brought about by its intense and totalitarian ‘abstraction,’ for instance in the recomposition of daily life in terms of abstract clock-time ... In effect, the project of modernization begins at the very moment a new territory is defined as pre-modern. (1998: 182) One of the dominant strains of Irish postcolonial thought in contemporary Irish criticism is concerned with exposing the ways in which imperial modernity, itself only one route out of Enlightenment thought, was made manifest in Ireland in the nineteenth century, and in teasing out the many ways in which a distillation of modernisation theory realised, and retained, its dominance in both the political and cultural management of Irish society, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is significant that Irish postcolonial studies has striven not only to reject a universal type of Enlightenment, granted it does bear ferocious critical ire for its Scottish variant, but has eagerly sought out traces of alternative Enlightenment thinking, which evidences an aggregation of indigenous circumstances and international Republican principles. The multicultural solidarity divined in the cultural politics of these late eighteenth-century projects has also been mapped onto the political and cultural terrain of twentieth-century Irish society, in which modernisation theory and its advocates are deemed to have hitched their wagon to a similarly universalising and exclusionary



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social programme as that promulgated in the most limited forms of Enlightenment thought. The renewed Irish interest in critiquing dominant strands of Enlightenment thought, most vehemently its Scottish declension, and in co-opting alternative versions of Enlightenment to postcolonial projects, has been noted by the eighteenth-century scholar David Denby. Denby’s essay ‘Ireland, Modernization and the Enlightenment Debate’ engages with these very matters, and focuses on an important volume of essays co-edited by Gibbons, Kirby and Michael Cronin: Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. The editorial consensus of this latter publication rejects the passive acceptance of liberal universal principles in Irish society, and adheres to a breed of cosmopolitan egalitarianism. Denby usefully sets out the terms of the so-called ‘Enlightenment debate’, which is no longer confined to the precincts of moral and political philosophy but has been transported to the sites of postcolonial debate. It is worth quoting Denby at length in order to grasp the basic concerns of this debate and then to translate its relevance to current conversations in Irish cultural criticism. He begins: ‘The term “Enlightenment” can be said to operate as a token, a coded signifier, and, simplifying only a little, as something which calls upon us to take sides’. Facing off against each other in this ideological confrontation are those who support the underlying tenets of Enlightenment thought: ‘the liberals and probably the Marxists’; and those constituencies that are opposed: ‘the neo-Aristotelians, some of the communitarians and the ecologists, the postmoderns’ (Denby, 2004: 29). Underlying these juxtaposing ideological positions are contrary readings of the universalist rhetoric of the Enlightenment, and again this is usefully glossed by Denby: What in one idiom can be read as universal human rights, democratic sovereignty, the defence of the people against the privileged few, a rational, scientific and secularizing approach to the planning of modern societies, and a belief that human beings can effect progress through such planning, can be rewritten in another language as an exploitative human domination over nature, an atomistic definition of the human individual which cuts people off from tradition and community. Perhaps most prevalent has been the accusation of ethnocentricity and global domination: the ‘Enlightenment project’ has been so confident in the universality of its description of the human condition that it has had no compunction about exporting




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The validity of postcolonial critical approaches has been their consistent antagonistic stance against such cultural and political uniformity; postcolonial studies, including its literary, historical and theoretical facets, impresses the agency of the local and the marginal both in spatial–geopolitical terms and in the temporal sense of historical, archival and non-archival recovery. As Gibbons, Kevin Whelan, and David Lloyd demonstrate, there are indigenous forms of modernity or instances of radical tradition that offer affective, and effective, affronts to the self-validating logic of narrow versions of Enlightenment thought. Nevertheless, as Denby argues subsequently, it is self- defeating to merely reject the philosophical heritage of the late eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. Recourse to a purely relativist, postmodern system of ethics, aesthetics or historiography is equally narrow in its prodigious playfulness. And in this criticism Denby largely echoes the postcolonial retrieval of valuable elements of Enlightenment thought in Irish studies. As will become clear, there are discernible affinities between Denby’s conclusions and the most progressive contributions to Ireland’s postcolonial Enlightenment debate. Specifically, Denby suggests that ‘in a context where historical and contemporary issues have become so explicitly entwined, historical writing must enable a dialogue between past and present, in which, among other things, the coherence and potentialities of the past, unclear to those who lived at the time, become clear to us with the benefit of hindsight’ (2004: 31). It is this school of postcolonial thought within Irish studies that I intend to address, an affiliated grouping that has disinterred ‘elements of Enlightenment history which have been obscured or insufficiently emphasized’ and has cast them ‘back into full view as part of the contemporary dialogue’ (Denby, 2004: 31). The impacts of Enlightenment thought and those of imperially driven processes of modernisation on Ireland have been key concerns for many Irish postcolonial critics; this has primarily centred around figures such as Deane, Gibbons and Whelan, each of whom has looked to illustrate the ways in which Irish culture and society were adjudicated to be deviant from the dominant strains of ‘rationality’ and, latterly, ‘sociability’ characteristic of enlightened social collectives. These critics are by no means uniform in their historical and philosophical convictions and/or sources, but each does look to exemplary figures in late eighteenth-century Irish society for corrective guidance in their



that model around the world, through colonization and now in the form of economic and cultural globalization. (2004: 29–30)

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respective postcolonial projects. Deane, in particular and characteristically, was at the vanguard of the philosophical resuscitation of the work of Edmund Burke, having completed his doctoral work on Burke at Cambridge in the late 1960s and subsequently employed Burke as a critical compass in much of his subsequent literary–historical output. Equally, and as Conor McCarthy has cursorily demonstrated, Deane, and Irish postcolonial studies at large, owe a debt to the philosophical work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.6 The critical pessimism of Adorno can be traced in Deane’s dismissive view of imperial modernity as it impacted on Irish colonial society; the rational functionalism and the universalising dogma of individual sociability based on cultural similarity are primary among these critical targets. The watermarks of Burke’s work are also evident in Gibbons’s most recent work on postcolonial ethics and it is to Gibbons’s work that I want initially to draw attention. Gibbons has taken Deane’s lead and recuperated a version of Burke that is critical of the excesses of British imperialism, a Burke that offers philosophical guidance in the formulation of an egalitarian postcolonial moral economy based on differential solidarity. While Gibbons’s major publication on Burke is a relatively recent venture, the spirit of postcolonial solidarity has been a consistent feature of his work for many years.7 But Gibbons does not confine his philosophical mining of the late eighteenth century to the work of Burke; he also locates a resistant egalitarian cultural politics in the political, non-confessional agenda of the Republican United Irish movement. The United Irishmen represent a strand of what Gibbons has termed ‘a postcolonial Enlightenment’; an Enlightenment that is supportive of indigenous cultures, one that respects the cultural currency of so-called ‘traditional’ or ‘obsolescent’ societies. Gibbons views the movement as a viable historical instance and source of cross-cultural solidarity based on civic, non-confessional Republican principles. The political and cultural accommodation offered by the United Irishmen is one that embraces the idealistic notion of an accessible civic public sphere. Combining an effective critique of Scottish Enlightenment thought with a utopian and postcolonial investment in the cultural politics and ethics of the United Irishmen’s project, he states: New concepts of history, and related stages theories of development were among the most important contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to Western intellectual culture. What is not often realised, however, is that in opposing progress to primitivism, and




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By way of contrast to such a prescriptive, stadial calibration of histories, cultures, and creeds, Gibbons posits the egalitarian impulses of the United Irishmen who ‘sought to embrace this despised social order, including it within their democratic vision of a new Ireland rather than relegating it to the fate of “doomed peoples” ’ (2003a: 83). There are, then, overt utopian dynamics behind the failed but enduring principles of United Irish egalitarian democratic principles, in Gibbons’s estimation, and it is plausible that such historical precedence can transfuse the convergent politics of contemporary Ireland. For Gibbons the United Irish programme participates in the contemporary postcolonial interrogation of ‘the limits of the Enlightenment’ (2003a: 83). As he concludes: ‘Part of the postcolonial (or postmodern) critique of the Enlightenment has been precisely its condescension, if not racist hostility, towards “native” cultures: by gesturing towards new versions of cultural interaction and religious tolerance, the United Irishmen may be seen as pre-empting this critique but without rejecting the powerful emancipatory vision of the Enlightenment in the process’ (2003a: 83). In his major study of Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime, Gibbons attempts to establish a philosophical framework through which postcolonial solidarity or cross-colonial sympathy can blossom outside the strict moral parameters of mainstream enlightened ‘modern’ philosophy. Traversing a range of political philosophy, visual aesthetics and Scottish Enlightenment political economy, Gibbons concludes that Burke’s writings on the sublime in his Enquiry, coupled with the dual effect of his personal linkage to the native Catholic population in Ireland and Warren Hastings’s campaign of bloody imperial rule in India, contribute to Burke’s modification of standard Enlightenment beliefs and is a tangible endorsement of an anti-imperial position. Burke’s work, for Gibbons, is not simply a crude rejection of the founding structures of this discourse, but constitutes a ‘radical extension of Enlightenment thinking’ (2003b: 116). Gibbons’s advancement of Burke as an exemplar of this brand of alternative Enlightenment has international resonances in the work of Sankar Muthu, whose book Enlightenment Against Empire charts equivalent undervalued trajectories in late eighteenth-century political philosophy



civility to barbarism, the Scottish intelligentsia were concerned to dispel the threat not only of a distant, exotic ‘other’, but also the savage on their native shore, in the form of Gaelic, Catholic culture. (2003a: 83)


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if a central reason to study the history of political thought is to gain the perspective of another set of assumptions and arguments that are shaped by different historical sensibilities and directed toward distinct political phenomena, and thus to defamiliarize our otherwise complacent political and ethical beliefs and priorities, then the study of Enlightenment anti-imperialism offers productive opportunities for such a task. (2003: 283) Such directions have traditionally given way in accounts (both positive and negative) of the Enlightenment to more limited versions. Muthu’s reclamation of Diderot, Kant and Herder is based on his conviction that their legacies as figureheads of the Enlightenment have been ill-served by its widespread condemnation as a philosophical resource for a universal morality which legitimated vile colonial expropriation, genocide and disenfranchisement. In some ways, Gibbons strikes an equal blow for Burke in his work, voicing a more nuanced version of Burke’s work, one that is amenable to radical historiographical and ethical projects under the rubric of a liberatory postcolonial studies. The radical nature of Gibbons’s Burke is evident in Gibbons’s assertion that Burke’s recalibration of the mainstream Enlightenment ‘sought to arouse our sympathies not just for (corporal) violations of our human nature ... but also for fundamental breaches of cultural integrity which address questions of cultural difference, and which thus challenge the parochial emphasis on “sameness” which often passes for cosmopolitanism’ (2003b: 116). The homogenising impulses of modernity, as diagnosed within postcolonial studies, therefore, can take instruction from Burke’s broadly inclusive sympathetic sublime ‘which crosses cultural boundaries’, and through which ‘members of other cultures can be induced to feel a sense of moral outrage with an intensity not unlike members of the aggrieved society themselves’ (Gibbons, 2003b: 116). Under the civilisational imaginary of the Scottish Enlightenment there was little ‘sympathy’ for cultural ‘others’; similarity and a communion of social standards were the accepted universal norm. Such a philosophical school demanded a renunciation of ‘local’ tradition and an amelioration or sundering of anachronistic social systems. The arrow of history was firmly pointed towards a preordained future and those communities that failed to keep step, or were incapable of keeping step, with its progress were either to be consigned to the oblivion of the past,



and who concludes his book with resolutely postcolonial and utopian sentiments by arguing that:


or abstracted into the consolatory topographies of romantic nostalgia. Cultural difference, then, was not to be countenanced and sympathetic feeling, or moral outrage, was not transferable across these social borders. Yet, as Gibbons amply outlines, Burke’s newly hewn programme of anti-imperial social justice and moral solidarity provides a corrective to such exclusionary cultural politics. The sufferings of oppressed others, who reside in cognate contexts of colonial occupation, is central to this Burkean idea; the severity of suffering can be felt across oceans and continents and is a potential germ of anticolonial resistance. As Gibbons concludes, alluding to the cross-continental reach of Burke’s anti-imperial vision: The logic of Burke’s position is in fact to extend the ethical basis of the Enlightenment, bringing the imaginative reach of sympathy to regions excluded from mainstream Enlightenment thought. For Burke, this involved a profound, troubled engagement with the plight of colonized peoples whether in Ireland, India, or America, an extension of cross-cultural solidarity to those cultures that were doomed, according to Enlightenment theories of progress, to the dustbin of history. (2003b: 113) Gibbons’s refraction of Burke’s writings and political speeches in terms of early anticolonial discourse were anticipated, to a degree, in Makdisi’s pioneering study of British Romanticism and empire in his 1998 book Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Makdisi presents a powerfully argued critique of British imperialism, proposing that the counter-rational aesthetic impulses of Romanticism embodied signal affronts to the relentless momentum of imperial modernity. Indeed, for our present purposes, it is apposite that Makdisi focuses on Burke’s contradictory relationship to the machinations, and logic, of Britain’s imperial mission. Makdisi’s reading of Burke’s most famous intervention in the administration of British India, the trial of Warren Hastings, is figured in terms of a conjunction between Burke’s political philosophy, his aesthetic writings and his ethics. For Makdisi, Burke’s vigorous declamations of Hastings’s administration of British holdings in India are wedded to his conceptualisation of the sublime, a point also raised in his study by Gibbons. Makdisi argues that Burke’s emphatic ‘differentiation’ of India as a physical, cultural and moral ‘Other’ is best understood in terms of the subcontinent’s sublimity; in other words, ‘Burke’s respect for the cultural difference of India is inextricably caught up with his fear of India’ (1998: 106).



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According to this argument, in Burke’s view Hastings’s great crime was not to be part of an exploitative imperial mission, but simply that his methods of administering that mission in India were excessive in their violence. There is no doubt, in Makdisi’s reading of Burke, that the necessity for the imperial link was ever questioned by Burke; the Indian population is incapable of self-governance and consequently requires political and moral tutelage under the benevolent imperial order. The core of Makdisi’s argument, then, is that Burke’s critiques of British imperialism were founded on his disapproval of how the empire was governed and never on the issue of whether imperial expansion was a morally objectionable matter in and of itself. While Burke was sensitive to the existence of pronounced differences in the moral and cultural patterns of British and Indian societies and insisted upon the fact that these specificities should be respected, there is a sense in Makdisi’s case that the superiority of British civility is always assumed. Nested within Burke’s writings on British imperialism, then, there is a discernible trace of generosity towards the colonial ‘other’. While the colonial mission is taken for granted, Burke does betray a radical sympathetic urge. It is at this point that we can divine some convergence between Makdisi and Gibbons, and their respective versions of the ‘colonial Burke’. Yet Gibbons is insistent in his espousal of Burke as a precursor of contemporary postcolonial ethics, while Makdisi concludes that Burke’s attitude to Britain’s oppressed colonial subjects was one that was marked by an abiding contradiction. He concludes: Burke’s impassioned ... speeches on India are characterized by an underlying tension between, on the one hand, his universalistic claims about the trans-cultural and univocal ‘nature’ (and hence ‘rights’) of humankind; and, on the other, his repeated invocation of a version of polygenesis as well as the contemporaneous scientific ... concepts of preformationism and anti-mutationism, according to which ‘improvement’ in level and status, whether for species, for individuals, for societies, or for classes, is impossible. (Makdisi, 1998: 103) Through this comparative positioning of Gibbons’s and Makdisi’s respective versions of Burke’s ethics, politics and aesthetics, we can conclude that Gibbons’s utopian configuration of a ‘postcolonial’ Burke does not go uncontested. But, equally, it demonstrates the necessity of bringing Irish postcolonial and Irish utopian readings into established, and often dominant, interpretations of histories of colonialism





and utopianism; processes which can allow for productive and enabling mutual trade and/or tension. It is apparent that Gibbons’s work quarries, one might suggest, the ‘unapproved roads’ of Enlightenment thinking, which furnishes Irish postcolonial studies with an alternative ethical coda. For instance, in telescoping the United Irish accommodation of a radical subaltern and native cultural sphere within its international republican economy, Gibbons asserts the crucial dialogic relation between the local and the global in the ethical discourse of postcolonial studies. He notes: In this juxtaposition of proximity and distance, familiarity and estrangement, it is possible to discern a version of the ‘sympathetic sublime’ that possesses the global reach of universalist theories of human rights, but without the calculus of abstraction, or the insensitivity to time and place, that characterised progress and universal reason in much mainstream Enlightenment thought. (2003b: 13) In this context, Gibbons’s long-term project is subtended by a desire to inaugurate an effective and non-coercive critical ethics. This is not a universalist postcolonial ethics, but is more consonant with ‘Burke’s sympathetic sublime ... [which involves] recasting what Benjamin has called “the tradition of the oppressed” in terms of cross-cultural solidarity’ (2003c: 74). And this is apparent in earlier interventions, which, less thoroughly engaged with the Enlightenment and its unrealised possibilities in any explicit way, are replete with the egalitarian ethics and cross-cultural dialogism that are apparent in Gibbons’s utopian postcolonial criticism thus far. In his 1996 essay ‘Unapproved Roads: Ireland and Postcolonial Identity’, Gibbons offers a tentative, and potentially subversive, theoretical alternative to the normative ‘vertical mobility from periphery to center’ (1996: 180). Postcolonial theory has undeniably ‘travelled’, usually from a Western-sanctioned centre to peripheral contexts. By invoking the Distant Relations art exhibition,8 Gibbons gestures to the possibility of ‘lateral mobility’. Through this cultural exchange, he identifies the germ for a cross-periphery solidarity, in which postcolonial cultures can interact in mutually edifying cultural exchanges. Indeed, the pursuit of such ‘unapproved roads’ can be extended not just to include artistic exchange, but equally to encompass the formulation of radical theoretical innovation (Gibbons, 1996: 180). This earlier essay merely alludes to the prospect of ‘lateral mobility’ without actually developing a concerted or workable method, or language. However, the more



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recent ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’ goes some way towards crystallising a definite theoretical trajectory for such a transgeographical project. Gibbons prefaces his argument with a sustained critique of the modernising objectives of Irish revisionist historiography. He cites Heribert Adam, who notes, ‘in their eagerness to prevent the gruesome past from haunting the future, well-meaning social engineers seek to create “a common history” between hostile groups’ (2000: 95). Irish postcolonial criticism has developed amid much invective from both revisionist literary critics and historians, who as we shall see below, have divined a peculiar textual bias operative in postcolonial readings of Irish history and politics. Yet despite such reproaches ‘the postcolonial turn in Irish criticism ... represents an attempt to extend the horizons of the local to distant and often very different cultures, beyond the comforting cosmopolitanism of the West’ (Gibbons, 2002: 104). Gibbons diagnoses the Irish colonial experience as that of acute trauma, echoing both Geraldine Moane9 and David Lloyd, and he encourages a constructive transgeographical engagement with memory and tradition as a means of forging ‘new solidarities in the present’ (2002: 105). These ‘new solidarities’ extend from his previous comments on the exigency for laterally mobile postcolonial criticism. Ireland’s ‘Third World memory’ (Gibbons, 1998: 27) should therefore operate within a polyvocal discourse of egalitarian ‘historically grounded cosmopolitanism’ (2002: 100). Indeed, Gibbons is not alone in canvassing such a discursive trajectory; Florencia E. Mallon, a historian of Latin America, forwards the idea: of non-hierarchical cross-regional dialogue, where neither of the two cases is taken as the paradigm against which the other is pronounced inadequate ... [such a dialogue] is not the application of a concept, part and parcel, without contextualization, to another area. Nor can it be framed in the assumption that one side of the exchange has little to learn from the other. (1994: 1493) In calling for such ‘non-hierarchical cross-regional dialogue’, Mallon suggests a form of horizontal egalitarianism; a discourse that enlightens and processes experiences of mutually endured marginalisation. This critical framework is emphatically not a matter of prospecting for crossborder correspondences or facile similarities, but allows the contextual specifics of previously colonised societies to work upon and through a store of politico-cultural theorisation. It is through stimulating and nourishing such ‘unapproved’ conversation and by learning from the





differential aggregates of this dialectic that postcolonial theory might evolve into a bona fide political praxis. Gibbons’s conception of postcolonial theory further overlaps with Mallon’s discursive visualisation in the sense that he presses for a contextually sensitive form of critique. There is not, and cannot be, a universal template of postcolonial analysis; its provenance and its applications are simply too diffuse for such programmatic aspirations. Lateral mobility or new solidarities in the present do not constitute facile circuits of elegiac equivalence; rather, they signal economies of moral indignation. Cross-periphery dialogue is not the ‘talking cure’ of puerile analogy wherein a correspondence on past oppression inures postcolonial societies to the exigencies of the present; the past should be neither a burden nor a shared space of alleviated pain. Notwithstanding, the past or communal memories retain a contemporary and future valence. Drawing on a range of historical, political and philosophical sources, Gibbons underscores the merit of such cross-cultural solidarity: Nor is this account of cultural diversity limited by the solipsism of localism or relativism which led certain strands in romanticism to construe authenticity as isolation, a withdrawal from the outside world. As if infused by the radical sensibility of Burke’s sympathetic sublime, Sampson and Russell highlight the predicament of one culture by bringing it into contact with another. (2003b: 228–9) By drawing attention to the validity of ‘lateral mobility’ or as Mallon terms it ‘non-hierarchical dialogue’, Gibbons not only alerts us to the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange but also initiates an ethical drama.10 Just as we have spoken of the cultural mutualities of horizontal vectors in postcolonial studies, there is also a discernible ethical dimension to such horizontal exchanges. Postcolonial critique is founded on an ethical explication of the dynamics of colonialism and of postcolonial societies. However, much of the ethical energy of postcolonial reading is expended on negotiating the moral relativity of what might be termed vertical vectors of centre–periphery: simply the ethical responsibilities of the internally differentiated categories of coloniser and colonised. Indeed, Gibbons’s notion of international, cross-peripheral or horizontal critical/ethical solidarity is verbalised, albeit at a more localised level, by Guha in ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’. Distilling Guha’s thesis, Chakrabarty notes: ‘In the domain of subaltern politics, on the other hand, mobilization for political intervention depended on horizontal affiliations such as “the traditional organization of kinship



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and territoriality or a class consciousness depending on the level of the consciousness of the people involved” ’ (Chakrabarty, 2000b: 16). Inherent to such lateral mobilisations is a deep incredulity at, or suspicion of, vertical or hierarchical political relations. While such adjudication is a core element of postcolonial critique, the trajectory alluded to by Gibbons opens up an alternative ethical vista. The monodirectional traffic of vertical ethics concedes discursive space to the shared ethical sufferance of previously colonised communities. Essentially, by endeavouring to empathise with the ethical and cultural legacies of alternative colonial experiences, one can refine and illuminate one’s own sense of postcolonial identity. Rather than perpetuate a discourse of exclusive centre/periphery dialogue, a reconstituted constellation of horizontal coordinates may prove more instructive. In ‘Postcolonial Ireland’, Joe Cleary evinces such a conscious, affiliative ethical economy. In an argument that is remarkably consonant with Gibbons’s notion of ‘lateral mobility’, Cleary notes Many loyalist estates in Northern Ireland fly the Israeli flag and republican ones the Palestinian flag. In the segregated working-class districts of Northern Ireland the tendency to map the northern situation in terms of other late colonial cartographies evidently endures. (Cleary, 2004b: 287–8) Such cross-cultural affiliation is not only manifest in the flying of flags, but is evidenced in the long heritage of political murals in Northern Ireland. In particular, nationalist murals are acutely conscious of ‘the spectres of comparison’, invoking historical, revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela, together with imagistic allusions to Palestine, South Africa and Cuba. Implicit in the resistant nationalist murals, then, is the idea of performative subversion; the murals are elemental within the cognitive maps of the everyday, and likewise are part of the brachiating political and cultural forms of communal and identitarian representation. The invocation of ‘foreign’ oppression and histories heightens the critical voltage of the local context. While not blandly corresponding context with context, these disparate forms of ethical conversation, whether in disciplinarity, theory, or popular culture, exercise what Gibbons calls ‘the sympathetic sublime’ (2003b: 237). Behind the surface array of visual symbols, images, metaphors or allegories of the political murals, and of what Cleary briefly describes, I would suggest, lies ‘the exercise of sympathy’ (Gibbons, 2003b: 237). The ethics of oppressed solidarity, as outlined by Gibbons through




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The exercise of sympathy arising from the sublime is a complex, twoway process, made all the more difficult because it tries to establish solidarity in conditions that extend beyond the ‘sameness’ or common ground of our humanity ... identification with the plight of others need not require stepping outside one’s own culture, but may be intensified by our very sense of belonging – an intensity, moreover, that may have as much to do with pain as with more abstract, optimistic ideals of emancipation and justice. (2003b: 237)

Revival, Rising and Utopia Opening his seminal text on oral history, The Voice of the Past, the social historian Paul Thompson observes, ‘all history depends ultimately upon its social purpose ... Where no history is readily at hand, it will be created’ (1978: 1). Here Thompson alludes to the politics of historiographical figuration and his comments serve as a further alarm to the profound ethical and political responsibilities of historical narration. Dynamic forms of political and cultural histories can be, and are, powerful motive forces against colonial or neocolonial oppression. But, likewise, postcolonial studies charts the repressive strategies of historical emplotment; it tracks the assiduous mechanics of narrative edition that are often characteristic of bourgeois anticolonial nationalism, and which are equally apparent in consolidatory, and defensive, postindependence historical and social narration. In his critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland alluded to above, Kirby juxtaposes the contemporary economic success with the lateral dynamism of the Irish Revival at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Kirby exposes what he believes is an essential shallowness inherent in many of the contemporary celebratory narrations of the recent time of economic prosperity. And in his analysis he is dismissive of the alleged achievements and legacies of the contemporary ‘revival’ in comparison with the earlier period of social transformation. There has been, following Thompson, a process of historiographical figuration, which belies the acute inequities of contemporary Ireland. What characterised Ireland’s invention in the period 1890 to 1920 was a strong civil society, mobilised in a rich variety of social, political, cultural and economic organisations promoting through



Burke, are evident in these political and cultural productions. They resonate in Gibbons’s argument when he asserts:

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vigorous political means the building of an economy based on native capabilities and resources to serve the good of society at local, regional and national level and creating a rich and inclusive ‘imagined community’ to which the majority could, with pride, owe allegiance. (Kirby, 2002: 28) For Kirby the earlier period is distinguished by its adherence to a suite of egalitarian utopian principles, which underlay the anticolonial nationalist trajectories of many of these social and cultural movements.11 Informed by a sense of crisis, these enterprises invested heavily in creativity in all spheres of social, cultural and political imagination. Yet, by way of undistinguished comparison, ‘the resituating of the state in this era of neo-liberalism so that it becomes subservient to market forces fatally undermines its ability to embody a project of social transformation’ (Kirby, 2002: 35). In contemporary Ireland, desire, that necessary ingredient of utopian thought and action has been usurped, blunted or crassly satiated. The absence of radical utopian impulses in contemporary Irish society is, then, a failure of both form and content – we are satisfied to subscribe to the mechanisms of, and to the daily material rewards accrued within, this system. And for Kirby that heralds nothing more than a complacent acquiescence with inequality and social dysfunction. It is instructive, then, that he should invoke the economic and cultural creativities of the Irish Revival period as exemplary of what he terms ‘native capabilities and resources’ as a counterpoint to his lament for the dereliction of utopian social imagination in contemporary Ireland. And it is to this period that we turn now – a period retrieved and celebrated in much greater detail by Declan Kiberd and P.J. Mathews as one of the social possibilities neglected by the post-Independence Irish Free State, but one that was infused with radical utopian energies in its prime, and that retains such exemplary utopian dynamism. This section deals with utopian impulses that did yield concrete and enduring results – moments of utopian purchase – within the social reality of Irish political, economic and cultural life, some of the legacies of which are still evident in Irish society and others that have, lamentably, been neglected. Specifically, we will address the work of Kiberd and Mathews, both of whom configure their critiques of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish society in resolutely postcolonial, and, it seems, utopian, terms. Most explicitly, both critics treat of the period of the Irish Revival of the 1890s and early decades of the 1900s as a time of intense and profitable utopian imagining and activism in Ireland.





Kiberd has been dubbed the ‘figurehead of postcolonial Irish Studies’ (Wheatley, 2001: 85) and his pre-eminence within the field has been employed, and deployed, as a vehicle for much politicised commentary. Speaking about Ireland’s disputed postcolonial condition, Kiberd writes of a complex ‘land which today belongs securely neither to the First nor the Third Worlds, but oscillates uneasily between’ (1994: 108). Ireland’s postcolonial position, then, mirrors its problematic status within the British imperial administration. It is perhaps this ‘liminal’ or unstable relation to imperialism and to its closest geographical neighbour that prompted the authors of the 1989 edition, The Empire Writes Back, to omit Ireland from its catalogue of colonial and postcolonial societies. In the opening pages of Inventing Ireland, Kiberd directly addresses this cursory treatment of Irish colonial history: In restoring writers to the wider cultural context, I have been mindful of the ways in which some shapers of modern Africa, India and the emerging world looked at times to the Irish for guidance. Despite this a recent study of theory and practice in postcolonial literature, The Empire Writes Back, passes over the Irish case very swiftly. (1996: 4–5) Kiberd’s introductory comments express, almost verbatim, Said’s remarks, at the beginning of Chapter 1, on Ireland’s exemplary role within the broader decolonising world. The intention of Kiberd’s criticism, therefore, is to navigate the enabling imbrications of the aesthetic and the political, to probe the points of intersection and to identify the latent, mutually beneficial elements of artistic creativity and socio-political enterprise. The cultural politics of narrative representation and historical remembrance are profoundly disputatious in a decolonising and subsequently independent nation state, and primary among Kiberd’s critical targets is the crystallisation of a ‘spurious national unity’ (1996: 10) in the form of a reactionary Irish state apparatus. And central to this are his critiques of nationalism and conservative disposition of the Irish Free State, in terms of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, as well as his celebration of the Revivalist cultural and political electricity that preceded this Independent stasis. In his capacity as director of the Yeats Summer School from 1985 to 1987, Kiberd can claim a share of responsibility for the direct importation of postcolonial criticism into Irish cultural studies, and indeed Irish academia. By inviting the so-called ‘godfather’ of global postcolonial



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studies, Said, to deliver what was to become a seminal/controversial paper on ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, Kiberd facilitated the exposure of Irish literary studies to the critical methodologies of postcolonialism. Postcolonial criticism had ‘travelled’ to Irish shores by the mid-1980s, yet still retains a profoundly contested valence, having never been unilaterally sanctioned within Irish academic or intellectual discourses. Kiberd exhibits an unequivocal commitment to a broadly comparative perspective; he embraces a theoretical vista that straddles diverse crucibles of anticolonial struggle, and postcolonial reconstitution. Ireland’s status as the first English-speaking postcolonial society is assumed; indeed, it is a fundamental precept of Kiberd’s entire diagnosis that the Irish literary and cultural revival was exemplary to subsequent decolonising nations. Ireland is, as Gerry Smyth rather sardonically quips, ‘first among non-equals’ (Smyth, 1993: 336). Characteristically, Kiberd argues, ‘the history of independent Ireland bears a remarkable similarity, therefore, to the phases charted by Frantz Fanon in his account of Third World people in The Wretched of the Earth’ (Kiberd, 1994: 95). Kiberd’s endeavours are driven by a commitment to the transformative and revolutionary potentialities of literature, and he is firmly indebted to the vanguard of postcolonial discourse: his theses are founded on these structures, and are dependent on the tropes pioneered by Fanon, Said and Ashis Nandy. The central issue for Kiberd is that the re- evaluation of Irish culture, especially literature, should be done in relation to other colonised societies and not solely considered within the critical gaze of metropolitan Europe or America. Ireland is ripe for reinvention, but only through the formulation of a dialogic politicocultural discourse. The very title of Kiberd’s seminal postcolonial intervention, Inventing Ireland, invokes the idea of the utopian; it bespeaks a process of imagination, of industry and of movement, just as Valerie Fournier gestures to below. And in his diverse, and copious, readings of the literary and cultural twentieth century in Ireland, Kiberd charts the multifarious utopian ‘inventions’ in literary form and content across the entire landscape of the literary canon. In particular, Kiberd asserts the remarkable cultural utopianism of the Revival period, as well as that of Wilde the proto-modernist and of Joyce the postcolonial modernist. Kiberd, in a sense, performs an act of recovery and redress in his readings, which are significantly pitched against the political and cultural orthodoxies of, firstly, the Counter-Revival, and, secondly, the more contemporary literary–historical and historiographical work of revisionist literary critics, historians and journalists. Characteristically, asserting the aborted




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In 1922 the urges of national possibility froze, with the country’s teachers cast as curators of a post-imperial museum, whose English departments were patrolled by zealous custodians anxious to ensure that nothing changed very much. Down the corridor, many curators of the postcolonial Gaelic museum, known as the Irish Department, made equally certain that no radical revisions occurred, no compromising contacts with other cultures. (1996: 561) There is a degree of facetiousness to Kiberd’s remarks in this extract, but, regardless, the spirit of his conclusion contributes to, and draws upon, widely held criticisms of the conservative mindsets and social programmes of the newly independent Irish Free State. In telling contrast to the richly assimilative practices of the Revival period, this era of new-found national independence sanctioned little beyond insularity. Defence became central rather than imagination; consolidation superseded creativity. In Kiberd’s assessment the provocative utopian energies of the nationalist movement were squandered in a surge of conservative stability. The cultural and political creativity of a raft of Irish writers and activists, it seems, was disowned and there was a lateral failure to exploit and build upon the momentum of this branch of Irish utopianism. Emblematic of this field of Irish utopianism, in Kiberd’s survey, are many of the canonical figures of twentieth-century Irish writing, including Yeats and Joyce. Their cultural documents and practices symbolise the unyielded possibilities referred to above by Kiberd. For Kiberd, post-independence Ireland retains the aspect of a Joycean colonial capital in the thrall of a provincial and insecure paralysis. The periphery-dominated centre refused to sanction a transfusion of polyvocal diversity or politico-cultural imagination within the fledging nation state. The stasis of a pastoral nationalism provided a buttress for the defensive conservatism of the emergent postcolonial state. In these terms, an idealised inflection of an ‘Irish nation’ was held as the model on which to base the pursuant postcolonial social programme. Independence lapsed into ‘a state-endorsed project [which] promoted the retrieval of an authentic tradition, whose continuity differentiated the primordial nation from those who colonized it. The cultural nationalism of the independent state anxiously sought the pure, the original, the authentic, the traditional to recuperate a depleted wholeness’ (Whelan, 2004: 184). This insularity was reflected



legacies of the utopian dynamisms of the Revivalists, Kiberd contends that:

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in the broad economic temper of De Valera’s state and equally in the ‘moral minesweepers’ of his Ireland: the Catholic Church. Kiberd’s critical logic, then, germinates in the fact that a decolonising phase, with bilateral engagement between cultural and economic discourses, has yet to be actualised in Ireland. Indeed, within anticolonial nationalist movements we see the performance of the nation’s past in the presence of others, in other words, the occupying imperial/colonial authority. Post-independence Ireland witnesses the persistence of habitual performance, a form of cultural and political performance that is divested of transformative potential. Just as all processes of change or cultural/ political beginnings involve a sense of loss, the state-led nationalist project of post-independence Ireland sought to institute a form of consolidation without the risk of further loss.12 Perhaps the most enduring, certainly the most cited, aphorism on Utopia by an Irish writer is that of Oscar Wilde. In his essay on Ireland and Utopia, referred to above, Moylan quotes Wilde’s remark that ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing’ (2006: 17). Moylan’s invocation of these Wildean utopian sentiments reiterates another allusion to Wilde’s utopian credentials by another leading international utopian scholar: in his 1991 book Utopianism, Krishan Kumar cites these very lines from Wilde’s essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1991: 95). Wilde’s proto-modernism and, for Kiberd, nationalism have been frequently referenced within the broader discourse of international utopian criticism, and it is such imagination and dialectical thought that inform Kiberd’s positioning of Wilde as a pioneering utopian Irish nationalist at the end of the nineteenth century. Wilde was never crude enough to subscribe to facile dichotomous national stereotypes, and, given his confessional background and classical education, he navigated a complex yet sympathetic ground between, or beyond, staid versions of Irishness and Englishness. His consistent and effective employment of irony, contradiction and dialectical thought represent subtle yet muscular reflexes of utopian thinking. For Kiberd, Wilde’s linguistic excesses were never reversions to impracticality – they were never abdications of a cultural politics because: Wilde refused to write realist accounts of that degraded Ireland which he only partly knew, and he took instead Utopia for theme, knowing that this would provide not only an image of revolutionary possibility for Ireland but also a rebuke to contemporary Britain.




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Again it is a matter of form – the dominant artistic forms of imperial Britain are incommensurate to the conditions and the temperament of Ireland. Consequently new artistic forms must be invented, dreamed of and hoped for, and such formal artistic utopianism is not confined to abstraction – cultural invention is a breed of dynamic utopian politics, as Mathews argues below. In a colonial context, such as Ireland, politics and culture were never mutually exclusive and any semblance of cultural renovation or revolution reverberated beyond the realms of the abstract. Wilde may have been canonised as an aesthete by reputation, but in Kiberd’s postcolonial reading of his career the utopianism of Wilde’s aesthetics constitutes a powerful strand of Irish nationalist politics. One of the most contentious narrative debates in Irish historical criticism between postcolonial critics and those of revisionism during the 1980s and 1990s centred on the Easter Rising of 1916. And, while a resolutely revisionist commentator such as the novelist Colm Toibin can declaim the event and its legacies as contemptible, Kiberd views this series of events, movements and personalities as a primary utopian effusion in Irish political and cultural history. Taking Carlos Fuentes’s aphorism that ‘the past is the only certifiable future we have ... The past is the only proof that the future did, in effect, once exist’ (Kiberd, 1996: 292), he performs a Benjaminian celebration of the symbolic and historical roots of the 1916 Rising. Again the Rising is a confection of both culture and politics, of abstract symbolism and of physical action – the imagination is figured as a domain of abstract creativity, but equally as a catalytic agent of decisive political engagement: ‘Imagine is the operative word for the liberationist who, far more than the nationalist, needs the sanction of previous authority if history is to be blown open. That sanction comes from history not as chronological narrative but as symbolic pattern, in which certain utopian moments are extracted from its flow [original emphasis]’ (1996: 293). The unifying spirit of symbolism, its capacity for integration and solidarity are key components in the dialogue between the past and the present. In Kiberd’s utopian schema such symbolism electrifies the actors of histories with the energies of the past events towards unrealised utopian horizons. Drawing from this general utopian idiom, Kiberd diagnoses its symptoms in the



‘England will never be civilized till she has added Utopia to her dominions’, he concluded in ‘The Critic as Artist’, adding the vital afterthought that ‘there is more than one of her colonies that she might surrender for so fair a land’. (1996: 50)

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actors and actions of the 1916 Rising, which ‘announced itself in this way, not only as the outcome of the previous thirty years, but also as a moment charged with the utopian energies of 1803, 1848 and 1867 [my emphasis]’ (1996: 293). Both the symbolism and the material actions of the 1916 Rising are transfused, across an extended and accessible historical continuum, with the failed aspirations of erstwhile revolutionaries. Sanction and impetus are taken from prior generations of utopian thinkers and activists in a renewed effort to sustain and to convene a workable suite of nationalist utopian ideals. The present conditions in Ireland were repugnant to such nationalists and, consequently, both historical imagination and contemporary creative action were, in Kiberd’s view, actualised in order to invent a better past and create a more amenable future. But, of course, the major cultural figure that is subject to Kiberd’s postcolonial imagining is Yeats. Summoned from a quasi-unionist purgatory, to which Deane had consigned him in the early 1980s, by Said’s controversial intervention, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, Yeats is situated as an exemplary anticolonial architect in Kiberd’s survey. Indeed, Kiberd’s particular discussion of Yeats lays the foundation for Mathews’s later work in Revival. In these terms, Yeats is seen in more rounded terms, not solely as the mystic and aesthetic guru of the Celtic Twilight, but as a man of action: politico, propagandist, agitator, polemicist – an artist for sure, but a political animal at the same time. As Heaney reflected in a much earlier assessment of Yeats in his essay ‘Yeats as an Example’: The point is, however, that no matter how much we have been led to think of the young Yeats as a dreamer, we must not forget the practical, driving side of him, driving forward towards his ideal goal. The founding of libraries, the association with political activists, all of this was not undertaken without some resoluteness, some ambition, some expense of spirit. And all of this was by no means the whole story. (1980: 105) Heaney’s version of Yeats, then, anticipates the more expansive postcolonial seizure of these anticolonial activities by both Kiberd and Mathews; yet this earlier précis loses nothing of the utopian zeal of Yeats’s various campaigns as they are outlined in the later narratives. Yeats’s versions of ‘Irishness’ and ‘Ireland’ have been subject to manifold critique and modification, but it is in Kiberd’s and Mathews’s work that we witness his resolute incorporation into the genealogy of Irish anticolonial nationalism. His diverse projects are seen as braids in the




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Since style is the mask from which the whole person may be inferred, so the form of an art may in time provide the synecdoche for a nation. This utopian idea explains Yeats’s yearning for the success of the Dublin Municipal Gallery and for the return to it of the Lane Collection of paintings. If the arts lie dreaming of what is to come, then the renovated content of a free Ireland may emerge when least expected. (1996: 310) Yeats’s agitation for the establishment of the Dublin Municipal Gallery for the location of Hugh Lane’s collection of modern masterpieces, then, is symbolic of Yeats’s utopian dream for an encultured Irish society. Not only could Dublin house this fine but solitary collection of paintings, but from such an impetus a more culturally independent and fertile Irish society might prosper. Indeed Yeats’s campaign in this case both straddled his poetic works and occupied his ongoing propagandistic pursuits – in a sense it is redolent of the necessary symbiosis of abstraction and practice that underpins any viable utopian project. While Kiberd finds the cooling strictures of the Counter-Revival primarily culpable for the abandonment of revolutionary utopian thought and activism in Irish society, he does not focus exclusively on the machinations of the Irish Literary Revival in his consideration of early twentieth-century Irish utopian creativity. Joyce is also enumerated in Kiberd’s utopian catalogue of vernacular Irish utopianism – but in Joyce’s case it takes the form of novelistic modernism. Joyce may oscillate between Ireland and Europe in terms of his biography and his artistic influence, but his modernist narration of Irish history in Ulysses is, Kiberd believes, equivalent to, if not consanguineous with, the projects of the Revival. Much of Joyce’s writing, both fictional and nonfictional, expresses a profound dissatisfaction with his contemporary Ireland, and, of course, with proposed measures to redress its oppressed and oppressive condition. And it is from just such dissatisfaction that utopian impulses issue. But for Kiberd it is in Ulysses that these impulses cohere, as Joyce moves from dislocation in the present to an imagining of the future through a complex negotiation with the literary and mythical pasts of Ireland and classical Europe. The integrity of fractured form is symbolic of this utopian dialectic; in Blochian fashion, ideology



broader, complex patterning of Irish national identities at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth-century, and, as Kiberd asserts, they are characteristic of the presiding utopian dynamism of that spectrum of political, social and cultural enterprises:

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is threatened by the recalcitrance of everyday moments. Joyce denies the all-consuming authority of the ideological, and hope is located in the minor epiphanies of the mundane: ‘Ulysses would, like Joyce’s earlier books, hold a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin in 1904: but, unlike them, it would also be a book of utopian epiphanies, hinting at a golden future which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments’ (Kiberd, 1996: 338). In Ulysses Joyce would convene both problem and solution: how to overcome the reality of a dour colonial capital and how to supersede the arid idioms of literary realism. For the colonial writer neither the present reality of occupation or oppression, nor the linguistic mechanisms of imperialism, are adequate for the cohesion of a viable national identity – therefore new forms, or radically reimagined forms, are necessitated. In this sense Joyce chimes with the earlier thinkers and activists of the Irish Revival. And both Kiberd and Mathews, in their respective but complementary postcolonial readings, are keen to stress the radical formal reinventions that are characteristic of this prolonged, but jettisoned, period of national reimagining. As Kiberd argues, and again he explicitly anticipates Mathews here: Even at this early stage [of Ulysses], Joyce employs the technique of mythical realism, juxtapositioning Odyssean marvels against the Irish quotidian. This method has been shown to have been implicit in many texts of the Irish revival, especially in the early plays of the Abbey, whose writers were among the first to grasp that fantasy, untouched by any sense of reality, is only a decadent escapism, while reality, unchallenged by any element of fantasy is a merely squalid literalism. (1996: 338) Kiberd’s critique is a critical lamentation for the abandoned artistic electricity of the Irish Literary Revival. In particular, Kiberd reimagines the explosive possibilities of the Irish Literary Revival and enlists the diverse, and diversifying, tropes of postcolonial methodology. The state structures that assumed governance in 1921–2 were informed by a defensive logic, in which such creative cultural dynamism was neutered. It is in this sense, then, that Kiberd’s work is representative of the broader concerns of Irish postcolonial criticism, in attempting to represent those ‘minority groups who didn’t form part of the main script [and were] edited out’ (Kiberd, 1999). In interview, Kiberd reiterated his critical credo, asserting: ‘politicians underestimate the power of culture as a force to overcome political difficulties’ (Kiberd, 1998b). Culture, primarily textual in nature, operates emphatically within the





realm of the political, and is eminently potent in resolving the elisions and cleavage of political dispute or incompetence. At the root of Kiberd’s reading of Ireland’s decolonising and postcolonial literary representation is a belief in the fact that literary texts are not bound by nationality. Consequently, in order for Irish society to regain access to the latent ‘power-seizing’ potency of art, Kiberd prescribes the establishment of laterally comparative and transgeographical postcolonial exchanges and equivalences. Artistic ingenuity and self-belief, supplemented by a radical investment in this creative ability by both historians and politicians, has the ability to furnish Irish society with ‘better, more appropriate forms’ (Kiberd, 1998a). In other words, the so-called ‘unfinished business’ of the Irish Literary Revival can potentially generate more variegated and dialogic forms of political and cultural identity in Ireland (Kiberd, 1998a). Kiberd’s work is primarily focused on the centrality of art, including literature, in forging a unified and recognisable national identity and consciousness; he affirms that we should ‘look to artists for inspiration, and not just for ornament’ (Kiberd, 1996: 652). Reiterating his unrestrained admiration for the cultural self-confidence that occasioned the Irish Literary Revival, Kiberd suggests that, if such cultural assurance could be married to the prevailing economic success in Ireland, then a more representative and genuinely postcolonial Irish identity would emerge. He asserts: The cultural traditions of the Irish Renaissance were not only plural but hugely reconciling and they are still available to be tapped by persons of goodwill: whatever happens, culture will be the site and stake of the debate, as politics wanes ... The need is to reopen ourselves to the cultural philosophy of Hyde, Yeats, Hannah Skeffington and that whole revivalist generation, whose project is still incomplete. (2003: 84) He discerns the existence of a discursive hiatus between economic modalities and the creative impulses of the cultural sphere. As we have noted, Kiberd lauds the cultural fortitude of the literary renaissance as it evolved in the midst of deleterious economic circumstances. His contemporary modulation is for a new cultural self-belief to emerge in order to complement the overwhelming sense of economic assurance that has manifested in Ireland during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ period. While Kiberd’s work has alluded more generally, if over a longer timeframe, to the richly utopian cast of the skein of social movements that were active during the Irish Revival, Mathews’s work has provided a



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singular, focused assessment of these projects. Mathews’s Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement is, as the title evidences, a materialist argument that these movements were never mutually exclusive, but were part of a broad utopian energy that informed Irish political, cultural and economic life at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Mathews’s assessment asserts its materialism overtly and it is unmistakably postcolonial in its exposure of the anticolonial and nationalist enterprises of the Revival. But equally he lauds the tenacious utopianism of each of the projects as singular undertakings and as collective, or at least imbricated, exercises. Indeed, Mathews’s postcolonial methodology intersects considerably with John McLeod’s recently coined agenda for postcolonial studies. In his editorial to The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, McLeod argues: To enter into postcolonial studies is to engage in a self-conscious process of contestation; it is to contend often with both the form and content of prevailing knowledge. It involves learning how to look critically at the world, and the knowledge and representations that have been made about it ... it is a term which describes, evaluates and helps to configure a relationship: between reality and its representations; between what we study and how we study it; between thought and action. It is a concept which helps us to frame and ask questions from a particular, interested vantage, and which secures a utopian ethics at its heart. (2007: 8) Such a manifesto for postcolonial studies is reflected in both Mathews’s and Kiberd’s engagements with the Irish Revivalist movements. Both are keen to redress the neglect and distortion of the Revival’s achievements in post-independence historical accounts, and both stress the utopian imagination of the earlier period in its ‘revival’ and creation of viable economic and cultural forms. Their contiguous critiques underscore the disingenuous ways in which the combined enterprises of the Irish Revival were processed in later historical and literary–historical renditions of the period – renditions that tarnished or obscured the fertile utopian heritage of Irish anticolonial nationalism and, it seems, impoverished the reservoirs of social imagination in Ireland up to the present day. In fact, the utopian and combative nature of McLeod’s version of postcolonial studies seems fitting to the entire range of utopian postcolonial projects undertaken in recent Irish postcolonial critiques.




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The broad aim is to open up the early productions of the Irish theatre movement to the discursive and material complexities of their historical moment and to explore the degree to which they were influenced by, and in turn influenced, the dynamics of the Irish revival. Central to this manoeuvre is the belief that the early Irish theatre initiative can be usefully understood as an important ‘selfhelp’ movement that has much in common with comparable projects such as the Gaelic League, the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) and Sinn Fein ... The purpose of this book is to recover these connections and reveal the degree to which a progressive self-help ethos was subscribed to across a range of cultural and social initiatives during the Irish revival. (2003: 2) In an effort to rescue the Irish theatre movement, and its pioneers, Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn et al. from the consolations of the abstract, the mystical, the esoteric, Mathews views this theatrical movement as clearly in tune with and contributive to the more ‘material’ self-help activism of the period. At a general level, Mathews positions the aggregation of social and cultural projects as testimony to an Irish declension of what Paul Gilroy has theorised as ‘alternative modernity’ (Gilroy, 1993: 187–223). These variegated, yet interlaced, projects ‘were not achieved by adopting colonial models of modernization’, but were fashioned by an understanding that the socalled traditional does not translate as ‘anachronistic’ or ‘dormant’, or ‘obsolete’ – contrarily, tradition is comprehended ‘as a stimulus towards innovation and change rather than a barrier to it’ (Mathews, 2003: 2). Mathews’s introductory comments invoke a range of theoretical and historiographical intersections: from the internationally postcolonial in Gilroy to the ‘nationally’ postcolonial found in the work of Lloyd and Whelan, with respect to the notion of the alternatively modern; and to recent utopian writing on memory and social change in the work of Baccolini and Elspeth Probyn. But, equally, the exchange between the past and the present that was such a dynamic feature of these social movements partakes of a radical utopianism. These initiatives, as Mathews outlines, sought nothing less than the wholesale structural reimagination of Irish society in its cultural, social and political



Mathews opens his account of the Irish Revival with an unalloyed declaration of his intentions – which largely centre on the contention that there has been a large degree of misrepresentation and miscomprehension in previous accounts of the period:

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forms, and strove to negotiate such change in natively produced utopian idioms. The nourishment for such utopian imaginings was not confined to a strictly anticolonial nationalism, as the demands of constitutional Irish nationalism had been advocated at Westminster for decades, most successfully by the Irish Parliamentary Party. But the combined fallout from Parnell’s political demise and subsequent death in 1891, and the failure of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill in 1893, meant that the channels of constitutional parliamentary democracy had become stagnant. And what was witnessed in the evolving ‘self-help’ culture in Ireland during the 1890s was an imaginative alternative to such formal political torpor. Again Mathews highlights the dynamism of these projects as they turned to local, traditional resources as assertions of renewed political agency and cultural empowerment. In his view: Central to the endeavour was the realization that the Irish had accepted London as the centre of culture and civilization for too long and that the time had come for the Irish people to regenerate their own intellectual terms of reference and narratives of cultural meaning ... [and] it is hardly surprising that the revival would eventually produce a movement which would take the self-help ethos to its most radical conclusion by advocating an alternative politics. (2003: 9) While the precise species of ‘alternative politics’ that would emerge as a legacy of this series of social endeavours has, itself, been fiercely contested, ‘[with] the development of the national institutions and the emergence of a new wave of nationalist newspapers, an infrastructure was put in place which allowed the “imagining” of the Irish nation’ (Mathews, 2003: 10). Here Mathews consciously alludes to Benedict Anderson’s conceptualisation of the imaginative fabrics of national identities, but, in fact, Mathews extends his narrative and, in distinction to Anderson, Mathews believes that it was a conjunction of nationalist newspaper publications together with the birth of the national theatre movement that furnished the public and the performative spaces of the imagination of Irish national identities. Crucially, these combined phenomena house discernible utopian energies, and in many respects cohere with Valerie Fournier’s assessment that ‘utopianism is not a blueprint for a “perfect society” but may be better conceptualised as a movement of hope. It undermines dominant understandings of what is possible and opens up new conceptual spaces for imagining and practicing possible futures ... it is about opening up visions of alternatives rather than





closing down on “a” vision’ (2002: 192). The mobile, generative forces of utopianism clearly, then, manifest in the series of cultural, social and political movements addressed by Mathews. They were imaginative, interrogative and pioneering – each pulses with desire and hope for change, much perhaps nascent and prospective. In fact Mathews and Fournier seem to share both idiomatic and conceptual affinities in their respective critiques. In Mathews’s case the utopian projects of the Revival are intimately bound up with pursuit of a national identity – yet such was the multifaceted nature of that series of projects that no single strain of Irish identity gained unilateral consensus. The variously consonant and dissonant voices and projects of this utopian nexus compete, inform and challenge the formulation of Irish identity: projects which, are, of course, at root utopian in their energies, if ‘not explicitly utopias themselves’ (Tower Sargent, 2001: 88). And, as we have established, this was not an Irish identity that simply leeched its conceptual and practical framework from British precedents. As Mathews outlines, both modern social and cultural practices – farming, theatre, journalism, and education – were fastened to ‘traditional’ native Irish practices in such a way that a historically informed present might mould an alternative route(s) to a modern Irish society. Reiterating his presiding contention, Mathews draws our attention to the urgency of grasping the material impacts of the cultural quarters of the Irish Revival and the extent to which the entire Revival movement proffered a viable alternative politics during this period. The intimacy of British colonialism, the proximity of the colonial mainland and the penetration of its exercises created the conditions for such utopian thought. Frontiers and borderlands that are coloured by conflict, occupation, usurpation and oppression demand a utopian politics to imagine beyond such proximate threat. And Mathews’s postcolonial reading of the Revival period is a signal intervention in the reclamation of such utopian energies that were characteristic of the combined Irish nationalist movements. As he concludes: One of the most remarkable features of this period is the extent to which the dynamic energies of a loosely aligned self-help revivalism emerged as an alternative sphere of influence to the realm of crisisridden parliamentary politics. All of the movements examined here professed to operate outside the concerns of party politics, yet, in their joint concern to turn Ireland into a centre of both cultural and material innovation again, their activities were inherently political and played an important role in Irish decolonization. (2003: 34)



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Although strikingly different to Fanon’s theoretical anticolonial writing in many ways, the political philosophy of Amilcar Cabral reasserts the instrumental role that culture must play in the liberation movements of colonised societies. While Fanon and Cabral differ in their conceptions of what constitutes ‘culture’, their writings have informed the so-called ‘culturalist’ elements of contemporary postcolonial studies. In concluding that ‘it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture’ (Williams and Chrisman, 1993: 56), Cabral registers the profound cultural agon that is symptomatic of the colonial context. Likewise, both Kiberd and Mathews operate within such a theoretical tradition, representing the confluenced self-help initiatives of Ireland’s ‘nationalist phase’ as acts of culture within the longer-term project of Irish national liberation. Summarising Fanon’s definition of national culture, David Macey writes: ‘when deprived of the twin supports of the nation and the state, cultures perished and died: national liberation and the renaissance of the state were the preconditions for the very existence of a culture’ (2000: 375). The energies of such cultural renaissance, however, were not reciprocated or matched by a similarly dynamic rebirth of the state. As such, the counter-revivalist impulses of the 1920s and 1930s undermined these erstwhile cultural energies and ‘one of the twin supports’ was not available to the development/liberation of the national culture. Underlying Kiberd’s Fanonian inflection of Irish twentieth-century Irish literature, in particular his highly influential work on John Millington Synge, is the conviction that the post-independence state did not answer the cultural, and therefore political, needs of a newly liberated nation. The state structure that assumed office in the 1921–2 period straitjacketed the critical and creative dynamism of the erstwhile literary renaissance. As Deane observes, ‘Ireland’s colonial history was both a history of emancipation from the monotonies of tyranny and, after the emancipatory movement, a restoration of the same monotonies under the name of freedom’ (1997: 168). Accordingly, Fanon’s tripartite modulation of the decolonising dialectic was hamstrung by a ‘state apparatus [that] remained unmodified since British days and condemned many citizens (as it was designed to do) to live like an underground movement in their own country’ (Kiberd, 1998a). Post-independence Ireland assumed a reactionary mentality; a newly liberated state, unsure of its security, and despite its de facto legitimacy, failed to imagine itself beyond the trammelled confines of a rigid appeal to stability and an atavistic traditionalism. The prairies of liberation remained unseen





as the nationalism of an insular state apparatus remained focused on simple consolidation rather than evolution. Reading through Fanon, Kiberd concludes: ‘The paralysis that Fanon detected in certain newlyindependent African States also gripped independent Ireland ... History, under such a dispensation, ceased to be progressive, becoming instead an endless repetition of familiar crises, with no hope of resolution’ (1996: 392–3). Ultimately, Kiberd diagnoses an ‘awesome cultural self-confidence’ in the stated intentions and mechanics of the Irish Literary Revival, a self-confidence that germinated despite, and not because of, ‘a profound condition of economic hardship’ (1998b).13 This cultural dynamism was, however, subsumed in a defensive, post-independence state formation; the energies that enabled liberation were, to a large extent, curtailed and quarantined in a conservative, national idyll. Similarly, Mathews concludes, ‘the revival was characterized by a rich and complex ferment of political and cultural thinking and no small amount of liberational energy’ (2003: 148). The period was energised by the dynamics of possibility; there was a manifest urge to reimagine or the axes or vectors of ‘cultural meaning’ (Mathews, 2000: 14) from an imperial metropolitan centre to an alternative and innovative Irish centre. The legacy and influence of Fanon’s anticolonial theorisation are evident in both Kiberd’s, and here in Mathews’s, reconceptualisation of the radical dynamism of both the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in Ireland. The radical imbrication of politics and culture produces what Mathews terms a store of ‘liberational energy’, and the conjunction of political, cultural and economic self-help initiatives reminds us of Fanon’s enduring conclusion that ‘culture is the expression of national consciousness ... [and] national consciousness is the most elaborate form of culture’ (1967: 198–9). This arousal of a national consciousness is not a deliberate adoption of the structures of modernisation, but rather is conceived of as an ‘alternative modernity’ (Mathews, 2003: 2), an idea that is central to many of the interventions within postcolonial Irish studies. In stark contrast to the ‘bogus unity’ of post-independence Ireland, which was characterised by a fervent counter-revivalist mentalité, these political, economic and cultural mobilisations were envisaged as genuinely prosperous and innovative unities. These socio-political conglomerations diagnosed the exigency for ‘an alternative path to modernization – on Irish terms’ (Mathews, 2003: 28). What Kiberd



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and Mathews trace, through Fanon, is the regeneration of a legitimate and proactive alternative national agency in Irish society. Kiberd claims that the cultural revival achieved nothing less than a renovation of Irish consciousness and a new understanding of politics, economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture in its widest sense. Complementing Kiberd’s reading, Mathews catalogues the machinations of the national self-help initiatives, a series of ostensibly discrete endeavours that were, in fact, mutually nourishing agents of Ireland’s alternative modernity. Both Kiberd and Mathews register, in an Irish context, an explicitly Fanonian interpretation of national consciousness and national culture. As Fanon argues, ‘a national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence’ (1967: 188). In crystallising a national culture, Fanon espouses the radical employment of the past ‘with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (1967: 187). Mathews echoes Fanon in maintaining that the variegated initiatives that fomented a sense of national consciousness in Ireland embraced ‘the idea of tradition as a stimulus towards innovation and change rather than a barrier to it’ (Mathews, 2003: 2). Equally, it is this Fanonian idea of ‘an invitation to action’ that both Kiberd and Mathews find so unique within the dynamics of the cultural revival that he believes was jettisoned in post-independence Ireland.

Counter-modernity, subalternity and Utopia Subaltern studies retails a reconfigured historiographical methodology, which partially intersects with the projects of English Marxist historiography or ‘history from below’, as pioneered by E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. As Thompson argues in his The Making of the English Working Class: While historians study the actors of history from a distance, their characterizations of their lives, views and actions will always be misdescriptions, projections of the historian’s own experience and imagination: a scholarly form of fiction. Oral evidence, by transforming the ‘objects’ of study into ‘subjects’, makes for history, which is not just richer, more vivid and heart rending, but truer. (1963: 90)





However, as Chakrabarty outlines, subaltern historiography is distinguished from the ‘history from below’ approach in three principal areas. Chakrabarty identifies its: ‘Relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, critique of the nationform [and] interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge)’ (2000b: 15). The work of the Subaltern Studies collective, then, is informative of the critics that I discuss in this section. Naturally there are varying degrees of influence, but nonetheless Lloyd’s work, particularly, avails of the politics and the methodologies of subaltern critique. In his foreword to Selected Subaltern Studies, and alluding to the politics of the Subaltern collective, Said writes: Theirs is no history of ideas, no calmly Olympian narrative of events, no disengaged objective recital of facts. It is rather sharply contestatory, an attempt to wrest control of the Indian past from its scribes and curators in the present. And if there can be no actual taking of power in the writing of history, there can at least be a demystifying exposure of what material interests are at stake, what ideology and method are employed, what parties advanced, which defended, displaced, defeated. [My emphases] (1988: vii) Significantly, in wresting the past from the petrifaction of linear narrative, subaltern historiography liberates subsumed, fragmentary histories. As many of the differential utopian interventions within Irish postcolonial studies make plain, the past possesses a vigorous valence in the present. Indeed, reclamation of the past from ‘its scribes and curators in the present’ politicises the representation of the past. Lloyd’s radical appropriation of subaltern reading strategies in an Irish context interrogates the representational synchronicity of the state and its national narrative. Invoking Guha’s notes on ‘the Historiography of Colonial India’, Lloyd deconstructs the authorial, and authoritative, self-evidence of ‘elite historiography’ (Guha, 1988: 38). He concludes: ‘the imagination of the nation is both the form and the representational limit of history, properly speaking’ (Lloyd, 1999: 26); in other words, the successful and integrated narration of the nation becomes, simultaneously, the historical legislation of the nation. Elements or excesses that are adjudged non-contiguous with the nation’s image of itself are deemed inassimilable to the authorised ‘story’. Such manoeuvres, then, are constitutive of what Guha calls ‘the ideological character of historiography itself’ (1988: 39).



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Subaltern groups can thus be thought of as having a double history: on the one hand, they play out their own discrete and complex formations and traditions; on the other, occluded by their difference from dominant narratives and forms and by those forms themselves, they are nonetheless ‘intertwined with [the history] of civil society’, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. (1993: 127) Here we also see Lloyd’s theoretical and political departure from Gramsci. Whereas Gramsci envisages the subaltern as the state in process, as potential unity arising out of its contingent fragmentation, Lloyd relocates the subaltern as necessarily alternative to the hegemonic stateformation; it is not ‘the state in emergence’ (Lloyd, 1993: 127). Lloyd’s inflection of Gramsci’s subaltern, then, displaces the representational and ethical boundaries of state-nationalisms. His conceptualisation articulates a much more labile constellation of historical narratives, part of which involves the interrogation of what Shahid Amin calls ‘the narrative strategies by which the people get constructed into a nation’ (1995: 2): strategies which cannot ‘do historical justice to the complex articulation of nationalist struggle with other social movements’, or fail ‘to envisage the progressive moment in nationalisms, which, globally, are not resurgent but continuous, not fixated, but in transformation’ (Lloyd, 1999: 20). The ‘unrepresentable’ cultural forms are occluded from ‘official’ narratives through a process of ‘uneven incorporation’ (Lloyd, 1993: 123). Subaltern spaces are not strictly silent, but are unheard or unheeded by their absence from or their inability to commandeer representational space. As Gyan Prakash notes: ‘the notion of the subalterns’ radical heterogeneity with, though not autonomy from, the dominant remains crucial ... In other words, subalterns and subalternity do not disappear into discourse but appear in its interstices, subordinated by structures over which they exert pressure’ (1994: 1482). These subject positions and practices are coterminous with the nation state, emphatically not sedimentary residues of an archaic and dispensable tradition, but conversely they are actively synchronic with the gestation and birth of the bourgeois nationalist body politic. The divination and representation of these cultural accretions is a strategy of reappropriation, as Prakash concludes: ‘it delves into the history of



Subaltern groups and their histories are not entirely excised or remote from the totalised, historical narrative, as Lloyd argues, through Gramsci:


colonialism not only to document its record of domination but also to identify its failures, silences, and impasses; not only to chronicle the career of dominant discourses but to track those (subaltern) positions that could not be properly recognized and named only “normalized” ’ (1994: 1486). The historiography of postcolonial critique traces the suppressions and elisions of imperial or foundational histories; similarly it must re-present the unpalatable truths of imperial diplomacy, colonial administration, and capitalist–imperialist rapacity. These subaltern histories, then, will divine the occlusions, and navigate the margins, of political and cultural discourse as well as unmasking the contextually differentiated imperial teleologies of ruthless acquisition and what Prakash terms its ‘normalization’ (1994: 1486). Hybridisation and ‘adulteration’ resist assimilation to the dominant discourse of nationalism, and they constitute recalcitrant elements, as they are inassimilable ‘to statist nationalism’ (Lloyd, 1993: 8). Lloyd’s concept of ‘adulteration’ is characterised by those cultural formations that are resistant to ‘a nationalism ... [that is], programmatically concerned with the homogenisation of the people as a national political entity’ (Lloyd, 1993: 100). The process, and indeed the fact, of colonial hybridisation problematises both the dominant imperial ideology and the counter-imperial monologic nationalism. Partha Chatterjee argues that ‘the popular is also appropriated in a sanitised form, carefully erased of all marks of vulgarity, coarseness, localism, and sectarian identity. The very timelessness of its “structure” opens itself to normalization’ (1993: 73). Hence there is a calibration of the national community to the needs of the nascent state formation; that which is amenable to the state’s hegemonic image of itself is assiduously valorised and moulded. Contrarily, as both Lloyd and Gibbons illustrate, remainders exist; cultural and political fragments that are inconducive to the ‘timelessness’ of progress and modernisation persist aloof from hegemonic representation. This fact, as Lloyd suggests, does not constitute exile to anachronism, but, rather, these discourses retain a crucial valence in their coevality with the state. Cultural forms (Lloyd lists nationalist street balladry) may be ‘unrepresentable’ but significantly are not rendered extinct or obsolete. Just as imperial accumulation legitimised forms of circumscribed exoticism or domesticated forms of alterity, the nationalist agents of independence countenance only that which is amenable to the phoenix narrative of the fledgling postcolonial state. Yet there are also historical figures and discourses that exist outside these polarities, and one such has recently been disinterred from relative historical marginality within Irish postcolonial studies.



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To conclude this chapter, then, I want to consider the historical figure whose writings and thought have been harnessed most recently, and most suggestively, within Irish postcolonial studies, and who can be stabled with many of the revivalist figures detailed in Mathews’s study: the 1916 martyr, James Connolly. Indeed the centrality of Connolly to Irish socialist anticolonial consciousness, as well as to mid-twentiethcentury international neocolonial Marxist theory, is boldly signalled by the biographer of Connolly’s son Roddy, Charlie McGuire: Connolly believed that it had been the British bourgeoisie that had introduced capitalism into Ireland, breaking up finally the last remnants of the old Gaelic communal system, and that it continued to profit in the present day from exploitation of Irish resources and from the labor power of Irish workers. He believed that the capitalist economic system was the real basis of British power and control in Ireland. (2006: 114) For Connolly, then, Irish national freedom without socialism is a stillborn idea; Ireland did not possess a dynamic, transformative bourgeoisie capable of radical social change. Rather, the indigenous Irish version was dependent on British economic control, so, therefore, in Connolly’s view ‘nationalism without socialism ... is only national recreancy’ (McGuire, 2006: 115). Such was the depth of Ireland’s coerced integration into the economics of British capitalist imperialism that a profound structural social revolution was required in order that Ireland realise genuine national liberty, both political and economic. In these sentiments we can see that Connolly’s work is proleptic of later national liberationist theorists and also of subsequent Marxist thought on the insidious nature of neocolonialism. Without conflating historical contexts, or geographical specificities, ties might be made between Connolly’s pioneering conjunction of national liberation and socialist democracy in his critique of colonialism and his anticipation of the inequities of neocolonialism in an Irish context with figures such as Fanon, Mao, Nkrumah, and Trotsky. As ‘the first theorist of neo-colonialism’, the link he proposed ‘between British capitalist penetration of Ireland, the nature of the social, economic, and political structures this created, and the consequences of all this for the Irish independence struggle anticipated by several decades the efforts of those who develop fully the theory of neo-colonialism’ (McGuire, 2006: 119). Connolly’s reclamation as an intellectual precursor of, and resource for, contemporary postcolonial theory, though, is not confined to its





Irish variant. In his seminal survey of the field, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young invokes Connolly’s work and positions his thinking on the correlation between the national struggle and the socialist struggle against the materially exploitative mechanisms of imperial modernity in the same philosophical continuum as that of the most radical Marxist figures of the twentieth century: Connolly was the first leader in a colonized nation to argue for the compatibility of socialism and nationalism, in doing so producing a position which would not only inspire Lenin and through him lead to the Third International, but which would subsequently become the defining characteristic of the triumphant tricontinental Marxism of the national liberation movements, including that of Fanon, but also that of Mao, Cabral, and Guevara. (2001: 305) While Young’s discussion of Connolly may be revealing, it is, nonetheless, cursory. Yet, subsequent to Young’s inclusion of Connolly in his extended genealogy of the radical historical informants of contemporary postcolonial studies, a number of significant pieces have appeared on Connolly in Young’s journal, Interventions. Beginning with a special number on ‘Ireland’s Modernities’, which included two essays that dealt with Connolly, and resulting with a special number dedicated to Connolly, the journal has provided a forum through which Young’s initial summary remarks have been elaborated upon by critics and literary historians from within the field of Irish studies. Primary among the recent efforts in the archival reclamation of this radical utopian thinker is the work of the American scholar, Gregory Dobbins. In a series of historically and theoretically rigorous publications, Dobbins has essayed the pioneering contributions of Connolly to early twentieth-century Irish nationalist and international Marxist thought; his anticipation of the work of mid-century anticolonialists and national Marxists such as Fanon, Cabral and Guevara; his mining and problematisation of complacent and State-affirming notions of the Irish ‘national’ archive and the ‘national tradition’; and Dobbins has canvassed the methodological relevance of Connolly’s political historiography to critiques of contemporary Irish society and its own legitimating historical and cultural narratives. Dobbins’s work is qualitatively different from many of the other acts of historical re-representation discussed heretofore, but the methodology endorsed by Dobbins significantly intersects with that practiced in the broader field of Irish postcolonial studies. Indeed, Dobbins’s positioning of Connolly’s legacy



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embraces both form and content in its explication of Connolly’s radical anticolonial critique of historiographical practice and in Dobbins’s conviction that Connolly himself represents a misconstrued figure within histories of Irish anticolonial nationalism and the Irish labour movement. In effect, ‘Connolly’s work has been forced to fit into pre-existing categories which elide or obfuscate the complexity’ (Dobbins, 2000: 6) of his work. Typically, Connolly’s legacy has been tethered to a narrowly conceived, and discredited, strand of romantic Irish nationalism, a fact which has obscured his deft theoretical negotiation of the politics of the local and specific (Irish nationalism) and the politics of the international and the structural (Marxism). So if Connolly’s revolutionary thought has been eclipsed and/or disfigured in twentieth-century historical accounts of Irish nationalist history, what is there to recommend a corrective reappraisal of this thought? How can Connolly’s early twentieth-century national Marxism inform contemporary readings of Irish colonial histories, and in what ways can such thinking pressurise the dominant modes of social policy and programming in Ireland today? In opening up such prospects we might turn, initially, to David Lloyd, who, it seems, has seized upon Connolly’s, and, of course, Dobbins’s, works as evidence of, even corroboration of, his previous, and ongoing, work on the narration of Irish history. For Lloyd, Connolly is the exemplary historian of Irish subalternity, the diviner of the fragmented pulses of Irish counter-modernity, which Lloyd has theorised so effectively, but has been reproached as lacking empirical or historical substance. In Connolly, Lloyd’s theoretical utopianism seems to have located a historical precursor: Connolly ... discerns in the attachment of the Irish working classes to a past form of social organization a mode of resistance to colonial capitalism that can form the basis of a radical social movement rather than an obstacle to be removed by the passage through prescribed stages of modernization. In this he anticipates many of the ways in which subaltern historiographers and postcolonial theorists have critiqued the developmental progressivism that informs not only imperial ideology but also nationalist movements. (Lloyd, 2008: 121) In this extract, then, Connolly is further co-opted into the field of postcolonial studies; Lloyd advances Young’s summoning of Connolly into the field with the added affiliation of the Indian subaltern studies collective. Just as Lloyd, Young, Dobbins and others attempt to wrest





Connolly from a tapered historiographical valence within revisionism, Connolly was acutely aware of the value and the need to research and to voice the unheeded political and cultural formations of precolonial Irish history, not as bland forms of regressive nationalist propaganda or consolatory nostalgia, but as expressions of enduring cultural difference, which could provide ‘a ground for further radicalization and the possibility of imagining alternatives without ... having to pass through the homogenizing stage of modernization and rationalization’ (Lloyd, 2008: 121). Consolidating his utopian investment in Connolly’s subaltern methodology (avant la lettre), Lloyd concludes that Connolly’s work bequeathed ‘insights into the ways in which cultural difference suggests the multiple social imaginaries that can ground resistant formations and alternatives to the internationalist model of the proletarian subject’ (2008: 121). It is a utopian historiographical practice that depends on the excavation of the past, of memories in the service of new political and ethical constellations. As Moylan maintains, this rememorative axis within utopian thought is crucial; for him ‘another important element in the utopian method is memory, in particular that form of memory that is productive rather than consoling and disempowering’ (2007b: 217). The past can yield enabling lessons, which are corrective of the diachronicity of imperial historical narratives. The past, as we have consistently seen, retains catalytic utopian energies and ‘the recognition of, and reflection on, past struggles can inform the contemporary process so that it becomes imbued with an educated grasp of previous campaigns even as it proceeds with the work of negation, re-vision, transformation’ (Moylan, 2007b: 217–8). In his ‘Introduction’ to Ireland after History Lloyd disabuses those critics within Irish studies who remain sceptical of Ireland’s ‘postcolonial credentials’ of the facile notion that the reading strategies of postcolonial theory are templative, and that they have been imported and unquestioningly grafted onto studies of Irish history and cultural production. Numbered among such critics we might include: the historian R.F. Foster; literary critic Edna Longley; economic historian Liam Kennedy; political historian Stephen Howe; and Marxist critic Francis Mulhern. Lloyd’s suggestive methodology encourages a theoretical equilibrium between specificity of local experiences and legacies of colonial rapacity, and the universal disenfranchisement (material, political and cultural) endured across colonial regimes. This methodology is not homogenising or prescriptive but attempts to strike a balance between the particular and the structural – in other words between the culturally specific readings that have been the predominant mode



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of analysis within postcolonial studies and the macrostructural readings of imperial capitalism that characterise neo-Marxist engagements with the histories of colonialism. In simple terms: ‘there are no identical colonial situations, so that in place of comparative we should in fact employ the term “differential”, marking the ways in which quite specific cultural forms emerge in relation to a universalizing process’ (1999: 3). Lloyd’s commitment to ‘differential’ analysis, wherein both insular essentialism and bland comparativism are short-circuited, provides the basis for potential vectors of cross-cultural solidarity; it is a mode of postcolonial critique that allies the respective legacies and traumas of postcolonial societies without vitiating the particularities of time and place: ‘Differential analysis ... marks the rhythmic insistence of cultural singularities that emerge in relation to colonial structures, so that the study of one given site may be profoundly suggestive for the understanding of another, without the two sites having to display entire congruence’ (1999: 3). What is apparent in Lloyd’s most recent interventions is his conviction that Connolly’s work represents an exemplary case of just such ‘differentiated’ thought. Connolly’s pioneering fusion of the needs of Irish nationalism with those of a class-conscious international Marxism is, for Lloyd, a foundational and instructive moment in the histories of Irish anticolonial and postcolonial theorisation, and, equally, pivotal to later anticolonial nationalist Marxisms. Specifically, ‘Connolly sketches an approach to the historical formation of cultural difference, and projects a revolutionary transformation based on cultural differences, that colonial capitalism itself produces’ (Lloyd, 2003a: 345). Crucial to Lloyd’s reappropriation of Connolly’s writings and of his political legacy is the congruence between Connolly’s conception of ‘History’ and its production, and that insisted upon by Lloyd in his various publications over a number of years. Connolly’s archival industry and the ends to which this research was directed are adjudicated as proto-subaltern, a series of methodologies to which, as has been made clear, Lloyd is indebted. Thus, the ‘differential analysis’ suggested by Connolly’s work is a recalibration of Lloyd’s earlier version. In this case subaltern histories present us with evidence – testimony of counter-modern cultural and political formations produced within the orbit of capital and bourgeois nationalism, but which retain a differential relation to those dominant historical vectors. Connolly’s reclamation, then, for Lloyd’s postcolonial project, is partly founded upon the consonance between the early twentieth-century national Marxist historiography of Connolly and Lloyd’s subalternistderived postcolonial historiography. Equally significant for Lloyd is





the sense that Connolly did not jettison the ‘nation’ as a political and cultural concept. Under intense theoretical and political pressure from postcolonial studies, both internationally and in Ireland, the ‘nation’ has been widely, if somewhat prematurely, proscribed as a viable conceptual informant of any emancipatory, postcolonial politics. The ‘nation’ is declaimed variously as essentialist, patriarchal, derivative, or plainly obsolete in a globalised world. Nevertheless, nationalism is not an exhausted political and cultural formation, and, within recent neo-Marxist analyses located within the field of postcolonial studies, to which Lloyd is a contributor, its currency has risen. National Marxism offers the possibility of an aggregation of specificity with structure; for Lloyd it is the favoured analytical resource in undertaking ‘differential’ studies of diverse colonial and postcolonial histories. Perhaps the most explicit conjunction of Connolly’s historiographical approach is in his elaboration of the viable ‘native’ Irish political and cultural practices that were recalcitrant to the homogenising imperatives of imperial modernity and, subsequently, the sanitational exercises of bourgeois nationalism. Part of Connolly’s project was to critique the legitimating narratives of such bourgeois nationalism, whose constituents had subscribed to the prevailing economic codes of bourgeois capitalism. Such a species of nationalist expression offers solid ground for radical political critique, as it is deeply implicated in the mechanisms of material disequilibrium. Thus, Connolly’s retrieval of subaltern narratives was a matter of historiographical, archival corrective; and a strategy of politico-economic criticism. But it was equally a means of producing ‘local’ historical instances of material exploitation by, and resistance to, imperial capital. What we accrue is an ‘attempt to link the episodic uprisings, socialist experiments, agrarian movements and popular anticolonial organisations, such as the Land League or the Fenians, into a discontinuous but nonetheless anticolonial subaltern narrative’ (Lloyd, 2003a: 355). Or, as Dobbins argues, more recently, in a similar vein: ‘Connolly’s argument concerns an alternative form of preservation in which the alternative values of the past are not eradicated but manage to persist despite the way in which they might have been misinterpreted or excluded from historical narratives’ (2008: 63). Indeed, Dobbins’s final point could just as well be made about Connolly’s own treatment within twentieth-century Irish historical studies. More generally, though, both Lloyd and Dobbins stress the resilience of the counter-modern as a viable assertion of Irish cultural difference. In many ways we return to the question of ‘form’; Connolly’s writings, and the historical formations essayed therein, are symptomatically



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fragmented and uneven, and, consequently, do not cohere with the demands of mainstream historiographical methodologies. These abrupt and volatile historical assertions bear Benjaminian traces, and in this sense we can gauge their value to postcolonial studies, to Irish studies and, particularly, to Lloyd and Dobbins. Commenting on Connolly’s tactical utility of the precolonial Irish custom of communalism, Lloyd succinctly articulates Connolly’s worth as a political thinker and as a proto-subalternist historian: What is more important ... is to grasp how Connolly takes up the idea, shared by British administrators and Irish political economists as well as ‘ardent patriots’, of an uneradicated Irish adherence to communal landholding but deploys it as a means to rethink historicist assumptions and make space for an alternative understanding of the relation between colonial experience and political radicalization. (2008: 120) And part of Connolly’s methodology is a critical relation to the Irish historical archive, which he understood as a fabricated means of dislocating Irish people from their differential histories. Connolly’s historiography, then, anticipates contemporary postcolonial historiographical theory and practice and, specifically, presages remarks such as the following from the historian of the British Empire, Antoinette Burton: The history of the archive is a history of loss, which may begin to explain why many social historians, patently aware of their own shifting for tunes in the past decade, are so eager to place it under ‘protective custody’. I would argue ... that it is the archive itself which should be subject to continuous suspicion and radical doubt, serving as it often does to normalize, through classification and re-presentation, what are invariably ‘fragmented, fractured and disassembled’ strands of historical evidence and experience ... And contrary to what some critics of post-structuralism and post-colonialism have suggested, it is possible to embrace this unknowability not in a spirit of ‘hip defeatism’ or ludic irresponsibility, but from a posture of utopian possibility – born of the promise which pluralism in its most vigorous, contentious forms can and does offer [my emphasis]. (2001: 66–7) Key among the texts that Connolly produced as part of his radical national Marxist historiography was, of course, Labour in Irish





History (1910). And this is the source of much of the proto-subalternist agency that both Lloyd and Dobbins actuate in their respective arguments. Indeed, Spurgeon Thompson provides a convincing reading of Connolly’s narrative, and in so doing underscores the proto-subalternist qualities of the work. Thompson argues that Labour in Irish History succeeds in foregrounding ‘the historical trace of subaltern insurgency, marking its historical purchase’ (2003: 379). In addition, Connolly’s methodology ‘exemplifies and anticipates a Gramscian approach to subaltern historiographical interpretation. He reads, interprets, and cites counter-intuitively to recover and value the occluded while demonstrating how such a hermeneutic can function’ (2003: 379). Not only, then, is Connolly a forerunner of the rigorous critique of nationalism undertaken by the Subaltern Studies collective, but his class-based analysis precedes the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. But, whereas Gramsci has been regularly informative of international, and occasionally Irish, postcolonial readings, the radical utopian national Marxism of Connolly has never before been sourced as a critical compass. In sum, then, both Dobbins and Lloyd present Connolly as a pioneer in what have become the methodologies of postcolonial historiography within Irish postcolonial studies. Connolly’s proto-subalternist historiography partook of the utopian ‘radical memory’ outlined below by Whelan. For Dobbins and Lloyd such work of reclamation is both historiographically inclusive and politically subversive, and represents a valuable trace of resistant Irish utopian memory. Of equal value is Dobbins’s belief that, while Connolly’s work is both exemplary and instructive in its relation to Irish postcolonial studies, it is also seen as a potential informant of critical discussions on the economic and cultural imprints of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, though in this respect Dobbins is keen to assert that Connolly’s work is very much of its time and should not be seamlessly transplanted onto the contours of contemporary Irish political debate. Nevertheless, the combative historiographical methodologies pioneered by Connolly can be considered utopian in their own time, but also as available utopian resources in our time too. Contemporary retrievals, then, of Connolly’s legacies and examples are patently utopian in their own right. As Dobbins speculates: The critical rediscovery of Connolly began not only after the advent of postcolonial theory in Ireland but also after the emergence of a full-blown globalized economy in Ireland during the period of the so-called Celtic Tiger. It is reasonable to wonder whether the recent



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Conclusion All of the foregoing material is, as we have outlined, qualitatively utopian in its differential relation to Ireland’s experiences and legacies of British imperial modernity. And, as if to confirm such a trend, Cleary recently concluded that within Irish Studies: Postcolonial studies ... while broadly internationalist in its outlook, has been dispositionally more sympathetic to the radical republican, republican socialist, and other dissenting minoritarian elements in Irish history ... for postcolonialists, the recovery of the memory of radical struggles in the past is an important element of any commitment to building contemporary modes of social consciousness and social analysis that extend beyond the limits of nationalism. (2007: 43) As we have seen, each of the interventions strives to underscore the utopian trajectories of past moments in Irish history and, implicitly, attempts to resurrect such utopian energies in the present. As Cleary notes, and as Whelan terms it, Irish postcolonial studies is infused with a commitment to the utopian possibilities of ‘radical memory’ – a concept that has been given lateral applications in recent Irish postcolonial scholarship. Rather than broaching the past as a calcified showcase of continuous failure and defeat, such ‘radical’ memorial utopianism visits the past as a vivifying repertoire of political, cultural and ethical options in the present and towards the future. In Whelan’s terms ‘radical memory deployed the past to challenge the present, to restore into possibility historical moments that had been blocked or unfulfilled earlier’ (2002: 60). And, in keeping with Kirby’s dim view of the prevailing conjuncture in which Irish society finds itself, to which it has firmly subscribed to, interventions that compel Irish studies to travel in these imaginative critical directions seem all the more pressing. Crystallising the utopian animus of these rememorative strategies at a general level, and drawing on Bloch, Vincent Geoghegan’s conclusion resonates with the utopian assertions present in Irish postcolonial studies: Much political contestation is already driven by group and individual memories, and these memories fuel the various alternatives



re-articulation of Connolly’s theoretical interventions is in part motivated by opposition to the newly dominant neoliberal values of the Celtic Tiger. (2008: 51)

proposed ... These memories provide much of the raw material for the vital utopian dimension of their politics. To the extent that these memories reveal shared values and experiences, the basis is established for the assertion of historical universals. It thus opens the door for a utopianism which is grounded in the historically evolving memories of groups of individuals. The future, in this conception, is not a return to the past but draws sustenance from this past. Memory is the means in the present to ground the future in the past. (1997: 31) In this chapter, framed as a ‘Response’ to Bill Ashcroft, then, we have discussed the historiographical and literary–historical retrieval of utopian potentials within Irish cultural and political history by contemporary postcolonial critics. Largely, such critics take a pessimistic view of the Irish experience of British imperial modernity and conclude that Ireland’s interface with the processes of social and economic modernisation in the nineteenth century were characterised by the experience of trauma, dislocation and disenfranchisement. In other words, modernisation under British imperial rule was grafted onto Irish society by an externally based occupying force. In this strand of postcolonial critique a range of resources are reclaimed as unrealised potentials and as potential informants of contemporary postcolonial interrogations of the current politico-economic conjuncture. Spanning the philosophical and political subtleties of Edmund Burke; the civic republicanism of the United Irish movement; the imbricated political, cultural and social movements of the Irish Revival; the socialist nationalism of James Connolly, as well as the recalcitrant local practices of counter-modern social formations mined by Connolly’s proto-subalternist historiography, it is evident that the utopian agents unearthed by postcolonial critics are both copious and highly differentiated. This suite of postcolonial critiques constitutes a range of unrealised potentials, as evidence of the persistence and viability of ‘radical memory’. A situation where the past is no longer a burden in the present, nor is it quarantined from the present, but is a spur to innovation and imagination in political, social, cultural and ethical fields. It is the past as utopian resource. In fact, as Kirby’s argument above details, there is an acute need for such historical and philosophical utopian thought in contemporary Ireland, where political apathy and consensus have become the norms. The value of the utopian strain within Irish postcolonial studies, then, is precisely its impatience with the prevailing conjuncture. In this sense, all of these critical endeavours are energised by the ‘fundamental dynamic of ... Utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism) ... [which]



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aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system radically different from this one’ (Jameson, 2005: xii). As is clear, Ireland’s histories of utopian, colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial theory and practice are vital informants of and participants in any future debate on the possible historical and/or contemporary transactions between utopian studies and postcolonial studies. What we have discussed in this chapter, then, are the multifarious strands of utopian thought that are manifest in contemporary postcolonial studies. We have ranged from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century – a period in which ‘modern’ notions of Irish national identities were hewn in all of their contradictory varieties. Equally, we have established how utopian thought and practice under the rubric of Irish anticolonial nationalism was intermittently successful, even ascendant, but that it is universally conceded that these successes have been resoundingly discarded in contemporary Ireland. While postcolonial theory, postcolonial literary history and historiography are frequently assailed as nostalgic or abstracted projects, the work of the literary critics and historians detailed here gestures towards the incontrovertible evidence of a protracted utopian heritage in Ireland and equally bemoans its absence, and underlines its necessity, in contemporary Ireland. The work considered in this chapter may be federated at some levels by its commitment to and/or treatment of Irish anticolonial utopianism, but it is differentiated in other ways, in terms of periodisation and political commitment. Yet each of these interventions, it seems, subscribes to Milan Simecka’s argument that social relations are essentially futile and empty without utopian hope. He writes: A world without utopias would be a world without social hope, a world of resignation to the status quo and the devalued slogans of everyday life ... We would be left with hopeless submission to an order which is only too natural, because it can, as yet, modestly feed the people, give them employment and a secure daily round. It is unable to provide for the unnatural demands of man, for the utopian ideas of its beginnings such as justice, freedom and tolerance, and to carry them further. This order no longer understands such demands, considering them unnatural and utopian; a remarkable case of amnesia. (1984: 175–6)




Postcolonial Metacriticism – The ‘Second Wave’

Pierre Bourdieu, academia and metacriticism If we are to introduce the work of Pierre Bourdieu to our discussion of Irish postcolonial studies it is worth keeping in mind Toril Moi’s concluding remarks to her 1997 essay, ‘The Challenge of the Particular Case: Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture and Literary Criticism’. Moi states: Even the most cursory account of Bourdieu must try to apply its insights to a concrete case, or it will fail to grasp Bourdieu’s intellectual project. One should not exaggerate Bourdieu’s intellectual debt to Wittgenstein. Yet Bourdieu is Wittgensteinian in the sense that he knows his theories make no sense outside the language games to which they belong. If we remove Bourdieu’s concepts from every specific context of significant use, we will never be able to do anything interesting, or even remotely relevant, with them. (1997: 508) In this instance Moi throws light on two of the most important aspects of Bourdieu’s critical methodology. Firstly, Moi gestures towards Bourdieu’s insistence that a theoretical framework that is neglectful of practical applications or responsibilities is simply impotent. Theoretical posturing is anathema to Bourdieu’s engaged sociological analyses, but it is also undermined by Bourdieu in his numerous metacritical responses to ‘theory’ as an academic and intellectual phenomenon. Secondly, Moi notes the co-implication of all social constituencies in a hierarchically structured symbolic economy. With more than a hint of neo-Marxist thought implicit in his work, Bourdieu highlights the mechanics of social and cultural capital, which are mediated through various, but implicated, linguistic economies. It also evident from Moi’s 102



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summary comments that Bourdieu is keenly aware of his own participation within such hierarchies and, again, he consistently urged academics and intellectuals to remain alert to, and interrogative of, their own positions and the symbolic mechanisms that sanction such positions. Bourdieu demands a self-reflexive critical practice that is sensitive to social relations that may be contingent, but are not equal. Outlining the productive and mystificatory relation between class privilege and the structures of education in society, in 1972, Bourdieu provides a serviceable précis of his subsequent modus operandi: The sociology of educational institutions and, in particular, of higher educational institutions, may make a decisive contribution to the frequently neglected aspect of the sociology of power which consists in the science of the dynamics of class relations. Indeed among all the solutions provided ... to the problem of the transmission of power and privileges, probably none have been better dissimulated and consequently, better adapted to societies which tend to reject the most patent forms of hereditary transmission of power and privileges, than that provided by the educational system in contributing to the reproduction of the structure of class relations and in dissimulating the fact that it fulfils this function under the appearance of neutrality. (Jenkins, 1992: 110–11) Bourdieu’s extended anatomisation of the disabling power differentials of the educational system, and its collusion with these disparities in society at large, is a powerful framing device for our discussion of the role of postcolonial studies within and across contemporary academic institutions. Writing elsewhere, and much later, on the same theme, Bourdieu concludes that the educational system is a corrupted network of endowed languages and hierarchies; it can no longer be considered, idealistically, as a transparent mechanism for the transmission of humanist knowledge: ‘Thus, the school institution, once thought capable of introducing a form of meritocracy by privileging individual aptitudes over hereditary privileges, actually tends to establish, through the hidden linkage between scholastic aptitude and cultural heritage, a veritable state nobility, whose authority and legitimacy are guaranteed by the academic title’ (1998: 22). These excerpts represent Bourdieu’s long-term view of the conservative, socially reproductive function of educational systems. And, while his assessment is markedly defensive and instrumental, it does nonetheless provide valuable insights into the machinations of the university





in society; the university as a discrete institution; and the processes of academic and critical consecration and professionalisation that unfold within the university system. The university, then, produces for the marketplace but also depends on the marketplace for its own sustenance. And, as is widely accepted, to succeed, even to survive, within a ruthlessly competitive corporate environment requires a raft of premeditated tactics by all social institutions, universities included. The university must retain its image as a site of learning; of pedagogical apprenticeship; of scholarly excellence; of uncompromised dedication to egalitarian achievement and broad social inclusiveness; and of distance from the inequalities of the market. Yet, as Bourdieu clarifies, these are merely window-dressing for the resolute implication of the university in the perpetuation of social hierarchies. As Richard Jenkins notes in his study of Bourdieu: ‘One of the most important characteristics of institutionalised educational systems is their role in reproducing the conditions of their own existence. They have to reproduce themselves as distinct fields’ (Jenkins, 1992: 109). Jenkins’s point has consequences that resonate beyond the macrostructures of the university as ‘institution’. His argument, and this is central to the ensuing discussion here, is suggestive of the ways in which academic languages, pedagogical practices, and even academic appointments contribute to an illusory sense of inclusion or access. But they too often reveal themselves as elements of a more insidious conservative agenda, which subtends projects of institutional self-preservation and individual careerist advancement. If the university is embedded in the structures of social reproduction, then its residents and patrons are equally responsible for this conservative function, and for facilitating critiques and/or reflection on these circumstances. While intellectuals, academics and critics adopt oppositional stances towards dominant political and economic bodies, for Bourdieu they are actually constituents of the same dominant strata of society. He writes: ‘Contrary to the illusion of the free-floating intellectual, which is in a sense the professional ideology of intellectuals ... as holders of cultural capital, intellectuals are a (dominated) fraction of the dominant class’ (1993: 43). Naturally such a characterisation of the social capital of the intellectual bears on our current discussion of (Irish) postcolonial studies. How can we reconcile Bourdieu’s assignment of privilege to the intellectual with the roles and works of equivalent intellectuals within a nominally ‘left’ field such as postcolonial studies? Should we adhere to Bourdieu’s rather instrumental portrait of the intellectual class in our consideration of postcolonial studies? Or can we both acknowledge the achievements of the field and at the same



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time provide pertinent metacritical responses for future postcolonial projects? Furthermore, we might also permit Bourdieu’s conclusions to reverberate within university-based postcolonial studies, and, possibly, act as a catalyst for critics and academics operative in the field to reflect on their own institutional location and how that coheres with their work as teachers and researchers within the field of postcolonial studies. In this respect, Conor McCarthy’s recent enumeration of a series of ‘questions’ for Irish postcolonial critics intersects with the lessons we might glean from Bourdieu (McCarthy, 2007a: 90). The kernel of McCarthy’s list is that there is no level of self-reflection within Irish postcolonial criticism on the relation between the discursive pursuits produced within the discipline and the possible material consequences of such work. Likewise, there is no evidence of Irish criticism acknowledging the material conditions of its own firm institutional privilege. This chapter hopes to furnish a useful introduction to the current temperature of metacritical debate within Irish postcolonial studies; it highlights the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for such a task; and it offers readings that are sympathetic to McCarthy’s demand for a more concrete conjunction between the discursive and the material within Irish postcolonial studies.

A devil’s dictionary of postcolonial studies1 In his introductory remarks to a 1989 interview with Bourdieu, Loic Wacquant refers to Bourdieu’s edition Homo Academicus; Wacquant characterises the text as ‘a political intervention in the specific politics of intellectual life’ (1989: 2). Bourdieu’s ambition in producing a lateral, and empirical, review of the French academy was, Wacquant argues, ‘that the socio-analytic instruments he sharpens in this book can be used in academic struggles to help increase the autonomy of the scientific field and thereby the political responsibility of its participants by making them more aware of the hidden determinants that operate within and upon it’ (1989: 2). There is no argument but that critical curiosity can become a self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling pursuit. The premise, then, of Bourdieu’s self-reflexive sociology is that an effective theory-as-practice can only emerge out of a self-reflexive academic/ intellectual field. If theory is its own self-contained legislator, entrapped in an ever-present parsing devoid of future possibilities, it degenerates into a discourse of objectification. Critics of postcolonial theory come from both within and without the field, and from a range of academic disciplines and intellectual interests. These interventions operate at two





levels, firstly at a constructive metatheoretical level, and, less promisingly, in the form of strategic polemic. This chapter is concerned with the metatheoretical commentary that has emerged primarily within Irish postcolonial studies. The idiomatic form of postcolonial theory and the potential, or implicit, political implications and agendas of such theoretical language are signalled as the most problematic facets of the debates. In a sense, the urgency of metacritical interrogations of the politics and language of postcolonial theory is founded on Bourdieu’s suspicion that ‘the blindness of intellectuals to the social forces which rule the intellectual field, and therefore their practices, is what explains that, collectively, often under very radical airs, the intelligentsia almost always contribute to the perpetuation of dominant forces’ (Wacquant, 1989: 18). While Bourdieu’s sentiments are excessively pessimistic, they do alert us to the encasing and structuring fabric of academic ‘jargon’. Furthermore, metatheoretical engagements must retain a consistent level of epistemological vigilance regarding their own linguistic operations and theoretical procedures. One of the features, and most frequent criticisms, of postcolonial theory is its idiomatic language. Postcolonial theory is not alone in mobilising such linguistic density and, in fact, it draws on many of its theoretical precursors, including psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, postmodernism and deconstruction. However, it is apparent that critics of postcolonial theory have adduced a fatal paradox at the core of its deployment of such elusive terminology. Scholars such as Bhabha and Spivak employ post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings in networks of catachrestic analysis in order to initiate a process of discursive, political and cultural ambivalence and subversion. These very theoretical manoeuvres, though ostensibly enabling and empowering, are derided as further alienating the exact constituencies they are designed to represent. Freighted with the philosophical history and hegemony of Western intellectualism, critics ask, how can such idioms materially cohere with the proposed disempowered communities? Further, is the idiomatic fabric of postcolonial theory a radical political agent, capable of bona fide social equalisation; is it an ethical language that genuinely realises or provokes concrete political liberation and/or representation; or is it yet another form of depoliticising abstraction, of linguistic encasement? Bourdieu concludes of academic language, ‘[it is] designed to dazzle rather than to enlighten, the academic livery of the word fulfils the eminent function of keeping the pupil at a distance. E longinquo reverential: respectful distance and respect through distance’ (1994: 3).



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For Bourdieu’s pupil can we read the unrepresented, disenfranchised communities of postcolonial and neocolonial societies? Are the taxonomies of postcolonial theory grounded in any form of sincere ethics, or are they constitutive of disciplinary/theoretical habit – habit that has no material purchase other than the perpetuation of academic orthodoxies? Of course there is a crucial difference between the close physical proximities of the teacher–pupil relations and the relative locations of the majority of postcolonial critics and the communities they seek to represent. However, Bourdieu’s point remains apposite; whether the academic theorist–critic is responding to a visible pupil or composing a theoretical treatise, there is an invocation of a ‘manipulation of words’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 4). Even a cursory reading of many postcolonial ‘readers’ will impress with the circulatory nature of the theoretical terminology. This is not to say that postcolonial studies is not a highly enabling framework of literary and historical critique, but that it is exigent that those operating within the field develop a sense of self-reflexivity with respect to their discipline, its language and paradigms and their own position within the field. It is not the notion or conceptual paradigm of postcolonialism that constitutes the essential problem per se, rather some of the theoretical excesses or tautologies that operate under its rubric. Political change is effected in and through language, but never through tautology, ossification or fetishisation. Again Bourdieu is illuminative on the nature of attenuated linguistic economies: The ability to understand and to manipulate these learned languages – artificial languages, par excellence – where we see the natural language of human intelligence at work immediately distinguishes intelligent students from all the rest. It is thanks to this ideology of a profession that academics can vouch for professorial judgments as strictly equitable. But in reality they consecrate cultural privilege. Language is the most active and elusive part of the cultural heritage which each individual owes to his background. (1994: 8) Bourdieu portrays an ideologically based professional coterie of academics, whose hegemony is predicated on and preserved by a mastery of ‘learned languages’. As Graham argues in an Irish context: ‘On a metacritical level the question is: how does criticism of Irish writing proceed beyond the justificatory argument for the value of postcolonial paradigms and begin to deploy the strategies of such theories in ways which are sensitive to the contours of Irish particularities’ (2002a: 32–3). Criticism, therefore, needs to evolve beyond the defensive postures of




‘positions’ and towards a realisation that postcolonial theory is not, and never was, as insidious a political stratagem as has been widely canvassed. Instead, it is time to consider the potentially illuminative theoretical mechanisms within which one can read transcolonial analogies as well as illuminate, as Graham notes, ‘the contours of Irish particularities’.

The postcolonial ‘exotic’ A university is a mechanism for the inheritance of the Western style of civilization. It preserves, transmits and enriches learning, and it undergoes evolution as animals and plants do.2 Each of the critiques below coheres with what is, arguably, the most comprehensive metacritical publication to deal with the problematic of postcolonial ‘representationalism’: Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001). Huggan’s title succinctly captures the thematic of his intervention, namely, tracing the imbrications of the resistant ethics of postcolonial studies and the consumerist objectification of colonial and postcolonial ‘othernesses’. The Postcolonial Exotic parades a raft of mechanisms through which ‘marginality’ is variously fetishised, championed, abstracted, and assumed in order that some form of material political or economic advantage might accrue. Clearly indebted to Bourdieu, Huggan’s self-reflexive critique opens up a broad debate on the name and nature of the ‘postcolonial’, drawing a distinction between the ‘postcolonialism’, which, in his estimation, harbours genuinely resistant motives and capacities, and ‘postcoloniality’, which, contrarily, is a product, and function, of global consumerism. In this climate Huggan begins by conceding that: Critiques of postcolonialism have intensified over the last decade, by no coincidence the decade that also brought postcolonial studies to prominence as an institutional academic field. Postcolonial studies, though never fully accepted within the academy, has become distinctly fashionable; ‘postcolonial’ is a word on many people’s lips, even if no one seems to know quite what it means. Like other commodified terms used largely for academic purposes, postcolonialism has taken full advantage of its own semantic vagueness. (2001: 1) This opening elucidation of ‘the trouble with postcolonialism’, to invoke Huggan’s opening subtitle, is suggestive of the simultaneous




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fertility and volatility of the field. Huggan impresses its assumption of a position of relative institutional legitimacy, if not prestige, though not uncontested, either internationally or, as we shall see, in an Irish context; its currency as a consistent topic of critical conversation across disciplinary and geographical boundaries; and its tendency, in many exercises, to lapse into linguistic and/or culturalist idealism, which, of course, militates against tangible political purchase. As Chapter 5 evidences, for many critics postcolonial studies is guilty of providing ‘a rationale for the kind of intellectual tourism that meanders dilettantishly from one place to another in search of ill-thought goals’ (Huggan, 2001: 2). As a battery of critical resources, postcolonial studies’ high profile attracts immotile scholarship, which merely utilises the perceived ethical legitimacy of postcolonialism’s politics as a cover for misplaced or hazy critical engagement. In other terms, postcolonialism generates a one-size-fits-all mania, under which all historical and contemporary experiences of oppression, trauma, and exclusion are adjudged as seamlessly analogous, uncomplicatedly interchangeable, or mutually informative, with scant attention reserved for contradictions of time and place. Yet, in another register, Huggan suggests that there is a level of opportunism at play in the lateral assaults on postcolonial studies. Naturally this does not absolve postcolonial studies of its own implicit and explicit agendas, but, as Huggan argues, ‘it has arguably become more fashionable to attack postcolonialism than to defend it’ (2001: 2–3). The fashionability attributed by Huggan to these attacks on postcolonial studies is repeated in the actual attacks themselves, where postcolonial studies becomes yet another transient, careerist vogue within academia. This is not to say that justifiable critiques, which pose legitimate questions, have not emerged. As the intellectual capital of the field has become more inflated it is interrogated in terms of its relationship to commodity capitalism, as Huggan, among many others, has done. Questions such as: how can a truly radical, even utopian, postcolonial criticism reside benignly within an institutional system that is constitutively exploitative and conservative? are routinely posed and, indeed, are relevant to much of the material at hand in the present discussion. Nevertheless, despite voicing these caveats, Huggan’s general survey is sympathetic to the politics and the long-term achievements of postcolonial studies, while at the same time retaining a principled metacritical awareness of the potential for distracting excesses within the field. For Huggan ‘the postcolonial exotic represents the interface between two apparently incompatible systems – the oppositional system of





postcolonial resistance and the profit-driven system of the transnational culture industries and global trade’ (2001: 263). The underlying liberatory cultural politics that are symptomatic of postcolonial studies are, then, inextricable from the structural disparities of the marketplace. Subversion and the vocabularies of difference, it seems, are prey to valuation and auction. Huggan’s critique has obvious implications for our discussion of metacritical responses to Irish postcolonial criticism, and, similarly, resonates with Bourdieuian insight in its own metacritical engagement with the international postcolonial field. In this section I want to address two areas that are brought into focus by Huggan: firstly, the institutional accommodation of postcolonial methodologies through university programmes, pedagogy, and professional endowment or consecration; and secondly, the theoretical and critical production and reception of postcolonial criticism. The discussion will attempt to situate Irish metacritical readings on these two points within the international postcolonial context provided by Huggan. Initiating his discourse on the seemingly inevitable participation of postcolonial studies within the circuits of global commodity culture, Huggan suggests that ‘it seems worth questioning the neo-imperialist implications of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on, and largely catering to, the West’ (2001: 4). What cannot be ignored within the postcolonial field is, as Huggan’s comments indicate, the rise and consolidation of the field as a series of reading strategies. But what proves troubling is the fact that it has instituted its own internal levels of hierarchy. In other words, certain postcolonial critics, writers, monographs, editions, and readers have been installed as anchored loci of postcolonial ‘truth’ claims. Such developments necessarily accrue material gain and professional privilege, and it is to these that Huggan casts a critical optic. Echoing Bourdieu’s earlier exposure of the intrinsic hierarchical, and in many ways quasi-nepotistic, culture of professional academia, Huggan contends that what emerges is ‘a cosmopolitan alterity industry’ (2001: 12). This economy, then, sanctions, and elaborates, a contracted battery of privileged abstract concepts such as we have seen above: marginality, hybridity, subalternity, authenticity, and ‘otherness’. As Sara Suleri maintains: ‘While alteritism begins as a critical or theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was the familiar category of the exotic’ (1992: 12). Additive to the outlined linguistic and conceptual critique of postcolonial theory, which Bourdieu’s work facilitates, is the necessity to



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read the institutional impact of the field of postcolonial studies. Naturally the two discussions are contiguous, but it is worth, briefly, considering how the field has embedded, and continues to embed, itself within international and Irish academic institutions. Huggan’s interrogation of the idiomacy of postcolonial theory is deeply in debt to Bourdieu’s critique of the abstractions of all academic languages. But Huggan is equally concerned with exposing how and where postcolonial studies has become a ‘product’, or a ‘brand’, within the global educational marketplace. In his view, while ‘the postcolonial is ... constructed as an object of contestation between potentially incompatible ideologies, political factions and interest groups ... postcolonial products function, at least in part, as cultural commodities that move back and forth within an economy regulated largely by Western metropolitan demand’ (2001: 29–30). This is not to say that postcolonial writers, critics and readers are helplessly without agency in their cultural transactions, but, crucially, to signal the inevitable implication of such ‘postcolonial products’ – however apparently ‘resistant’ they are intended or may appear – within the uneven material networks of capitalist market exchange. Huggan’s concern is that the genuinely critical potentialities of postcolonial theory are repeatedly blunted by their co-option to the political and cultural mainstream. In his terms, the ‘other’, subversion, alterity, etc. are all ‘exoticised’ and consequently domesticated through commodification. In this context he poses a series of questions that not only seem germane to the discussion of the opacity of certain facets of the postcolonial linguistic economy, but equally bear on the ways in which the field has become modularised and consecrated within the university industry. Huggan inquires: ‘Is it possible to account for cultural difference without at the same time mystifying it? To locate and praise the other without privileging the self? To promote the cultural margins without ministering to the needs of the mainstream? To construct an object of study that resists, and possibly forestalls, its own commodification?’ (2001: 31–2). These queries may seem more pertinent to narrow discussions of the politics of academic language, but they also impact upon the embrace by institutional bodies of postcolonial methodologies, writers and critics. Specifically, there is a distinction between the idealist view, which subscribes to the notion that such embraces are an index of institutional reform and egalitarianism, and the sceptical judgement, which sees merely a marshalling of potential political dissent into proximate control and surveillance. As Eagleton suggests in After Theory, ‘the most flourishing sector of cultural studies today is





so-called post-colonial studies ... it has been one of the most precious achievements of cultural theory’ (2003: 6). Huggan’s implication is that such prominence is not realised by accidental means or without compromises being made. The key point, however, is that the ‘postcolonial’ is now institutionalised; it is central to many, and addressed by most, literary and cultural studies university departments. It is firmly established as a key mode of reading within undergraduate, and many postgraduate, university programmes. As Huggan further notes: ‘postcolonial studies has been constructed at Western universities as both oppositional academic location and attractive object of consumption’ (2001: 250). While postcolonial courses are advertised as avenues through which students can be introduced to ranges of international literatures, cultures and ideas – even undergo radicalisation and ‘conscientization’3 through induction into narratives and theories of historical and contemporary anti-imperialism – Huggan remains doubtful of the efficacy of such proposed oppositional stances. Several educational theorists, including Henry A. Giroux, and inspired in some measure by the work of Paulo Freire, commit to the utopian possibilities of a pedagogy of resistance. In Giroux’s view university education is fundamental to the fomentation of ‘educated hope’ (2004: 39). The university, then, is envisioned as a vital public space which facilitates ‘critical education’ (Giroux, 2006: 75). Giroux explains ‘critical education’ as a pedagogy that ‘links knowledge and learning to the performative and worldly space of action and engagement’; and in turn it is capable of ‘energizing people not only to think critically about the world around them but also to use their capacities as social agents to intervene in the larger social order and confront the myriad forms of symbolic, institutional, and material relations of power that shape their lives’ (Giroux, 2006: 75). And postcolonial studies has been enlisted as a potential discourse that can awaken radical political consciousness in students.4 Yet such pedagogical optimism, specifically with respect to postcolonial studies, has to be leavened by a degree of scepticism. As Huggan makes clear, the teaching of postcolonial studies at university level certainly enhances and enriches the formal and thematic experiences of the student, with their exposure to complex theories and texts of political and cultural difference. Nevertheless, the danger remains that in these circumstances difference becomes ‘textualised’ or abstracted into an irreconcilable distance from the material reality of the reader. In other words, as a consequence of the ‘pedagogical’ nature of the student’s experience, the traumas and realities of material life under colonial and postcolonial conditions are denied any sense of historical purchase or material ethical



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consequence. Furthermore, as Timothy Brennan warns: ‘the defense of teaching non-Western literatures is widely perceived as being made in the language of civil rights (inclusion, equality of representation) rather than on the grounds of what these literatures offer: a humanist knowledge pushing beyond European provincialism’ (1997: 115). Thus, even when a ‘political’ element enters the discussion of non-Western literary texts, there is a sense of aesthetic condescension; the writers and texts are simply offered inclusion into an immutable heritage on the basis of pluralist equality rather than the privilege of concretely impacting upon the fabrics of the Western literary tradition. As we will discuss in greater depth below, for Brennan, these postcolonial pedagogies are symptoms of a culturalist, Eurocentric relativism that characterises aspects of the field and its genealogies. The university industry is, thus, a front-line site in the production and elaboration of the ‘postcolonial exotic’, according to Huggan, and, as part of his critique of the modalities of ‘exoticisation’, he summarily addresses a number of specific institutions and pedagogical trends in the international expansion of postcolonial studies. Huggan draws on a survey completed by a Harvard University undergraduate student, Yukun Harsono, which detailed a wide range of postcolonial syllabi – essentially, an empirical inventory of how postcolonial studies is pedagogically processed across a number of universities. In Huggan’s view the survey, while not exhaustive, ‘demonstrates the extraordinary disciplinary range of postcolonial studies’ (2001: 250) – a view which is something of a given for those who operate within the field. Postcolonial courses are noted in ‘history, geography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, architecture, political science, comparative literature, education, music and dance, and the visual arts’ (2001: 250). And, at a general level, Huggan concludes: Many of these courses are pointedly inter- or transdisciplinary, reflecting the shift away from a literary focus ... Graduate programmes in postcolonial studies like the MA at the University of Essex ... are also keen to bill themselves as interdisciplinary ... Like the composite MA at Essex, several individual courses turn to postcolonial theory, often in tandem with its postmodern equivalent, as a means of contesting disciplinary boundaries and of conceptually refracting traditionally conceived fields and areas of study. (2001: 250) Perhaps, the most noteworthy point about this section of the survey is a startling absence; namely, there is no reference to economics, political





economy, or economic history in the original list, nor is there any corrective allusion by Huggan. But, as we shall briefly note below, these subjects have, in fact, impacted upon the teaching of colonial histories and postcolonial histories at university level. Regardless, it is surprising that Huggan does not comment on such an omission, given the resolutely ‘materialist’ trajectory of the overall argument of his book. Postcolonial studies, then, at an institutional level reflects, and partakes of, the lateral trend of permeable disciplinary and departmental boundaries – a legacy of the rise of cultural studies in the 1980s. Equally, the very interdisciplinary nature of such programmes, such as that outlined at the University of Essex, are highly competitive within the lucrative postgraduate marketplace. By not ‘focusing’ the student within a single disciplinary lens or departmental regime, these postgraduate programmes are retailed as pluralist, complex, ambidextrous and flexible. On the one hand, such interdisciplinarity rightly mirrors the necessary interdisciplinary texture of contemporary cultural criticism, yet, on the other, it undeniably retains a market-oriented posture. It appeals to the idea of individual consumer choice; it fulfils the consumer desire for options and compounds the illusion of consumer autonomy. As part of the continuing metacritical self-reflection of Irish postcolonial studies, we might profitably turn to Joe Cleary’s critical obituary for Edward Said in 2004. Cleary locates in Said an unassailable, and undiluted, critical–intellectual exemplar for our times. Marked by a sensitive catholicity in his literary critical work, and dogged and rigorously principled in his political engagement, Said stands as a foundational figure in contemporary intellectual circles. For Cleary, the humanist integrity of Said’s career reflects poorly on the recent, and ongoing, corporatisation of the university sector, and of contemporary intellectual life at large. Criticism and theory seem, as this chapter admonishes, to have spawned hollowed-out declensions, which are bereft of political courage and commitment. They are vacuous idioms of self-inflation passing as political praxis. Indeed, Cleary attributes a similar pessimism to Said himself; Said rejected any sense that the classroom and the street were mutually exclusive: Said had no patience with those who wished to quarantine literature or criticism off from the world, but he also maintained across his career that one of the recurrent dangers with engaged modes of criticism of whatever sort – new historicist, deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, postmodernist – was that they had



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an inherent tendency to become more concerned with their own autotelic self-reproduction than with the worldly problems that originally called them into existence. When this happened, theory or criticism became once more unmoored from the world to become a new convoluted and self-regarding scholasticism, and whatever radicalism it might once have possessed diminished into a merely rhetorical or noisy dissidence that simulated oppositionality while leaving everything in fact cosily intact. (Cleary, 2004a: 1–2) At this point Cleary is drawing on Said’s work in The World, The Text and The Critic, wherein he discusses the roles of the committed critic and committed criticism, neither of which fastens itself to the consensus of the mainstream. At the same time, Cleary is alluding to Said’s humanist suspicion that overdependence on theorisation can follow two equally undesirable routes. Firstly, an exclusive adherence to theory can evacuate literature of its innate ‘literariness’, reducing the literary to a function of deterministic theoretical models and collapsing literature under the weight of the political. And secondly, theory can become an end in itself, remote from the material causes and originary spurs that excited it into action; in other words, self-propagating and abstracted. It is clear, then, how Said’s cautious approach to theory is in need of urgent replication within the field that he, unconsciously, served to inaugurate. Cleary employs his eulogy for Said partly as a wedge to open a brief, but acute, materialist critique of the ‘university’, which, and here he accords generally with Huggan, has seen ‘the university ... transformed in a whole host of ways that have ... remodelled higher education to serve essentially the ... commodification and consumerist processes’ (Cleary, 2004a: 12). The net result is that ‘this whole system of cultural value positively encourages students to approach their education in crassly consumerist and instrumentalist terms and academics to deliver it to them as such’ (Cleary, 2004a: 13). While Huggan’s survey of university courses that are dedicated to the study of empire and postcolonialism is international in its scope, it continues the trend within The Postcolonial Exotic of eliding entirely the case of Ireland. As this book details, postcolonial studies has had seismic effects on the field of Irish studies, indeed has been formative to its contemporary incarnation. Yet the relation between postcolonial studies and the Irish context, as I have repeatedly asserted, still receives uneven treatment within international postcolonial readings. In Huggan’s case, perhaps, Ireland’s omission is grounded in the fact that the country, and its residents, are simply not ‘exotic’ enough to warrant inclusion.





Proximity and racial contiguity prohibit membership. But surely those facts themselves make Ireland’s inclusion all the more pressing, in the sense that it complicates further Huggan’s schematisation of what constitutes ‘postcoloniality’ and, crucially, the ‘postcolonial exotic’. Drawing on, and expanding upon, Huggan’s investigations, in the next section I will treat of Irish metacritical responses to the importation of postcolonial methodologies into Irish studies, but, for now, I want to address, briefly, the Irish case in terms of Huggan’s preceding discussion of the postcolonial ‘industry’ as it pertains to the institution of the university. Surveying the postcolonial ‘scene’ in Ireland in 2007, Cleary remarked that ‘much work remains to be done, however, at institutional and pedagogical levels to equip new generations of scholars with the range of linguistic, hermeneutic, and historical skills that any really enterprising postcolonial studies requires’ (2007: 50). Belying the pessimism he expressed earlier regarding the corporate takeover of the university system, Cleary believes that the university is a site of potential ‘radical education’. The interface of the academic, the institution and the postcolonial can instil a form of ‘radical education’, such as that outlined and theorised at length by Giroux (1992a). Perhaps, as John Marx urges, and again Huggan’s sympathies for postcolonial studies resonate here also: The interdependence between postcolonialism and the university is not only a sign of complicity, however. Postcolonial literature has become part and parcel of academic culture. However, we ought not to leap to the conclusion that such a development is inherently conservative. To acknowledge that postcolonial literature has entered the ivory tower, I contend, is not to negate its capacity to have widespread effects. (2004: 92) Marx’s point captures the essence of the problematic elaborated by Huggan – how to align the truly critical with the institutional site of university pedagogy, without cementing the abstraction of imperialism? Yet Marx is aware of the provisionality of his faith, the conditionality of his utopian faith in the postcolonial within the university. In a footnoted point in the same 2007 piece, Cleary informs us that, while many Irish academics avail themselves of the conceptual resources of postcolonial studies as a pedagogical tool, there are only two dedicated programmes of study in Ireland that focus on empire and postcolonialism (2007: 50). As will be widely known, these



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programmes are both Master of Arts programmes: the MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUI Galway and the newly conceived MA in Culture, Empire, Postcolonialism at NUI Maynooth. From an institutional perspective, members of the Department of English at NUI Galway have been pioneering in their commitment to postcolonial studies and its application to the Irish context, and the MA programme, which was inaugurated in 1994, is a highly successful product of, and contributor to, the department’s leadership role in this area. The MA has combined with a series of international conferences hosted at Galway on themes relating to colonialism, including: ‘Gender and Colonialism’; ‘Defining Colonies’; and ‘Ireland and India’. Yet, while the Department of English retains a prominent role in these achievements, the MA in Culture and Colonialism is, in fact, a multidisciplinary programme that is sustained by a generous cross-departmental teaching team. Up to ten departments have been involved in the delivery of the programme’s modules, ranging across: economics; history, sociology and politics; Spanish; Irish; and film studies. The MA, then, offers an international and transhistorical education in the differential histories and legacies of empire. In broader terms, the MA has been affiliated with many of the leading figures in Irish postcolonial studies, including Gibbons and Lloyd, as well as those ‘left’ critics who, though sympathetic to postcolonialism’s critique of imperial modernity, would otherwise demur from its culturalist accents, in particular, Eagleton. In recent years the Department of English at NUI Maynooth has been consolidating its position as an equivalent centre of postcolonial excellence. The department has instituted two new MA programmes that draw on its strategic recruitment patterns of recent years: the MA in Empire, Culture and Postcolonialism and an MA in Twentieth Century Irish Writing and Cultural Theory. In many ways Maynooth seems to have assumed the position of a more dynamic postcolonial hub than Galway, and the Department of English hosts a number of scholars who have been at the forefront of contemporary debates in Irish postcolonial studies – all of whom are cited in my survey: Cleary, Graham, McCarthy, Emer Nolan, and Moynagh Sullivan. In contrast to the MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUI Galway, the MA in Empire, Culture and Postcolonialism at Maynooth is heavily serviced by the Department of English. This is not necessarily a drawback, given the expertise of its staff in this area, but it does point up a distinction in the respective foci of both MA programmes. Galway seems to provide a more international, multidisciplinary grounding; whereas Maynooth draws upon its resources in the Department of English to attend to the politics of





‘representation’ in postcolonial studies. However, where the Maynooth programme is additive to its Galway counterpart is in its attention to issues of race; its concentration on Ireland and postcolonial studies; and its innovative employment of imperial case studies from Palestine, the Belgian Congo, and India. What is crucial about both programmes is the extent to which both underscore the idea that studies of imperialism are historically grounded both in representation and in harsh material realities, and that both emphasise the continuing relevance of such ‘thinking tools’ to the contemporary world. Yet, as Huggan warns, and as I discuss subsequently, both programmes are differentially part of a wider economy of ideas, personalities, and institutional politics, and thus are open to necessary metacritical challenges. Likewise, and as Cleary is patently aware, these programmes, like all university programmes, are consumer products. And we must be conscious of the fact that, although they assert, and strive to inculcate, radical thinking and historical understanding, they too can be implicated in the perpetuation of a postcolonial ‘alterity industry’. This is not to say that either of these programmes is culpable of any of these specific charges, but merely to signal their contiguity with the economy of the ‘postcolonial’ charted by Huggan, and to lay claim to a space for the Irish context in his survey.

Irish metacritique What might be termed the ‘first wave’ interventions in Irish postcolonial studies have been complemented by a form of metacriticism through the work of Colin Graham, Gerry Smyth, Linda Connolly, Joe Cleary, Richard Kirkland and Conor McCarthy. There is now a prevailing interest in effectively theorising Irish postcolonial theory itself. These interventions have assessed the theoretical corpus and trajectory of Irish postcolonial theory, and have both offered original modes of theoretical development and/or highlighted the limitations of postcolonial theory thus far. These metacritical interventions accord with Eugene O’Brien’s assertion that, ‘just as Derrida and Lacan problematise the aetiology of meaning, so theoretical writing must interrogate theoretical writing if it is not to fall upon a “tu quoque” charge of preferential reading’ (2000: 52). While earlier Irish, and international, postcolonial criticism has a tangible political edge in its frequently ‘oppositional’ or diametric discursive examination, Bhabha and Spivak, among others, have furnished postcolonial theory with ‘a broader range of theoretical options’ (Hooper, 2002: 7). And such theoretically grounded



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interventions have resulted in the problematisation of easy divisions, elisions, and certainties within colonial discourse analysis. The impending threat, however, is that such theoretical abstraction has the potential to hamstring the material, political import of postcolonialism as a discursive resource and merely revert to an inefficacious breed of conceptual abstraction. To this end Graham argues: the ‘mal archive’ which marks Irish criticism is, as Derrida suggests it must be, ‘a token of the future’; this ‘token’ is, in turn, bound to ‘the possibility of a forgetfulness’ ... Archival ‘token’ and the futurology of ‘Ireland’ then find themselves caught in the supplemented cycle promising and forgetting which is Irish criticism. (2001: 35) Graham diagnoses a promise of fulfilment in the act of curiosity or in the critical act. The possibility of alternative futures, of moving beyond the immediate or the present, is inextricable from the deployment of a critical language. Criticism, then, nurtures utopian possibilities and Graham’s most sustained intervention thus far, Deconstructing Ireland, is partly a survey of the modes in which theoretical, literary, visual, and historiographical declensions of the utopian have been active within Irish culture in the twentieth century. The divination and the mobilisation of ‘promising’ critical languages are underwritten by a desire for change; the critical act harbours a revolutionary possibility. Whether focused on the present, telescoping the past or unstitching the exercise of power in politics, culture and economics, the critical act contains a revolutionary impulse. Theoretical postcolonial criticism should emanate from an ethics of disaffection, but the theoretical idioms of contemporary cultural theory frequently stray from this sense of material disaffection and often become an exercise in verbose vanity. These theoretical excesses are exactly what Graham terms ‘the supplemented cycle of promising and forgetting’ (2001: 35). In the eyes of many critics, postcolonial studies has mutated into a fashionable academic trend, and has, in, material terms, become a publishing industry phenomenon. While the tropes and paradigms of such a politico-cultural resource have gained a wide currency, concurrently there is a burgeoning concern, evidenced in recent interventions, with respect to the structural lexicon or theoretical idioms of Irish postcolonial analysis. Specifically, the Irish critics alluded to above have initiated a self-reflexive dialectic within Irish postcolonial studies. The swift importation of terminology or critical vocabulary; the legitimacy of comparative, postcolonial methodologies; and the ‘materiality’




of postcolonial interventions are among the most fundamental issues registered within this metadiscursis. To these basic concerns might be added the question: are the conceptual tropes of postcolonial theory operative in such a way that ‘earlier events’ become mere functions of indicative linguistic or theoretical lexicons? Simply put, is there a sense in which history becomes the object of retrospective theory, or as Smyth asserts ‘it is a sacrifice of history to theory’ (1995: 28)? The designation of a metacritique of Irish postcolonial studies is a matter of ‘epistemological vigilance’ (Bourdieu, 1996: xiii); those who read must also be read. While the expansion, and what I see as a ‘deepening’, of postcolonial theory has been and is dismissed perfunctorily as little besides a voguish academic cachet, its limits are not internally imposed but conversely derive largely from its external characterisation as an academic–theoretical menace. It is precisely the absence of a concerted cross-disciplinary will that constitutes the current limitations of postcolonial discourse. Effectively, the project of postcolonial metacritique, of which this monograph is an element, answers in parvo Conor McCarthy’s invocation for a form of critical self-reflection. Each critical intervention perforce assumes or exercises a degree of authority, but is merely, in this case, the authority to initiate such a ‘beginning’, to divine a thread or a logic to the confluence of ideational possibilities and genealogies that are housed under the rubric of Irish postcolonial criticism. In his delineation of ‘The Critic’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’ Benjamin accents the combative nature of the critic’s vocation and the critical milieu. In the opening two theses, Benjamin argues, firstly, that ‘the critic is the strategist in the literary battle’, and secondly, he warns that ‘he who cannot take sides should keep silent’ (1979: 66). Benjamin emphatically jettisons any pretensions to critical objectivity and implicitly infers the moral and ethical implications and responsibilities of critical intervention. His theses, then, are not so much speculations as bald demands on critical constituencies. Such critico-philosophical invocations are easily applied to current debates on postcolonial criticism, including its Irish declension, as many recent interventions within Irish postcolonial studies are overtly concerned with the practical possibilities of abstracted critical debate and its economy of discursive strategies and theoretical language. Indeed, Gerry Smyth articulates such metacritical sentiments when he concludes that ‘it is no use congratulating ourselves for deconstructing the paradoxes of colonial imposition if that liberatory gesture occurs within a discursive landscape mapped in advance by the colonial encounter’ (1999b: 30).




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Smyth reiterates one of the foundational concerns of both feminist critics and women’s historians vis-à-vis the theoretical and historiographical infiltration of their projects by post-structuralist methodology. In Benjamin’s terms, Smyth’s remarks indict what are essentially self- defeating critical tactics in broader representational encounters. A similar point is made by Nandy in his psychological discursis on colonial relations, a point directly drawn on by Smyth. Smyth’s metacritique of oppositional theoretical discourse is galvanised by Nandy’s assertion that colonialism ‘creates a culture in which the ruled constantly tempted to fight their rulers within the psychological limits set by the ruler’ (1983: iii). Postcolonial criticism is charged with the task of mining original discursive strategies or critical manoeuvres if a representative or emancipatory critical language is to escape the gravitational pull of colonial discourse, or if it is to avoid the institution of new forms of self-referential hegemony. Societies require both creative and critical representation, and Smyth underscores the centrality of the critical act in constructing viable cultural spaces through which national identity can be verbalised. He notes: A present-day shift in emphasis to critical discourse, therefore, signals a recognition that there can be no decolonising literature, no national culture of resistance, before a prefiguring critical discourse creates a series of social and institutional spaces in which a culture and its particular effects can function and have meaning. (1999b: 33) Criticism, in Smyth’s argument, is revealed as an innately ambivalent practice; it holds the germ of imaginative, creative possibility in clearing such cultural spaces, but equally it withholds in its ‘function in validating, refining, and policing the cultural acts wherein the national narrative is performed’ (1999b: 33). Criticism contains the prospect of future change, but, as Smyth warns, it also imposes its own naturalising order on political and cultural fragments. In this spirit Smyth outlines, at length, the charges laid against postcolonial theory: ‘its elision of history, its textual fetishism, its exorbitant prose, its inability to register outside the institution, and its lack of self-consciousness with regard to its own function within wider politico-economic temporalities’ (1999a: 212). In support of his argument Smyth has invoked Aijaz Ahmad, who himself has concluded that the majority of postcolonial theory constitutes little more than a ‘conversation among academic professionals’




(Smyth, 1999a: 214). Notwithstanding the critical and historiographical initiatives of groups like the Subaltern studies collective, Smyth divines no genuine emancipatory prospect within postcolonial criticism in its current forms. In Smyth’s view there is no liberation from the discursive web of colonial discourse, or, in Nandy’s phrase, from ‘the products of the imperial culture’ (1983: iii). The representational, both political and verbal, liberation of subaltern or marginalized narratives through postcolonial or subaltern critical–historiographical strategies, is excessively conditional on the medium of liberation. In a conclusion that is resignatory in its relinquishing of effective critical agency, Smyth writes: ‘A strategy based on the parodic disruption of “normal” relations can quite easily become the sign of marginality, a psychotic, exotic realm of activity beyond meaning and intention, drained of any potential for practical intervention’ (1999b: 43). Smyth’s conclusion recalls Said’s earlier delineation of the institutional domestication of radical cultural theory within academic departments. Not only are marginality and liminality contained in their normalisation as ‘signs’ of oppression, but, as Said argues: the irony is that it has been the university’s practice to admit the subversions of cultural theory in order to some degree to neutralize them by fixing them in the status of academic subspecialities. So now we have the curious spectacle of teachers teaching theories that have been completely displaced – wrenched is the better word – from their contexts. (1993: 389) Smyth has engaged in a necessary and developing metacritique of Irish postcolonial theory and has provided a valuable, admittedly summary, critique of postcolonial theory, and he adumbrates its fundamental institutional bias, noting that ‘as the potential for critics and historians to engage with wider intellectual issues and scholarly endeavours has increased so a greater self-consciousness with regard to issues of methodology and archive has emerged’ (1999: 211). Smyth notes the diversity of intellectual participants in contemporary postcolonial theory, and he points to a tangible deficiency in current critical practice. While the borders of academic disciplines have been diluted in an interdisciplinary dialectic, the nature of this cross-pollinating discourse has not been conclusively critiqued. Although this interdisciplinary coordination may seem unequivocally productive, and while it has the potential to foster heretofore-unrealised critical insight, the very fact of its academic location has yet to be thoroughly analysed. It is Smyth’s contention




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that it remains all too easy for theory, and the intellectuals who engage with it, to remain aloof from social action and to avoid active, political participation. Postcolonial theory’s ‘exorbitant prose’, then, is identified as the means by which it has become little more than an ‘academic conversation’. Smyth’s contention that postcolonial theory is characterised by a level of ‘textual fetishism’ echoes the work of many of the critics broached in Chapter 5. However, Smyth’s critique is designed as a theoretical corrective rather than a polemical caricature. The elision of the practical–political is achieved through this practice of textual fetishism, as an overdependence on cultural homologies serves to preclude a materially active praxis. The inherent danger identified by Smyth is that there has been a ‘reconfiguration of the political as merely a matter of reading/writing skills’ (1999: 212). In other words, the imbrication of postmodernism, post-structuralism and postcolonialism has created a critical plain that is no longer cognisant of ‘the material dimensions’ (O’Dowd, 1988: 8). In Smyth’s view, so long as ‘the material dimensions’ are marginalised, the possibility of creativity through discontinuity is diminished. Within his critical–theoretical purview, then, the containment afforded by ‘sacrificing history to theory’ has been embraced within Irish postcolonial criticism (1995: 28).

Criticism, utopianism or futurology? In his essay ‘A warmer memory: speaking of Ireland’, Graham throws into relief the conceptual nomenclature of ‘Irish Studies’ and ‘Ireland’. The materiality of cultural critique recedes, therefore, as the favoured deployment of paradigmatic typologies and conceptual tropes both envelope and distantiate any semblance of Irish ‘reality’. Perhaps overstating the case slightly, Graham concludes: The teasing gap between the modern and ‘the non-modern’, between concrete definition and continually deferred definition, has become such a trope of Irish criticism that we might wonder whether a fuller analysis of Irish criticism in the last century would not reveal this to be self-fulfilling function of criticism itself, rather than the inevitable and serious game of pursuit of national and literary explication which it again and again reappears as. (2001: 54) By invoking Barthes’ Michelet and Albert Memmi, Graham alludes to the impossibility of critically ‘representing’ history from below – just as Spivak’s subaltern cannot speak, can the endeavours of books such as





Theorising Ireland, Reinventing Ireland, or Inventing Ireland ever approximate to an adequate sense of ‘Ireland’? He concludes, ‘put simply, if Ireland existed self-evidently, why would we need to examine it, contest it, invent it, state its anomalies, or write it?’ (2002b: 38). Similarly, in Deconstructing Ireland, he interrogates the dim intellectual prospect that Irish criticism has become an end in itself; that the induction of the reading strategies of post-structuralism and the attendant catachrestic theorisations have revealed little besides Irish critics’ fascination with Irish criticism and concomitantly ‘a “cited”, quoted version of itself [Ireland] which is both excessive and phantasmal’ (Graham, 2001: xi). The multifarious impulses of Irish criticism have, in recent decades, convened around a series of identitarian binaries. Salient issues of tradition/modernity; nationalism/unionism; postcolonialism/revisionism and ‘the past’/‘the future’, ostensibly operative in oppositional voices, have become entrenched in a cacophony of what might be called debate without genuine debate. The will to radical self-critique is absent as a discursive uniformity and critical self-obsession produce a series of ‘supposedly adversarial positions’ (Graham, 2001: 52). In effect, the degree to which ‘supposedly adversarial positions’ become entwined, in particular postcolonial theory and revisionist criticism, hints at a sense of mutual dependence: the vigour of ‘opposition’ reduces both to functions of each other’s discourse. As Graham notes: ‘the power of these repetitious patterns in Irish criticism is that in their phoenix narrative both the moment of destruction and restitution have a drama which postpones and drowns out other voices’ (2001: 52). Criticism’s multiplicity is silenced or whitewashed by the necessary assumption and/or allocation of aesthetic/political positions: an effective colour-coded index of Irish politico-cultural commentary. Graham argues: Giving ‘Ireland’ a meaning which fills out the term comfortably is seemingly the underwriting principle of Irish criticism’s existence, with the aesthetic, the cultural, the generic and the ‘minor’ all given a presence within critical writing on Ireland by their contribution as slivers of ‘Ireland’, which are temporarily imagined as hived off from the undisrupted, unseeable whole. (2001: 66) Implicit within Graham’s overview of Irish criticism is the sense of ambivalence diagnosed by Smyth. Criticism is a primary function of identity-politics; equally it is invigorated with both consolidatory and liberationary capacities. However, behind the sense of expectation



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(Graham, 2001: 67), with its superficial transformative face, lies a debilitating experience of delay. The critical language of change mutates into an idiom of deferral, which can just as easily be construed as an ideology of (always already) delayed liberation. Between Smyth and Graham, it seems, we see the historical centrality of the critical act in the creation of cultural space, but likewise we are forewarned of its naturalising and ‘self-fulfilling’ tropes. Eagleton, in fact, articulates the crux of Graham’s critique, in his reflection on the nature of an emancipatory socialist praxis. Eagleton writes: Socialism belongs to the capitalist epoch as much as does the stock exchange, and like any emancipatory theory is preoccupied with putting itself progressively out of business. Emancipatory politics exist to bring about the material conditions which spell their own demise, and so always have some peculiar self-destruct device built into them. (1988: 7) Graham’s argument, then, would seem to suggest that Irish cultural criticism inoculates itself against its own destruction. In extending its own life span, Irish criticism refuses to confront, or foment, the crisis of its own demise, without which it merely services circuitous abstraction.

Splitting the subaltern or ‘epistemological necrophilia’5 In this his reputation was great, though perhaps not equal to his merits; for it happens here, as in other departments of human society, that, however the subalterns may furnish wisdom and skill, the principals exclusively possess the éclat.6 In his classic 1794 novel, Caleb Williams, William Godwin deploys a term that has generated, and continues to generate, a lateral theoretical conversation within contemporary postcolonial studies: subaltern. Godwin draws on the original etymology of the term, which has its roots in the sixteenth century and designated a low military ranking. Yet the plight and endurances of the protagonist, Caleb Williams, resonate in many of our contemporary critical debates. Effectively, Caleb becomes an affect of power, most obviously with respect to his master/ pursuer, Falkland. Notably he undergoes processes of representational ‘layering’; he discovers versions of his own narrative in rumour; gossip; in the blurbs on wanted posters; and in popular broadside publications.





Within the historiographical methodologies of subaltern studies, modernity/counter-modernity and speech/silence are dependent intimates; likewise the exercise of power is intimate with the experience of powerlessness. Centrality dissolves without the presence of marginality. From this perspective, then, Godwin’s text is an ethical and a critical forebear of contemporary subaltern readings. It is neither a treatise on counter-hegemonic usurpation nor a celebration of the ethical superiority of disenfranchisement. Rather, through the intimacy of power with its oppressed ‘other’, Godwin hints at the possibility of subversive alterity. Caleb possesses, in a Benjaminian sense, the narrative possibility to disrupt the surface of the ‘present’ narrative; his intimate knowledge of Falkland’s murderous transgression is coeval with his own exile, persecution and misfortune. One of the lessons of Godwin’s text, then, and the responsibility of the intersected projects of subaltern studies and postcolonial historiography, is the negotiation of an ethical, critical idiom with which to subvert the consistent ‘writing over’ of such marginalised constituencies by ‘legitimate’, authoritative discourses. Epifanio San Juan Jr has produced a full-length polemic on the limitations of postcolonial theory, an edition ambitiously, and rather misleadingly, entitled Beyond Postcolonial Theory. The most provocative of San Juan Jr’s chapters is his discussion of postcolonial idioms, specifically the deployment of Gramsci’s notion of subalternity in historiography and cultural history. He argues: ‘In this sense, “subaltern” becomes a moment in the strategy of a fundamental class striving for hegemony (consent armored with force) by establishing the “integral state” via a political party as leader of a historic bloc striving to universalize an expansive, self-reflexive, critical world-view’ (1998: 87). What is most notable is the definitional or ‘locational’ conflicts written onto subalternity as a social, political, class, or gendered constituency, from its etymological provenance as a sixteenth-century military designation to Godwin’s class-based deployment and through to Gramsci’s Marxist mobilisation. Latterly, subaltern studies, David Lloyd in the Irish case and postcolonial studies at large have broadened, not always helpfully, the definitional resonance of subalternity. It no longer retains an exclusive class-based import, but in fact is in danger of becoming an inert signifier of a universalised sense of oppression. Its theoretical utility rests, perhaps, as a signal of oppression rather than as a terminological embodiment of marginality. Subaltern historiography is concerned, then, with a differentiated project of historical and literary representation; it is a diffusive ethical reading of wilful elision, distortion and control.



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San Juan Jr further notes: ‘Gramsci holds that subalternity is a condition marked by the absence of a will or project on the part of a social group to achieve an integral, organic, critical self-consciousness’ (1998: 95). The Subaltern Studies historiographical collective, through its federated and regular publication of research papers, is assailed as attempting to appropriate or to ventriloquise such a ‘critical self-awareness.’ Representational mediation is charged as an insidious sequestration of individual and/or communal autonomy. The ethical issue thereby raised is: should no effort at historical representation be exercised? Is such a course more ethically pure than any effort at representation? Alternatively, do initiatives, such as Subaltern Studies, effectively accentuate the inarticulacy of subaltern constituencies, or is this inarticulacy a function of the effort itself? Are historical representations designed to fail in order to underscore the traditional marginalisation or elision of historical communities and practices? The writing of history is a philosophical, ethical and literary task; it is emphatically not exclusively a matter of establishing integrated, fact-based narratives. Contrarily, the most pressing ethical concern of historical writing and writing on history is, and should be, the disestablishment of the mechanisms that inaugurate ‘established facts’. The represented constituencies of a historical narrative are ‘voiced’, but behind the unified historical enunciation are necessary, and resounding, silences. To invoke both Benjamin and San Juan Jr, then, subaltern historiography is concerned with interrogating the vocalised authority of historical utterance. It does so by tracing, or at least acknowledging, the enforced narrative silence that actually breathes life into the represented historical enunciation. Such a conclusion, then, pertains to the theoretical idioms that manifest within subalternist readings, as the articulation of theoretical representation is also a matter of cultural politics. The ethical legitimacy derives from the attempt to expose both imperial and state-nationalist ‘lies of silence’. Neither postcolonial studies nor subaltern studies, then, are simply projects concerned with representation in language; as Spivak admits, even the return of linguistic representation is not successful. The languages of cultural and historical representation are frequently stained with the legacies of the diverse experiences of global and capitalist imperialism. In the end all relationships and dialogues are manifestly political, and perhaps the task is to successfully foment an ethical, self-reflexive awareness of these power disparities or to initiate dialogic relations that circumvent the structures of imperial authorities. These dialogues are not ‘answering back’ to the enunciations of power in any oppositional or reactionary sense, but are legitimate and radical




alternatives based on alternative solidarity and non-hierarchical relations. It is the capacity and the willingness of postcolonial communities to recognise and appreciate their mutual silences as forms of resistant articulation. Postcolonial reading and writing extend beyond the limitations of the integrated text; resistance and subversive representation (or the subversion of representation) inhabit the cacophonous silences that accentuate the register of the instituted historical text/voice.

An Irish subalternity? The rhetoric of colonialism can only arise or manifest itself from within the colony or from contact with the colony; thereby the ideologies that came to characterise colonialism – racism, essentialism, tourism – can only be seen to become animated during colonialism. Thus colonialism, to an extent, creates itself, just as Deane and Said assert that cultures ‘invent’ or ‘begin’ themselves; the discourses that came to represent global imperialism were neither natural nor entirely preconceived. Likewise, the tropes of cultural and postcolonial criticism must be designed, firstly, to problematise these colonialist ideologies, but equally the language and the theoretical concepts of postcolonial studies must not be assumed as natural and freestanding. Like the critic–intellectual who engages with it, postcolonial theorisation must be fully cognisant of the fact that ‘ “intellectual work” also has its protocols’ (Smyth, 1999a: 217). The proliferation of terminology and paradigms within the corpus of Irish postcolonial studies, a diverse and by no means unified corpus, has introduced concepts such as hybridity, subalternity, mimicry, the ‘other’, liminality, and irony to debates on Irish cultural and political history. Nevertheless, this discursive trend must not proceed in terms of a rarefied universal coda or insular definitions, but demands that critics rethink ‘the concepts of irony, hybridity, mimicry the contact zone and transculturation in the Irish context will produce readings of Irish culture which arise out of a recognition of the claustrophobic intensity of the relationship between Ireland and Britain’ (Graham, 1994: 41). In an effort to bypass the recurrent default to the concept of ‘the nation’ within certain facets of Irish cultural criticism, Graham has examined the notion of subalternity, as we have seen itself a laterally employed concept within the field of postcolonial theory. Graham reiterates his constant theoretical refrain in his efforts to contextualise his discussion; he asserts: ‘no longer can the post-colonial nation be regarded as a triumph of the labours of oppressed people ... [the nation] is itself an over-homogenizing, oppressive ideology which elides




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the multiplicity of subaltern classes and groups’ (1996: 365). Initially Graham’s critique of nationalism, vis-à-vis its subsummation of gendered and subaltern discourses, rehearses many of the arguments formulated by Lloyd, and equally he recognises the ostensible role of nationalism as a neo-imperial, conservative discourse, which is monumentalised in the state-form. His critique addresses Irish nationalist discourse, and Graham dismisses the most conspicuous manifestation of nationalist sentiment in the form of ‘the overarching umbrella of Irish nationalism and its end-product state’, which constitutes a discourse of rationalisation that is complicit in assuming and ‘enforcing the subaltern status of women and other marginalized groups’ (1996b: 367). Graham’s examination of Irish anticolonial nationalism’s evolution rather than its revolution echoes Lloyd’s analysis of state-led nationalisms, which assume a hegemonic status in the ‘postcolonial moment’. However, Graham is not satisfied with Lloyd’s critical alternative wherein he (Lloyd) ‘reinscribes nationalism as a subversive force in cultural theory’ (1996b: 367). Lloyd’s critique of nationalism is centred on the concepts of ‘adulteration’ and ‘melancholy survivals’, both of which are restless and residual manifestations of marginalised discourses. As we have noted, Lloyd, like Graham, is committed to problematising the homogenising telos of the nation state; he does not believe that the teleological result of nationalist struggle is necessarily enshrined in the formation of the state. However, as Graham points out, Lloyd fails to sanction any telos other than perpetual discontinuity and fragmentation, indeed, ‘Lloyd’s understanding [of] nationalism [is] as always insurgent but never hegemonous’ (1996b: 368). As Graham correctly diagnoses, Lloyd’s reading ‘contorts the ideology of nationalism by separating it from and fetishizing the concept of the state’ (1996b: 368). Equally, Lloyd constructs a corollary fetish of the subaltern itself by ‘ethically endowing’ the notion of subalternity (Graham, 1996b: 368). Lloyd’s interpretation is limited by his assertion of the presumed naturalness of the subaltern class and its fetishisation as an ethically pure formation. Tying the ideal of Irish critical futurology to a specific metatheoretical concern, Graham notes: Ethically endowing the position of the subaltern can lead to a revelling in the insurgency of nationalism or feminism which easily slides into a continuous and necessary restatement of their oppressed position. Indeed it forms an academic subject which would be lost were it to progress ... Subalternity, decried as a politically unjust status by those who speak about it, will simultaneously function as an





Lloyd’s inflection of ‘subalternity’ is, Graham notes, based on a presumption that the oppressed subaltern resides in a state of perpetual insurgency. Contrary to Gramsci’s original explication of a counterhegemonic subaltern, wherein seizure of the state was a material telos, Lloyd does not theorise any form of hegemonic consolidation or representation in a usurped state-formation. In renegotiating the political animus of the subaltern class, Lloyd, it seems, institutes an ethical fetish; the oppressed remain unsullied by the demands or responsibilities of power. The purity of the subaltern is maintained by its renunciation of the perceived legitimacy of political hegemony; in effect it retains the romantic purity and the ethical superiority of a perpetual revolutionary location. Furthermore, as Heather Laird argues at length in Subversive Law in Ireland, Lloyd’s disavowal of any form of ‘alternative authority’ through liberation is symptomatic of the failings of recent post-structuralist inflected subaltern historiography. Laird’s case, as we shall see, is indebted to the work of Neil Lazarus, and she aims to introduce a transformative, neo-Marxist methodology to the reading of Irish colonial history, which does not privilege the perpetual guerrilla tactics of Lloyd’s post-structuralist historiography. Lloyd’s work embodies ‘a fusion of “Foucauldian” approaches to power and a poststructuralist emphasis on the decentred, the fragmented and the heterogeneous [that] has led to both an increase in the importance of marginality and difficulty envisioning an end to the dominant’ (Laird, 2005: 133). Lloyd, as we have noted, acknowledges theoretical debts to both Gramsci and Fanon, but in his compulsion to critique, and reject, the state he defers to the dissimulating tropes of Chakrabarty and Chatterjee. Ultimately, for these critics: The problem with this aspect of Lloyd’s work, however, is that, in the terms of the approach which he adopts, the ability of these elements to function as a form of resistance is largely dependent on their continued marginal position in relation to the dominant. Lloyd in this determination to avoid confronting the state through its own logic, constructs a model of resistance that runs the risk of posing no great threat to dominant power structures. (Laird, 2005: 155–6) In tactically sidestepping the dichotomous relations of modernity/ tradition, hegemony/counter-hegemony, Lloyd’s subaltern recalibrates



invocation of an unspoilt consciousness, pure because disempowered. (2001: 110)

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the ethical economy of postcolonial studies. Subaltern constituencies that embody this sense of ethical alterity populate Lloyd’s modernities; the issue of power relations is not simply that of binary opposition, or perpetual insurgency, as Graham would argue. Lloyd’s subaltern is not actively insurgent, but its very unconscious cultural practices are subversive, very often incommensurable, resistant effects. The project of incorporating a subalternist perspective into readings of Irish history is not to enter a bi-vocal repudiation of the state or its historical narrative. Critics attempt to highlight its elisions, interrogate the motives for such elision and represent the victims of such historical editing. The viability of political and cultural communities is not in question; the authority enshrined in the state and its role in both creating and essentially embodying attenuated political and cultural communities requires subaltern histories. In Lloyd’s political and cultural schema subalternity constitutes a struggle for representation, political and verbal, rather than a simple struggle for hegemony. Nevertheless, Emer Nolan, reading through Ulysses, points to the tropic constitution of the subaltern condition. She notes: If Ulysses accords with the paradigm of subaltern history, it already illustrates the irony of such a history – in announcing that articulation has been denied to some, we necessarily articulate their case on their behalf. This is the difference between writing about subalternity (criticism) and being subaltern. Can a subaltern be aware of being so and remain subaltern? Or, more precisely, can such an awareness be articulated without loss of the condition which is defined by inarticulacy? (2000: 90) From an ethical perspective, then, can we respond to Nolan’s question (a question that is a consistent, perhaps the most consistent, interrogation of postcolonial subalternity)? If the subaltern is coercively inarticulate, mis- or non-represented within imperial or nationalist histories, then surely this constitutes a profound ethical and political strategy. Therefore, in attempting to represent, to trace or to articulate the histories of subaltern communities or individuals, postcolonial studies must signal an ethical criticism. Neither subaltern studies nor postcolonial theory at large is constitutively definitive or accomplished. Nolan’s point is entirely valid, questioning as it does the ethical texture of a theoretical language and critical position; however, such questions ultimately are characteristically limited. Postcolonial theory diagnoses ethical problems/disparities and has the potential to suggest alternative




ethical frameworks; it does not and cannot prescribe definitive ethical solutions. In historically representing subaltern constituencies, there are clearly inalienable spatial elements; oppression is not simply enacted over time but, as Gramsci recognised, it unfolds within and between concrete, spatial and territorial contexts. Reflecting on Gramsci’s spatial conception of political struggle, Said notes: ‘He thought in geographical terms, and the Prison Notebooks are a kind of map of modernity. They’re not a history of modernity, but his notes really try to place everything, like a military map; I mean that there was always some struggle going on over territory’ (Viswanathan, 2004: 195). In accenting the spatial materiality of Gramsci’s theoretical writings, Said reminds us of the need to police, discriminate and frequently to disown complacent idiomatic parsing in postcolonial analyses. Postcolonial studies can, and must, learn from the urgency placed by Gramsci on the demands of what Said calls ‘discrepant realities ... on the ground’ (Viswanathan, 2004: 195). Extending the notion of a spatialised subalternity to an Irish context, Kevin Whelan points to the subaltern value of Ireland’s cultural landscape. Whelan considers such a resource as ‘potentially a democratic document from which can be recuperated the history of the undocumented. In this approach, history is reconstructed by seeing the landscape through the eyes of those who made it’ (1996b: 127). While there is a mitigating effect in articulating subaltern histories, the effort, when based on liberatory ethical principles, is preferable to an entire historical subsummation, elision, distortion, or disenfranchisement. Lloyd locates moments of cultural, political and economic alterity within subaltern histories, and equally what Shahid Amin calls ‘historical fieldwork’ is a vital element of counter-modern narrative participation.7 The metatheoretical readings of Graham, Laird and Nolan on subalternity in an Irish context are reminders of the exigency of a self-reflective critical ethics within postcolonial studies and contemporary historiographical practice.8 Critical language and critical practice, then, are not excused from the ethical economy of their own investigations. As Deane writes: Like any academic endeavour, postcolonial scholarship needs to use generalizations and abstract categories; it is constantly in danger of creating its own theoretical universalisms. Thus various universalizing tendencies – political and theoretical – sit uneasily alongside critiques of universalism and a preoccupation with the local and particular. And postcolonial studies vacillates between two ethical





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Free-play or theoretical labels? In his metacritical engagement with the concept of hybridity, Richard Kirkland asserts: Postcolonial theoretical terminology has become normative within Irish Studies ... [for] many critics what is troubling in such a development is not merely the ethical or teleological imperatives of postcolonial theory but the fact that despite Ireland’s status as one of the first nations to decolonize, the incomplete nature of this project has, until recently, inhibited the development of what can be considered an indigenous mode of postcolonial thinking. (2002: 53) As we have seen, one of the primary indictments of postcolonial theorisation is its ‘easy transferability’, within which the concrete, material circumstances of postcolonial societies are elided or remain undifferentiated. Kirkland offers a suitably metacritical caveat to Irish postcolonial discourse, urging ‘that the postcolonial can be perceived through Ireland rather than, crucially, Ireland being perceived through the postcolonial’ (2002: 53). While accepting the employment of broadly comparative theoretical models, Kirkland does so only in so far as the integral specificities of (post)colonial contexts are differentiated. Indeed, in deference to the materiality of postcolonial analyses, Kirkland resurrects Fanonian anticolonial discourse. However, his inflection of Fanon’s discourse differs sharply from Kiberd’s strictly modular version; such a modulated ‘transfer’ is an anathema to the specificity of place and sensitivity toward divergent material conditions canvassed by Kirkland. Alternatively, he enlists Fanon’s work in terms of its commitment to, and resolute belief in, ‘the total liberation [which] concerns all sectors of the personality’ (2002: 55). The postcolonial imperative is sanctioned to the extent that it addresses the diversity and particularities of given historical, colonial contexts. Postcolonial perspectives enable specific historical readings of specific colonial conditions, and postcolonial theory provides a battery of discursive resources with which to address these issues. Kirkland echoes Smyth in his conviction that postcolonial theory has compromised its integral, and founding, relation with ‘decolonising practice’ (2002: 62).



imperatives – the advocation of universal rights and the injunction to respect the other. The first can simply replicate imperialism, the second can lapse into ethically rudderless relativism. (2000: 13)


Following Graham’s disavowal of an ‘ethically endowed’ subaltern, Kirkland broaches another lexically postcolonial condition or typology: hybridity. By invoking the concept of hybridity, Kirkland firstly interrogates a key trope within postcolonial and cultural studies, and crucially examines its deployment at the level of institutional or academic discourse. What is at stake for Kirkland, then, is not only the radical deconstruction of hybridity as a viable critical trope, but equally the active forms it assumes within Irish postcolonial studies. The development of an effective metacritique of postcolonial theory is at least partly predicated on the policing of both its terminological politics and its specific and comparative applications. Thus, Kirkland’s explication of hybridity, and its functions, is part of a larger critical project that is designed to foreclose the facile domestication and/or partial ‘celebration’ of postcolonial idioms. By encasing hybridity in a form of apolitical and celebratory pluralism, postcolonial critics endow artists with ‘a prophetic function ... one which operates at a level remote from “practical politics” ’ (Kirkland, 1999: 223). Again, we return to the notion of discursive fetishisation that canvasses the idealised margins or the purified peripheries.9 Essentially, it is an effort to destabilise postcolonial theoretical tropes within Irish literary and cultural studies, which can, through a process of normalisation, disabuse criticism of its interventionist responsibilities. Hybridity is canvassed as a potentially enabling and subversive discursive, as well as political, location within postcolonial studies. Its syncretic fabric is demarcated as a site of ‘slippage’ and cross-pollinated potency in both colonial and postcolonial societies. In contrast to strictly binary critiques of identity formation, hybridity is perceived as a dualistic position of both/and, in which, through a consistent deferral of identity, the subject is empowered. The indistinct or hybrid identity, then, operates within a Saidian or Foucauldian continuum in which naming or identity recognition constitutes a form of oppressive or controlling hegemony. The instability of reference thus enshrined in hybrid identities or cultures is perceived as a means of liberatory cultural politics. For Homi Bhabha resistance is located in repetition and displacement, rather than in direct opposition or contradiction. Within this framework the hybrid, or hybridity, become integral moments of affective subversion. To this end Bhabha writes: ‘hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of colonialist disavowal, so that other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’ (1994: 114). The naturalised symmetry of self/other is



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dissolved in Bhabha’s dialectic, as the anchored fixities of cultural differentiation ‘are not simply there to be seen or appropriated’ (1994: 114). Resistance is not a conscious investment in a language of subversion or opposition; rather than trace effective resistance to moments of open discursive confrontation, Bhabha’s hybrid forms engender dissembling instances of discomfiting ambiguity enacted within what is termed the ‘third space’. Whereas antagonistic verbal or political confrontation and articulation accepts the centre as its locus of value, both the affective and the silent undermine in their refusal or indeterminacy. In this way the actual articulation of domination has embedded within it its own subversion, Bhabha notes: The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the circulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. (1994: 35) Ella Shohat juxtaposes the liberatory potentialities of Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ and cultural hybridity. Under the strangulating pressures of colonial dispossession, Shohat maintains, colonised societies and cultures have valid claims to ‘compensatory originarism’, a facility she defines as ‘the strategic requirement to recover (or construct) a past, even if it is a partially imaginary one’ (1995: 175). Confronted with the metrocentric discourses of post-structuralism and postmodern narrative incredulity, concrete re-enfranchisement is foreclosed. While the narrative scaffolding of oppression is dismantled under such critical appraisal, so too, Shohat feels, are avenues of minority resistance and representation. With such a contention in mind, Shohat argues against Stuart Hall, affirming that ‘the fact that identity and experience are narrated, constructed, caught up in the spiral of representation and intertextuality does not mean ... that nothing is at stake, or that the struggle is over’ (1995: 174). Shohat’s understanding of hybridity differs from Bhabha’s mischievous post-structuralist readings of colonial discourse. Whereas Bhabha’s hybrid is a function of the instability of reference inherent within the colonial enunciation, Shohat does not attribute the same level of agency to the ambivalence diagnosed by Bhabha. While Bhabha’s colonised communities resist in their affective compromise of the ‘original’, Shohat believes that ‘a celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se thus always runs the danger of appearing





to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence’ (1995: 175). Her reading of colonial hybridity, then, devalues the currency of its ambiguous performance; hence her invocation of an exigent, alternative ‘compensatory originarism’. For Shohat, the hybrid is far too enmeshed within, and dependent upon, the act of colonial transgression. As Philip Darby concludes, and further critiquing Bhabha’s resistant hybridity: ‘There is still, however, an evident reluctance to break from fixed anchorages. Even Homi Bhabha, whose work represents a new chapter in exploring the potentialities of hybridity and cultural change, is unable to dispense with the innate oppositions of the grand narrative’ (1998: 224). Despite the disruption promised by Bhabha’s hybridity, both Shohat and Darby elicit the persistence of fixed identitarian categories. Bhabha may trace paranoia, mimicry and the dissolution of meaning, but, these critics ask, is his discourse prone to the reassertion of binary thinking? In his astute appraisal of such a discursive programme, Kirkland identifies serious elisions in what is ostensibly a liberating conceptualisation. Kirkland adumbrates the proximity of hybridity and institutional self-propagation; he notes, ‘the danger remains that in evoking the subaltern category within Irish cultural studies we merely buttress the prevailing academic discourse against its other by restricting the play of the hybrid to a containing metaphor [my emphasis]’ (1999: 220). The self-preservatory instinct of institutional practices, in effect, invents a malleable yet eminently controllable ‘other’. In ostensibly tracing the evolution of a diffuse and potentially exponential politico-cultural dynamic, the institutional tropes of postcolonial theory merely sanction a toothless and purely discursive typology. Just as Graham registers the limitations of Lloyd’s fetishised subaltern, Kirkland notes just such an operation in both Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture and Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland. Through a methodology grounded in cultural historicism, both critics point to the possibility of creative, and by extension political, liberation above and beyond the rhetoric of both traditional nationalist expression and liberal modernisation. Kirkland’s intervention, then, is motivated by the need to transcend any simple recognition of cultural hybridity. By merely registering the subversive potential of allegory, or adumbrating the Fanonian architecture of ‘the literature of the modern nation’, neither Gibbons nor Kiberd ‘allow the recognition of the hybridized identity to question the frame of the relationships between subaltern, institution and nation’ (Kirkland, 1999: 222). The hybrid is not an applied or generic term or state, but an unpredictable, ambivalent series of differentiated instances, processes, and utterances. Significantly, then, Kirkland questions the sociality of



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the hybrid as operative within postcolonial theory; he concludes: ‘from an institutional perspective the postcolonial framework of the hybrid as it is emerging often appears totalising and contextually insensitive due to an inability to recognize the full epistemological instability it engenders’ (1999: 225–6). In Bhabha’s terms: Cultures come to be represented by virtue of the processes of iteration and translation through which their meanings are vicariously addressed to – through – an Other. This erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures which, when inscribed in the naturalistic sign of symbolic consciousness frequently become political arguments for the hierarchy and ascendancy of powerful cultures. (1994: 58) The political and critical force of the hybrid, then, derives less from its constitution as an antagonistic unity than from its enactment as ‘a state of being in between’ (Kirkland, 1999: 219). Kirkland’s critique of hybridity is not based on a unilateral rejection of its political potency, but rather on its apparent tenurial position within the academic institution. Rather than exploiting the provisionality of the hybrid or its transitory enunciative location, a hollow victory is construed through the metaphoric representation of marginality. Young captures the dislocating nature of Bhabha’s, and by derivation Kirkland’s, inflection of hybridity, when he states that ‘hybridity here becomes a third term which can never in fact be third because, as a monstrous invention, a miscreated perversion of its progenitors, it exhausts the differences between them’ (1995: 23). The danger, as diagnosed by Kirkland, is that the ‘exorbitant prose’ of postcolonial theory is becoming more sequestered within a containing lexicon of its own making. Through the creation of an attenuated theoretical idiom of concepts and paradigms, the gap between postcolonial and decolonising practice and postcolonial theorisation is widening. Consequently, the very real instability and heterogeneity of ‘the local space’ is elided. Kirkland’s scepticism concerning the deployment of a truly subversive hybridity, coupled with Graham’s wariness about the ethically endowed subaltern, brings into focus one of the principal problematics of contemporary Irish, and international, postcolonial criticism. Just as we have noted a form of academic institutionalisation and intellectual specialisation within postcolonial studies, such a discursive imbroglio has also precipitated a form of terminological orthodoxy. A taxonomy of postcolonial concepts





has developed wherein the theoretical tropes have become signifiers for diverse socio-political groups. The facility to cast oneself as ‘subaltern’, ‘hybrid’, or ‘marginalised’ has become a sine qua non of postcolonial respectability; it is a situation in which ‘terminology-as-type’ is operative. The task, then, as articulated in an Irish context by Kirkland, Graham, and latterly Connolly, is to represent the tropes and paradigms of postcolonial criticism in less trammelled and politically ineffectual guises. In effect, ‘an awareness of the hybrid, the heterogeneous and the anomalous should not be the catalyst for celebration’, but should produce a criticism that reneges such containing fiats in favour of a more participatory cultural politics (Kirkland, 1999, 225–6).

Colonialism as type Nicholas Dirks dispels the myth that colonialism was, in fact, a unified, paradigmatic concert of ideologies, which were systematically and consciously administered from a metropolitan centre. Rather, Dirks argues, ‘it [colonialism] was a moment when new encounters within the world facilitated the formation of categories of metropole and colony in the first place’ (1992: 6). This is not to say that a spirit of magnanimity or benignity subtended colonialism, Dirks continues: But colonialism was not only good to think. The world was full of incentives for accumulation of all kinds, from knowledge to spices, from narratives to command posts. There were compelling reasons to invent systematic beliefs about cultural differences, unifying such disparate projects as the precarious formation of national identity and the relentless exploitation of economic resources. (1992: 6–7) Colonialism, then, cannot be interrogated through discursive strategies that depend on its transhistorical or transgeographical homogeneity for their critical purchase. Arguing with respect to Irish colonial history, Joe Cleary asserts a similar point to that of Dirks. Cleary accents the contextually disparate experiences and legacies of various forms of colonialism, rejecting any templative reduction of the histories of colonialism. He argues against the mistaken assumption that ‘there is some sort of “classical” colonial or post-colonial condition’ (2004b: 253). While not diluting local or regional experiences of imperialism, in terms of chronology, race, geographical location, or indeed varieties of imperialist expansion, Cleary diagnoses the presence of cultural affinities between postcolonial societies. For Cleary, the values



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of a postcolonial paradigm are lodged in this very fact: differentiated heritages of imperialism can avail themselves of a vertiginous battery of critical resources without succumbing to a modular homogeneity. Cleary’s reading of the similarities and differences between diverse colonial crucibles is emphatic of postcolonial studies’ critical oscillation between the local and the universal. Furthermore, it recapitulates both Lloyd’s and Gibbons’s assertion of difference as a primary indice of postcolonial theoretical and ethical projects. The differential, and differentiating, projects of postcolonial studies, then, are alternatives to the homogenising unities of modernisation. Chiming with Cleary, Lloyd and Gibbons, Fauod Makki concludes: in this new geopolitical configuration, hegemonic knowledge was recast in order to make ‘sense’ of the new global order. The opposition between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, which had been intrinsic to justifying colonisation at the height of imperial incorporation, was no longer viable. The formerly colonised had to be brought out of the dialectics of colonial difference into a universalising discourse. (2004: 155) In Cleary’s view it is the very differential fabric of colonialism itself that sanctions Ireland’s inclusion within postcolonial theoretical discourses. To use Graham’s phrase, Ireland’s ‘liminal’ relation to colonialism is not, in fact, as exceptional as is widely imagined. Cleary states: Given that a wide diversity of colonial situations can exist even within a single Empire, the fundamental predicate of postcolonial studies in an Irish context is not that Ireland’s historical profile corresponded exactly to that found in other colonies, but, rather, that twentieth-century Ireland has wrestled with a complex of colonial structures, legacies, and dilemmas, many of which have also occurred, in variant forms obviously, in other former colonies across the world. (Cleary, 2004b: 253) In establishing postcolonial studies as the discursive opponent of modernisation theory, Cleary suggests that the animus of postcolonial studies is to ‘determine how Irish social and cultural development was mediated by colonial capitalism’ (2003a: 43). In other words, the mediating macrostructures of global capitalism must be interrogated in terms of their accreted local legacies across an international range of postcolonial societies. Again in an idiom that resembles both Gibbons





and Mallon, but that infers a more economistic methodology, Cleary notes: ‘postcolonial studies impels Irish Studies in the direction of conjunctural global analysis [my emphasis]’ (2003: 44). However, cultural discourses remain a crucial facet of postcolonial analyses; in MooreGilbert’s view they are ‘indispensable for a full understanding of the histories of imperialism’ (1999: 398). And it is a fact not lost on Cleary; yet, while he factors in the contributive share of cultural analysis, it ultimately remains secondary to ‘the internally contradictory structure of the modern capitalist world system’ (2003: 45). Barbara Christian vocalises the widely held suspicion that literary critical theory, from which many of the projects of contemporary postcolonial studies initially sprouted, is merely a repackaged authoritarian orthodoxy. Christian echoes many interlocutors of postcolonial studies, as she feels that the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks. I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene – that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to ‘the centre’. (1995: 459) Christian’s conclusion concisely records some of the most transparent problems of postcolonial studies’ critics. Despite a legitimate, almost Bourdieuian characterisation of academic capital, Christian’s portrait of a synchronised postcolonial conspiracy of domination over emergent, ‘new’ literatures is both reductive and paranoiac. Equally, and this is a point resolutely rebutted by Cleary, Christian attributes an excessive degree of instrumentality and uniformity to theoretical readings of emergent, marginal literatures. While there is a merit to her metatheoretical commentary on the hegemonic possibilities of critical orthodoxies, Christian’s argument seems oblivious to both the theoretical and the geographical differentials accommodated within contemporary postcolonial studies. Of far more utility is Cleary’s conclusion: The point, finally, is not to adduce whether Ireland is or is not really ‘just like’ any of these situations, since no two colonial sites are ever completely identical. It is, rather, to think the ways in which specific national configurations are always the product of dislocating intersections between local and global processes. (2003: 45)



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Bart Moore-Gilbert proposes an oscillating and interdisciplinary relation between postcolonial studies and imperial history. Dispelling the viability of disciplinary discretion and mutual abstraction, he suggests that this discursive axis is better conceived of in terms ‘of a healthy disputed border area, which simultaneously brings together and keeps distinct the fields of knowledge in question’ (1999: 409). Equally Moore-Gilbert dispels any notion of full disciplinary integration, correctly anticipating that either discretion or frontal integration would alleviate any sense of critical crisis, out of which theoretical, or possibly political, alternatives might accrue. It is a point underlined by Spivak, as she argues that ‘the performance of these tasks, of the historian and teacher of literary studies, must critically “interrupt” each other, bring each other to crisis [my emphasis]’ (1987: 241). This view confirms Paul de Man’s contention that ‘the notion of crisis and that of criticism are very closely linked, so much so that one could state that all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis’ (1989: 8). Both Spivak and Moore-Gilbert impress the ethical responsibilities of critical intervention. Through the induction of crisis, critical engagement destabilises the unitary, and unifying, impulses of ‘normalised’ disciplinary, as well as political and cultural, modalities. In de Man’s terms, such criticism brings itself to crisis as it reflects upon its own genealogy. Similarly, in diagnosing the urgency of such critical mobility, Spivak and MooreGilbert underline the exigency of denaturalising the practices of discrete disciplines through exposure to, interaction with and understanding of alternative discourses. What all of these approaches have in common is the fact that none are grounded in the production of sameness, or in the installation of bland analogies. The encountering of difference does not foreclose solidarity emerging out of shared experiences of oppression. In the mobile, ethical disciplinary and theoretical dialectics summarised above, conversant strangers foment a sense of generative crisis. Effectively crystallising such a point, and in discussing Burkean notions of justice and ethics, Gibbons invokes Uday Singh Mehta: as Uday Singh Mehta argues, it is not that Burke is rejecting reason, but his purpose is ‘to enlarge its ambit, to make it social and more passionate and more informed by the uncertain vagaries that attend and inform experience’. This provides for a more grounded, alternative cosmopolitanism in that ‘it holds out the possibility, and



Bourdieu, criticism and power


only the possibility, that through the understanding of what gives experiences their meaning two strangers may come to converse with each other, perhaps befriend each other, perhaps disagree with each other, along with the myriad other eventualities that structure where a conversation may lead and end up’. (2003b: 178) The ‘myriad other eventualities’ are precluded if discretion or insularity prevails and the conversation is never sparked into existence. Moreover, it is this ‘outward’ impulse that provokes Susan Stafford Friedman to register a similar contention; she concludes that ‘ “travel” elsewhere to other disciplines can stimulate new ways of thinking about home, particularly as learning about others dislocates, disorients, and disturbs. Travel elsewhere denaturalises home’ (2001: 507–8). As Bourdieu notes, ‘the output of an academic system, on the other hand, is determined by the absolute or relative quantity of information transmitted through language. For there are few activities which consist so exclusively as teaching in the manipulation of words’ (1994: 4). The valorisation of postcolonial perspectives by literary departments accentuates the rapport between institutional power structures and linguistic academic reading. While Bourdieu, in this case, examines the teacher/student relationship in the French higher educational system, his signalling of the linguistic excess of academic teaching, and for my purposes critique, neatly intersects with Kirkland and Graham’s admonishing reading of current postcolonial nomenclature and practice. Kirkland’s is a legitimate point; the dispatching of uncritical terminology is inherently retrograde within any analytical and political discipline. Indeed, it is an issue directly alluded to by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: ‘A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence ... As a descriptive catch-all term, “hybridity” fails to discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity: colonial imposition, obligatory assimilation, political co-option, cultural mimicry and so forth’ (1994: 42). In celebrating ‘hybridity’ or politico-cultural diversity, the critic must be cognisant of the terms of celebration, both the epistemological terms and literally the idiomatic terms. Again we return to the drama of critical ethics; objectification through categorisation serves a debilitating and futile political project. The construction of or ‘writing’ of hybridity remains a question of power, and, by investing a critical term with an overdetermined liberatory valence, postcolonial theory may in fact,



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to paraphrase Gibbons, continue to travel roads ‘patrolled by global powers’ (1996: 180). Kirkland and Graham consummately outline the pitfalls and limitations of propagating postcolonial ‘containing metaphors’, but Bourdieu goes much further. While we can point to a strategic control exerted by postcolonial theorists over un(der)-represented constituencies in terms of a distancing academic taxonomy, Bourdieu points to a subjective insecurity and self-interest in operation within academia. If we supplement the caveats of the Irish critics with Bourdieu’s reading, academia seems a riot of political manoeuvres. Not only is the language of academic theory capable of calcifying liberatory aspirations in diverse postcolonial societies, Bourdieu goes on to argue: the lecturer who foregoes the marvels of professorial language and gives methodical and explicit presentations risks appearing as a primary school teacher who has strayed into higher education or as a non-conformist who will also find the institution turned against him, even though he has answered real needs and unacknowledged expectations. (1994: 14)10 The initial part of Bourdieu’s formulation deliberately verges on the absurd, yet it does retain a certain currency in that it manifests the desire for adequacy within the academic profession. And again, while it is an extreme exemplification, it raises the key issues of control and time as essential facets of academic power; perception as a ‘primary school teacher’ is an inadequate store of symbolic capital (an inappropriate habitus within the field) and therefore precludes consecration. The latter part of the argument is germane to Irish academic discourse, indeed all forms of institutionally based organisations. Bourdieu introduces a basic ethical dimension to his explication of academic discourse by addressing the sincerity of its motivations and methods. He inquires as to whether academic language is primarily a mechanism for communication, a mechanism of pedagogical instruction or alternatively a mode of tautological self-preservation, intimately bound to the processes of careerist advancement and the dialectic of consecration. Similarly, we can pose a corollary question: is the language of postcolonial theory capable of, and are critics interested in, moments of political, economic and social improvement? Again the idiomatic theory must consider its own ethical position; can postcolonial studies sustain itself on an attenuated battery of typologies? The self-reflection of




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In short, research into the causes of the linguistic misunderstanding which characterizes the teaching relationship must extend to the functions which this failure serves in perpetuating the system. Every effort to transform the system which is not accompanied by an attempt to transform attitudes towards the system (and conversely) is doomed to failure. (1994: 3) Such an attitude is equally relevant to the system of Irish postcolonial studies; are linguistic and theoretical density the problem or merely agents/functions of a more lateral issue? Clearly, then, intellectuals become tenured within institutionalised formations; at a ‘macro’ level we note the specialisation of academic labour, and increasing alienation and/or suspicion within and between academic disciplines. Simultaneously, there is a definite institutionalisation of critical tropes and methodologies, as political affiliations and investments impede the gestation and application of competing cultural theories. The institutionalisation of Irish studies, within which postcolonial criticism is operative, precipitates homologies of legitimate discourse. A familiar vocabulary of intellectual practice evolves through sanctioned academics, approved journals, and hermetic conferencing. As Kirkland diagnoses, critical theory frequently operates with its own interests in mind; the ‘containing metaphors’ of academic diction, in this pessimistic view, promise little more than attenuated and conditional identities (1999: 220). Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge make a similar point, arguing that ‘like any academic endeavour, postcolonial scholarship needs to use generalizations and abstract categories; it is constantly in danger of creating its own theoretical universalisms’ (2000: 12). One of the signal necessities of future postcolonial theoretical debate and praxis is a policing of such abstraction. As it is a constitutively ethical discourse, postcolonial studies must navigate the ethical terrain between advocacy of universal rights and the enfranchisement of the marginalised. While critics of postcolonial criticism, literary history and historiography cite its terminological and philosophical dependence on ‘Western’ epistemology, the subversive potential of postcolonial studies resides in the location and enactment of alternative and catachrestic readings of modernity, resistance, power and representation.



academics on their institutionally based and contingent positions can only proceed in concert with a complementary interrogation of its reading and writing mechanisms. Again Bourdieu reflects on the dynamics of the teacher–pupil axis:


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Like method, theory properly conceived should not be severed from research work that nourishes it and which it continually guides and structures ... Bourdieu wishes to recover the practical side of theory, as a knowledge-producing activity ... [w]hat he stands poised against is theoretical work done for its own sake, or the ‘institution’ of theory as a separate, self-enclosed, and self-referential realm of discourse – ‘logology’, that is, ‘words about words.’ Bourdieu has little time for conspicuous theorizing, freed from connection to the practical constraints and realities of empirical work, and he shows little sympathy for the splitting of Concepts and their endless rearrangement [my emphasis]. (1992: 30–1) Quite simply, Bourdieu eschews as futile any project that proceeds on the basis of perpetual idiomatic and conceptual parsing. In the context of Irish postcolonial studies there is no great leap of critical imagination demanded in order to appreciate the relevance and resonance of Wacquant’s summative comments on Bourdieu. Again Wacquant reiterates the first principles of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, accenting the theory-as-practice equation. The issues at stake for contemporary Irish postcolonial studies are twofold. Firstly, to what extent is the corpus of postcolonial inquiry, as it currently proceeds, a fashion of ‘logology’, in the sense that revisionist critics are apt in their derision of a textually confined methodology? Equally, if we reject the above criticism, and proceed on the grounds that postcolonial methodology is of an intrinsic worth as a series of reading and writing strategies, how can we arrest and/or foreclose the development of tautological metacriticism? The challenge, as delineated by Bourdieu, is to ensure that postcolonial theoretical readings of culture, politics and economics assume levels of material register. The task, then, is to measure critically the currency of this metacritical conversation and to evaluate whether or not it registers as a genuinely enabling theoretical argument, or if it recedes into the realms of ‘conspicuous theorizing’.



In Bourdieu’s dialectic the theoretical is inoperative without a logic of practice. As Wacquant further asserts:

Ireland, Gender and Postcolonialism

The fact that history is essentially an act of interpretation, a re-reading of documents, means that it hides our origins from us. For, by its nature, history excludes all that is not quoted or written down. Only what has been transcribed is available for interpretation ... History has an historical horizon which is constituted by the activity of history itself: the horizon of writing. It offers the mechanism for generating a tradition, but not the means of reflecting on the validity of the tradition itself.1

Postcolonialism and gender Introducing the recent supplementary volume to The Oxford History of the British Empire, entitled Gender and Empire, the editor, Philippa Levine, reminds us that ‘one of the lessons of feminist history has been about the dangers of too readily assuming that group identifications always work’ (2004: 2). Just as patriarchal, imperial and national discourses served to naturalise, and to abstract, multifarious racial, confessional, and gendered lives, reactionary and oppositional critiques of such historical, and contemporary, representations cannot be founded upon equivalent universalist principles. Wholesale appropriation of an unmodulated ‘female’ experience, or ‘femininity’, is, assuredly, a replicative and, consequently, self-defeating tactic. In broaching gendered histories and contemporary lives there must be an apprehension of gender as something that ‘does not stand alone or somehow “above” other factors, such as class and race’ (Levine, 2004: 2). If gendered readings within postcolonial studies are to have any purchase, then their relationships with the hierarchical cultural politics and economic structures of global capitalism must be mediated with due concern for 146



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differential contextual specifics. As Levine further states: ‘In particular, the emphasis on inequalities, which gendered interpretations necessarily highlight, remind us that other important divisions also structure colonialism. Differences in material wealth and social status, hierarchies based on race and skin colour, and other such divisions are always at work in social relations’ (2004: 2). The fracture of universalist cultural, political and social taxonomies facilitated by the rise of ‘postal’ theories both alerts and enables critics across a spectrum of resistant projects to attend to such local difference. Yet, as we shall discuss, such ‘incredulity’ and specificity is not to sanction any form of absolute critical relativism. Equally, tracing the imprints of global capitalist exploitation through such contextually sensitive critiques can help to establish transnational solidarities based on class oppression, or gendered marginalisation, without deferring to vacuous idioms of universal unity. Such critical routes, then, are part of the wider feminist and postcolonial ‘critique of the reification of cultural communities [which] should take us ... toward a greater fracturing of universalism’ (Menon, 2005: 225); and have been long central to the critical and historiographical methodologies of many poststructuralist-derived critical projects – not all of which are as successful, or as enabling, as they might appear. Considered as discrete but imbricated fields of critical inquiry, postcolonial criticism and feminist criticism have been historically preoccupied by many of the same issues, including: ‘representation, voice, marginalization and the relation between politics and literature’ (Bahri, 2004: 201). Deepika Bahri’s list is, of course, generalised in its designations but, by implication, she suggests all forms of representation and access to representative media; material and discursive marginalisation; and the construction of and articulation of a self-present voice. And one of the guiding principles of contemporary postcolonial feminism is to establish the differential historicity of female experiences, lives and struggles, which became reified in earlier anticolonial nationalist movements; become tokenised and supplementary within the early years of metropolitan second-wave feminism; and are routinely sidelined in a class-based and/or nation-centred anticapitalist globalisation movement. This is not to efface the undeniable achievements of these preceding political enterprises, but simply to suggest that the disproportionate oppression of ‘Third World’ women has been inadequately mediated in contemporary ‘left’ thought and writing – whether that is within postcolonial studies, or anticapitalist globalisation theories, or under varieties of neo-Marxist thought. What postcolonial feminist thought accents is the fact that comprehensive critiques and comprehensions of




the relationships between the local and the global, between the national and the international, between prosperity and poverty will always be partial without factoring in issues of differential gendered lives and contexts. In many ways the trajectories mapped by feminist scholars within the field of postcolonial studies match those etched by the editors of the volume Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. In their editorial Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl and Antoinette Burton explicitly link the future responsibilities of postcolonial studies with the political, economic and social deformations of global capitalism: Indeed this constitutes the most significant challenge facing democratic thought: what visions of a postcolonial world can we as humanists offer that will interrogate, perhaps, even interrupt, the forms of globalization now dictated by politicians, military strategists, captains of finance and industry, fundamentalist preachers and theologians, terrorists of the body and spirit. (2005: 13) Under the machinations of the neo-Orwellian cast list convened here, the project envisioned by Loomba et al. cannot be complete without a requisite attentiveness to the vagaries of gendered disparity and dislocation. It seems that under such muscular regimes of acquisition, women in developing societies are qualitatively, and quantitatively, more exposed to their excesses. The representation of women’s histories is a constituent element of the cultural politics of postcolonial studies. Similarly, postcolonial critique is itself one of a range of discursive modes through which feminine voices, texts and practices are represented. Feminist literary history, women’s history, oral history and subaltern historiography are neither discrete discursive strategies nor reducible one to the other. Thus any consideration of the complex and differentiated relations between gender, colonialism and nationalism must be alert to these multiple methodological resources. Postcolonial readings of gendered histories draw on, but are not bound by, the resources of this matrix of literary and historiographical engagement. Drawing parallels between feminist theory and postcolonial theory, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin argue: ‘Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to re-instate the marginalised in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early nationalist post-colonial criticism, sought to invert the structures of domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions in place of a male-dominated canon’ (1989: 175). Both discourses have, however, progressed beyond the bald assertion of opposition,




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and, instead have succeeded in foregrounding the complex diversity of material experience, by which the very structures of narrative representation are scrutinised. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin continue: ‘but like post-colonial criticism, feminist criticism has now turned away from such simple inversions towards a questioning of forms and modes, to unmasking the assumptions upon which such canonical constructions are founded, moving first to make their cryptic bases visible and then to destabilise them’ (1989: 175–6). Both feminist and postcolonial theories are future-oriented, utopian discourses, seeking representative change in the material circumstances of disenfranchised constituencies. Neither can be collapsed into the other, nor should their theoretical projects be reduced to post-structuralist excess. The theoretical exchanges and political imbrications of postcolonial and feminist theory must be translated into an effective praxis. But also these very theoretical exchanges must be policed themselves, so that the materiality of a practical cultural politics is not diluted. Postcolonial theory, women’s history, subaltern studies and feminist theory can possibly engage in mutually enabling, interdisciplinary sorties. In fact, it is possible to outline the principal theoretical and historical confrontations within these debates. Firstly, the postcolonial and subaltern deconstructions of anticolonial nationalism have succeeded in registering the contributions of groups and individuals who had been elided from, or ‘normalised’ within, the postcolonial nation state’s official self-narration. Similarly, in negotiating the gender politics of the colonial period itself, historians and literary critics attempt to navigate the overwriting discourses of colonial, national and patriarchal authority. Subaltern studies and oral history have been effective in representing the agency of colonised, gendered subaltern constituencies. Furthermore, these debates on the political and cultural constructions of gender have accented its inherent historical contingency. In effect, these interventions have sought to denaturalise gender as a discursive category, and thereby render it recalcitrant to categorical objectification. In this context, David Alderson and Fiona Becket provide a cursory genealogy of the differentiated, and oppositional, mobilisations of gendered representation in Irish colonial and nationalist history. They note: ‘both colonial ideology and nationalist movements have promoted feminine concepts of the nation. From the perspective of the colonial centre ... Ireland has been sexualised as a territory awaiting – even inviting – invasion and penetration’ (1999: 61). Furthermore, writers like Matthew Arnold2 exoticised the feminine Celtic, Irish race, and Ireland became ‘the unreasoning faculty within the body politic, repository





simultaneously of imaginative sympathy and of a potentially destabilising petulance’, while the nationalist movement maintained the tropic genderisation of Ireland, developing ‘its own idealisations of the nation as a woman who might inspire her young men to heroic action and selfsacrifice in her defence’ (Alderson and Beckett, 1999: 61).3 Underwriting each of these gendered discourses is a politics of exclusion, draped in the metaphoricity of inclusion. In its imitative relation to imperial discourse, bourgeois nationalism repeats the political and cultural occlusions that it ostensibly seeks to redress. As postcolonial critics and historians attempt to represent the efforts and practices of female historical actors, they are confronted with the representational strictures of imperialism, patriarchy and class. Gendered postcolonial studies, then, witnesses a confluence of political and disciplinary agendas and procedures, as well as ethnic, materialist, and geographical material disparities. Postcolonial feminist criticism and histories are not simply processes of discursive retrieval or re-representation – a criticism long attached to postcolonial studies as a critical field. As Bahri further suggests in her appraisal of feminism’s relationship with postcolonialism, ‘nearly all issues central to postcolonial feminism are concerned with the various ways of reading gender: in the world, the word, and the text’ (2004: 200). Bahri’s analysis, then, does not disqualify the legitimacy of poststructuralist discursivity in postcolonial studies, but equally underscores the urgency of the material conditions of representational hierarchies. Indeed, Bahri’s argument chimes with recent interventions in Irish postcolonial studies, when she argues that ‘feminist perspectives have been central to postcolonial studies from its inaugural moment, sharing many of the broad concerns of postcolonialism, but, also revising, interrogating, and supplementing them’ (2004: 200). Such critical affinities between feminism and postcolonialism in an Irish context have been cursorily highlighted recently by Joe Cleary (2005: 1–17). From a preoccupation with the politics of representation to material exploitation onto political enfranchisement, gendered and/or racial discrimination, both feminist and postcolonialist projects have been exercised by the perceived historical violences of modernity’s and imperialism’s various histories and legacies. Privileging the male Western subject as the locus of a universal civil human nature, such histories have been confronted with a battery of theoretical and historiographical critiques, among which feminism and postcolonialism can be numbered as some of the most incisive. In an Irish context the contiguity of these critical projects has been acknowledged by both Joe Cleary and Emer Nolan in their



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most recent work; while, as we will encounter below, Linda Connolly alludes to historical synchronicity of these fields of criticism, but is dismissive of the enduring parallels. Indeed, while Bahri can quite legitimately assert that ‘gender issues are ... inseparable from the project of postcolonial criticism’ (2004: 201), her conviction is not always supported by the tense response of many Irish feminist critics and historians to the pre-eminence of postcolonial methodologies within Irish studies. An area of particular relevance to Irish feminist criticism and to Irish women’s history is the broader international critique of postcolonial studies that emerged from what might be termed ‘postcolonial feminists’. Such postcolonial feminist critiques suggested that postcolonial studies has been primarily, if not exclusively, attentive to issues such as the projects of empire construction, anticolonial nationalism and the complexities of decolonisation, and that little rigour has been brought to matters related to gender and empire, gender and anticolonial nationalism, or gender and the writing of postcolonial histories. In sum, the histories of female participation in these, and other, projects have been deliberately, as well as unconsciously, marginalised in what parade themselves as emancipatory, and inclusive, literary historical and historical discourses. While imperially enshrined hierarchies of race, wealth, political representation and narration are thoroughly unstitched, gendered strands of such hierarchies, as well as the legacies of localised indigenous patriarchal systems and the gender biases of contemporary neo-imperialism, remain critically impoverished. Indeed, both postcolonial studies and international feminism are confronted with similar problems in identifying the terms, locations and limits of the constituencies of their relative critical advocacy. Logically, it would seem that both cohere around questions of material disenfranchisement and exploitation, both in historical and contemporary contexts; both address the issue of racially motivated violences; and both remain potentially powerful resistant critiques of the prevailing politico-economic conjuncture. As we have discussed, while feminism can productively critique and expand the critical and historical optics of postcolonial studies, from a metatheoretical perspective it is not immune from such counterreadings itself. As is widely understood, scholars such as bell hooks and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have intervened in such debates, and both resolutely dispute the recolonisation of postcolonial feminism by what are adjudicated as the universalist tendencies of ‘first world’ feminism. The critiques offered by hooks and Mohanty are symptomatic of a more





In the context of the hegemony of the Western scholarly establishment in the production and dissemination of texts, and the context of the legitimating imperative of humanistic and scientific discourse, the definition of the ‘third world woman’ as a monolith might well tie into the larger cultural and economic praxis of ‘disinterested’ scientific inquiry and pluralism which are the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the ‘non-Western’ world. (1997: 274) While Mohanty’s point has been well assimilated into debates within postcolonial feminism, the spirit of her argument actually has a longer afterlife beyond the immediate context of feminism’s relativity to postcolonial studies. Mohanty’s reservation anticipates later concerns articulated with respect to the suspicious malleability of postcolonial studies. The vogue to cast oneself as ‘postcolonial’ is deemed to have evacuated the term of any referential purchase; in effect critics argue that it has become a signifier without a signified, its own post-structuralist locutions finally, and detrimentally, having caught up with it and rendered it a politically and critically neutered sign. Such polemical vehemence regarding the motility of postcolonialism is, as we have seen, a characteristic of its arrival into Irish studies. Writing on the politics of travel representation, Caren Kaplan argues: ‘Feminism, however, as an articulation of modernity, has an ambivalent relationship to empire. In the struggle to expand the realm of social and political power for women, Western feminism has sometimes relied upon the frontiers and zones of difference established through economic and cultural imperialism’ (1995: 33). In other words, just as anticolonial nationalism mutated into an attenuated, and exclusionary, politico-cultural force, feminism exhibits an equal reductive and homogenising tenacity. Though gender may be successfully diagnosed, and illustrated, as an effect of hegemonic power structures and its representations, there are tangible contextual specifics dictated by class, race, ethnicity and geography. The exposure of an objective system of oppression cannot be usurped by a counter-system of ostensible liberation. Mohanty urges for discretion between the political discourses of Western feminism and the representation of ‘Third World woman’



lateral suspicion of the ability of postcolonial theory to ‘travel’ and to adhere to oppression in differentiated contexts. Exemplary of the feminist version of this argument is the following, from Mohanty’s most famous essay ‘Under Western Eyes’:

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(1997: 255). She believes that feminist theorisation of the situation of ‘Woman’ in the Third World ‘eventually ends up constructing monolithic images of “Third World Woman” by ignoring the complex and mobile relationships between their historical materiality on the level of specific oppressions and political choices on the one hand and their general discursive representations on the other’ (1997: 269). Mohanty’s point throws into relief the qualitative difference between the theoretical representation of ‘woman’ and the differentiated material realities of women. Her argument extends the ethical concern of postcolonial studies; in seeking to redress the oppression of gendered, racial or class objectification, postcolonial or subaltern critics/historians cannot reestablish the representational hierarchies of patriarchy, imperialism or class. It is an issue also alluded to by Gayatri Spivak: Reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or in the Third World is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history and sociology. Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever. (1993: 90) This extended point braids the subalternist projects with the politics of representation confronted, and reimagined, by feminist criticism and women’s history; Spivak explicitly asserts a cross-disciplinary range and impetus. But, significantly, she also registers the persistence of hegemonic/patriarchal idioms and paradigms within ostensibly liberatory initiatives. Spivak’s conclusion, then, records the inescapable imprint of patriarchal, or Western European, discursive affects and languages within marginal, yet aspirationally resistant, discourses. Recalling Mohanty, hooks cites racial, ethnic, class and geographical disparities as material and moral impediments to a unilateral feminist agenda, what she terms ‘the idea of “common oppression” ’ (1997: 396). hooks argues that such an idea disguises and mystifies ‘the true nature of women’s varied and complex social reality’ (1997: 396). She rejects such a platform as it merely ratifies the authority of the oppressor. The underlying animus of hooks’s reimagined feminist agenda is the idea of difference as the basis for solidarity. It is here that hooks, and feminist





theory, intersect with the ethical project of postcolonial studies. As I argue, the creation of critical typologies, universal paradigms, or idiomatic metaphors is futile, as they overinvest in the ‘sameness’ of colonial and postcolonial experiences. The validity, and valence, of both feminist theory and postcolonial theory are in their navigation of both the local and the universal, in the manipulation of difference as a source of unity. In arguing that ‘women do not need to eradicate difference to feel solidarity’ (hooks, 1997: 411), hooks coalesces with the theoretical agenda proposed by Lloyd for postcolonial projects, when he argues that ‘concepts and abstractions that we bring to bear from other theoretical work have constantly and self-consciously to undergo modification and sometimes transformation in relation to other sites’ (1999: 14). One of the areas in which contemporary Irish feminist writing and activism deviate from postcolonial feminist studies is the material disparity with what has been termed ‘Third World Woman’. Mohanty’s original nomination sought to fracture the disempowering generalities of Western feminism and to metatheoretically alert feminist criticism and activism to the solipsistic nature of much of its rhetoric. As we have established, Ireland can be productively historicised in terms of the reading strategies of postcolonial theory, but the material distance that exists between Irish women and those of the developing world are self-evidently too acute for the resurrection of hollow theoretical analogies. However, I am not implying that there is a materially secure homogeneity to the general female population of Ireland; even within the confines of a small island such as Ireland, the material disparities between women are profound. Nevertheless, analyses of disabling mechanisms that govern the structures of power, political enfranchisement and participation within and between these diverse geopolitical constituencies can be, and have been, productive. Likewise, the historiographical resources and projects of Irish women’s histories bear affinities to those undertaken within Indian subaltern histories. The Indian examples may well incline towards a Marxist politics, but the acknowledgement of differential disenfranchisement can be a spur to a form of mutually enriching ethical understanding. Of course, what also requires acknowledgement within contemporary Western, including Irish, feminist criticism is its historical and continuing complicity in the economic servility of women in developing countries. More recently Mohanty has provided a powerfully engaged volume, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, on international postcolonial feminism in recent years, and it is worth considering some of its principal arguments and how they might



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productively impact upon postcolonial studies, Irish postcolonial studies, Irish feminist studies, and the interfaces of all three of these interlaced discourses. This volume is not only highly suggestive for contemporary and future postcolonial feminist theory and practice, but could equally inform initiatives that might be undertaken under the postcolonial feminist rubric in Ireland. Mohanty’s international optic is sanctioned, she says, by the stark realisations that ‘the interwoven processes of sexism, racism, misogyny and heterosexism are an integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be’ (2003: 3). Not only do sexuality, gender and race contribute fundamentally to the structures of our social worlds, but they are compounded by ‘the regressive politics of ethnic nationalism and capitalist consumerism’ (Mohanty, 2003: 3). Therefore, Mohanty forwards a tripartite critical programme with which to combat this skein of ‘regressive’ political realities. In her view ‘an antiracist feminist framework, anchored in decolonization and committed to an anti-capitalist critique, is necessary at this time’ (2003: 3). This updated critical agenda by Mohanty progresses from her earlier seminal intervention, ‘Under Western Eyes’. Where the earlier publication, as we have seen, rejected the appropriative theoretical gestures of ‘Western’ feminist criticism, which, in Mohanty’s view, deprived ‘non-Western’ feminists and women of voice and agency, the more recent volume draws attention to the differentiated negative impacts of global capitalism on all women. But again this is not envisioned as an essentialist feminist strategy, but is formulated in order to foster solidarity through difference, and to combat tactically what Mohanty perceives as the ‘masculinism’ of global capitalism. Mohanty’s stated goals for her antiracist feminist, anticapitalist projects are considerable, and are concerned with: The politics of difference and the challenge of solidarity; the demystification of the workings of power and strategies of resistance in scholarship, pedagogy, grassroots movements, and academic institutions; the decolonizing and politicizing of knowledge by rethinking self and community through the practice of emancipatory education; the building of an ethics of crossing cultural, social, national, class, and racial borders; and finally, theorizing and practicing anticapitalist and democratic critique in education, and through collective struggle. (2003: 10) Mohanty’s panoply of goals extends beyond the theoretical negotiation of difference and solidarity to embrace practice-based and pedagogically





led interventions. Not only is her inventory of stated aims salutary for the future of feminist criticism, but it is singularly empowering for the entire field of postcolonial studies. There is a metacritical rigour to Mohanty’s manifesto, which is deeply conscious of, and suspicious of, the epistemic violences of empires and late capitalist neo-imperialisms. She is cognisant of the centrality of contextual particularity in her critique, but she is keen to assert the importance of collectivism and solidarity not despite but because of cultural and racial difference. This critical vision, then, firstly, intersects with the metacritical commentary within postcolonial studies discussed in the previous chapter, but it also coheres with the radical utopian visions of postcolonial criticism that were addressed in Chapter 2. Naturally, there are sharp methodological and contextual disparities between the respective utopian critiques, but this does not necessarily preclude the possibility of allowing them to ‘speak’ to each other within a catholic postcolonial forum. Radical feminist criticism has always, of course, been a utopian discourse, both internationally and in Ireland, but what the current discussion impresses is the need for Irish feminism to recover its erstwhile utopian dynamism, which, Emer Nolan argues below, has been compromised. From a postcolonial standpoint, it seems apposite to preface such a discussion of Irish postcolonial criticism and its testy relationship with Irish feminist criticism with a rehearsal of what are the most enabling facets of a truly utopian postcolonial feminist agenda, as formulated in Mohanty’s work. Mohanty judges globalisation and globalised capital as the most urgent problems confronting contemporary criticism. And it is only through recalibrated modes of theory, practice and pedagogy that adequate responses, even solutions, to these conditions can be realised. In her view this feminist criticism has a pivotal role to play in these critical mobilisations because ‘both Eurocentric and cultural relativist (postmodernist) modes of scholarship and teaching are easily assimilated within the logic of late capitalism’ (2003: 244). However, this is not to say that we abjure all forms of ‘Eurocentric’ thought; versions of ‘Eurocentric’ discourses such as Marxism and nationalism, despite repeated rejection within liberal and postcolonial analyses, have played legitimate and empowering roles in the triumphs of anticolonial, liberationist movements across the globe. Mohanty must incorporate such historical understanding into her broader framework and allow these discourses to inform her decolonising projects.4 As it stands, Mohanty’s project is faced in opposition to the assimilative gestures of cultural relativism and pluralism; she offers what she terms ‘the comparative feminist studies/feminist solidarity model’, which ‘potentially counters



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this logic by setting up a paradigm of historically and culturally specific “common differences” as the basis for analysis and solidarity. Feminist pedagogies of antiglobalisation can tell alternate stories of difference, culture, power, and agency. They begin to theorise experience, agency, and justice from a more cross-cultural lens’ (2003: 244). In this way feminism transcends the limits of the local and the national without abandoning them, but also recognises the vast material inequalities experienced at global levels, which are, of course, contingent upon these local geographies. Through such critical and historical avenues correspondence, tension and contradiction can be generated within a transnational feminism, while at the same time employing the fruits of such discursive flexibility against the material inequities of racialised, gendered, neo-imperialist capital. Such a transnational feminist ‘solidarity through difference’ is, then, both dialogic and self-reflexive. As Caren Kaplan argues: Examining the politics of location in the production and reception of theory can turn the terms of inquiry from desiring, inviting, and granting space to others to becoming accountable for one’s own investments in cultural metaphors and values. Such accountability can begin to shift the ground of feminist practice from magisterial relativism ... to the complex interpretive practices that acknowledge the historical roles of mediation, betrayal, and alliance in the relationships between women in diverse locations. (1994: 139) Endorsing Mohanty’s caveat, in relation to Irish women’s histories, Maria Luddy notes: ‘women were not a homogenous mass and their politics differed according to their class. Women’s role in politics in nineteenth-century Ireland was diverse and involved women from all social classes’ (1997: 90). Luddy’s point suggests, however, that systems of gendered subordination or hierarchy also existed within nationalist political and cultural movements, manifest in both the structures of organisation and the language of representation. In the same volume of essays Joan Hoff supplements the critical–historical caveat of both Mohanty and Luddy; Hoff decries the idiomatic excess of poststructuralist theory and rejects its abstraction, and homogenisation, of concrete political problems. Inveighing against its dematerialisation, and effective depoliticisation, of gender, Hoff argues: Like all post-modern theories, post-structuralism casts into doubt stable meanings and sees language as so slippery that it compromises




the historians’ ability to identify facts and chronological narratives. It also uses gender as a category of analysis to reduce the experiences of women, struggling to define themselves and control their lives in particular historical contexts, to mere subjective stories. (1997: 32) In evacuating language of its representational anchorage and political purchase, Hoff contends that post-structuralism leaves ‘political reformers without generalizations about the commonly shared experiences of women as a basis for action’ (1997: 32–3). Hoff correctly censures the potential containing gestures of theoretical abstraction, but she does not accept the destabilising capacities of post-structuralist readings. In reducing post-structuralism to an agent of postmodern indulgence, Hoff cannot accept it as a potential ‘basis for action’ in itself. As we shall see at greater length in chapter 5, Benita Parry anticipates Hoff’s critique of post-structuralist theory in a specifically postcolonial context. Parry rejects both Spivak’s and Bhabha’s insistence on the persistent authority of colonial discourse, under which, respectively, the subaltern/native is incapable of discursive representation or reduced to affective modes of articulation in mimicry or sly civility. The post-structuralist elements of postcolonial theory, then, are seen as innately disabling to the recovery of indigenous and/or female voices. Buttressing Hoff’s historiographical critique, Parry diagnoses such theoretical excess as a further stage in imperial domination, one that fails to create an adequate space for the colonised/marginalised as historical actor. In a sense discourse becomes a coloniser in its own right, further marginalising those it ostensibly strives to liberate and/or represent. Women’s histories or women’s studies cannot proceed on the basis of studying ‘woman’ or ‘women’ as reified abstractions, nor can it read them as inhabitants of/actors in entirely alternative historical spheres/continuum. History has overwritten, and is underwritten by, conceptions of gender. Postcolonial studies, and its affiliations with both gender and feminist studies, must not simply insert the contributions of women into authorised historical narratives, but can refashion the modalities of historical, and political, representation through the reclamation of the variegated and coeval manifestations of female political and historical participation. As Pamela Cox concludes: ‘Future feminist histories must still focus on those subject to power, but they should also focus more vigorously and consistently on the continuities and connectivities of power. This would allow for a valuable retheorising of historically powerful categories across time and space’ (1999: 168).





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Challenging the dichotomous, binary logic of essentialist constructions of gender and race, Mary Jean Corbett confronts the discursive, and colonial, interrelations of Irish and English cultures. Corbett’s reading complicates oppositional understandings of self/other, coloniser/ colonised and male/female, as she identifies an economy of identitarian exchange ‘in which simple binaries cannot hold’ (2000: 3). Moreover, Corbett proposes that gender, and its naturalisation and institutionalisation at the site of the family, is the crucial agent in the perpetuation of both political and verbal representational control in Ireland. She argues, ‘in the English-Irish context, gender provides perhaps the most fundamental and enduring discursive means for signifying Irish political incapacity’ (2000: 16). Equally, Corbett correctly appreciates that the discursive mobilisation of gender as a vehicle of representational control is not transhistorically uniform. The logic of binary thinking, she contends, founders on the intimacy of the Anglo-Irish colonial relation. This is an intimacy rooted in both the geographical proximity and racial contiguity of the islands, but equally because of the political intimacy instituted in 1801 with the Act of Union. In other words, the persistence of what Kevin Whelan calls ‘the other within’ (2001: 13) vitalises the political and cultural incongruities, and ambiguities, of the Irish colonial context. Corbett’s reading of Anglo-Irish relations through the lens of gender politics operates emphatically within a postcolonial theoretical matrix. However, in negotiating the mutual exchanges of Anglo-Irish identity politics, Corbett refuses the homogeneity of unqualified historical or geographical analogies. Referring to the work of Luke Gibbons and Seamus Deane on the prevalence of racial, colonial and civilisational stereotypes, and alluding to the longevity of such dichotomous idioms, Corbett concludes that their ‘rearticulation with new elements under new conditions in the mid-nineteenth century thus bears close investigation for the historically specific results it yields’ (2000: 88). Writing on the radical potential, and urgency, of women’s histories, the social scientist Joan Wallach Scott concludes that such narratives: challenge the accuracy of fixed binary distinctions between men and women in the past and present, and expose the very political nature of history written in those terms ... [they expose] the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies. With this



Ireland, gender and postcolonialism


Wallach Scott’s manifesto for women’s history registers the concerns of both subaltern and postcolonial studies; her historical perspective acknowledges the coevality of gendered alterities within the narratives of patriarchy. It is a point implicit in Marjorie Howes’s consideration of Yeats’s relation to Irish nationalism, in which, echoing Chatterjee’s discourse on nationalism, she argues that ‘constructions of nationality that are the most flexible and contradictory may well be the most powerful’ (1996: 12). Such a nuanced configuration of gendered national histories is also asserted by Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd in their contribution to ‘An Agenda for women’s history, 1500–1900’, in which they cite the introductory editorial comments from the first volume of Gender and History: The integration of the experiences, languages, and perspectives of women into our understanding of the past ... requires a fundamental transformation of received categories and modes of thinking, as well as a new conceptualization of the very definition of historical study and of the nature of those who have the power to define it. (1989: 4) The editors enumerate four distinct but interrelated arenas of critical reappraisal through which women, and gender, might be historically represented. It is not simply a matter of documentary reclamation; rather, in actually accenting the differentials of gendered histories, the historian can confront the established modes of historical thinking and representation. History, as a disciplinary phenomenon, is both contributive to, and contingent on, the social classification of gender. In trying to negotiate the possibilities of egalitarian representation, then, historical and literary critical readings of gendered postcolonial identities are faced with lateral methodological problems. Both the sociologist Pat O’Connor and the historian Margaret Ward are emphatic in their conviction that women have been deliberately elided or manipulated within both the Irish body politic and its historical narratives. O’Connor asserts that ‘women in Ireland are accustomed to making choices and creating meaning and identity with structures which, to a greater or lesser extent, are not of their own choosing’ (1998: 255), while Ward argues that ‘men have written women out of history, that is an undeniable truth, and it



approach women’s history critically confronts the politics of existing histories. (1988: 27)

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has occurred despite the fact that in many instances the history of women’s struggles has been available for those who have had the inclination to look beyond their prejudices’ (1991: 4). Both points are forceful indictments of what are perceived as institutional or objective social structures, which marginalise both the political and the verbal representation of women. O’Connor’s statement, however, seems reductive, in that she diagnoses a lateral process of gender-based discrimination, but fails to move beyond the objective parameters of this discrimination to any field of subjective or local resistance to such authority. Ward, at least, gestures to the existence of alternative histories that lie both within and athwart the standard narratives of Irish history. Equally O’Connor seems to homogenise ‘women’ as a social and discursive category, whereas Ward cites the evident plurality of subsumed histories, and implies that reading or recovering Irish women’s histories through subaltern or postcolonial perspectives can deprivilege the authority of incumbent historiography. Such radical representation must include social, political, legal, economic, cultural, religious, educational and labour histories. These diverse historical fields, however, must not be represented in terms of assessing how women simply contributed. In order to circumvent the objectification, or fetishisation, of women and their histories, the modes of historical writing themselves must be reconsidered. The ‘naturalised’ orders of gender roles cannot dictate the terms of historical representation or in turn be dictated by historical representation. Recalling Gerda Lerner,5 Ward writes: In writing this type of history, the goalposts do not change. It is not male-defined, because much of it is detailing women’s autonomous contribution, but at the same time women continue to be the outgroup, fitting into categories and value-systems which consider ‘man’ as the measure of significance. Gerda Lerner has described this as ‘contribution history’. (1991: 18) The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story As an exemplary instance of a postcolonial feminist assertion we can profitably turn to the work of Angela Bourke. Through what might be termed ‘tropic agility’, or perhaps hybridity, Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story does not simply record or ‘answer back’. Bourke’s narrative is a radical challenge to the parameters of historiographical form itself. Interweaving orality, historical writing and literary representation, she alerts us to the architecture of narrative itself.





Bourke’s text is an exemplary narrative that skilfully straddles the complex cultural politics of postcolonialism and feminism in an Irish context. As I have argued elsewhere at greater length, Bourke’s methodology avails itself of a recognisably subalternist historiographical practice.6 The story of Bridget Cleary’s death and the subsequent trial is not enunciated or represented in a concise, linear fashion. Engaging with much contemporary postcolonial historiography, which itself draws on Benjamin, Bourke reminds us of the igneous, metamorphic instability of memory and historical narrative. Equally, as Bourke admits: ‘Cases of marital violence, and of women killed by their husbands in their own homes, are not unusual. The story of Bridget Cleary is firstly one of “domestic” violence ... Their [the Clearys’] society was strongly patriarchal’ (1999: 206). The story straddles both subaltern and gender histories, in a manner suggestive of Spivak‘s doubly marginalised and inscribed subaltern female; Bridget Cleary inhabited a patriarchal community within a colonised society. In representing the intersection of such elided histories and cultural legacies, the critic/historian must be alert to the effective ‘double colonisation’ of the female subject. In evacuating the hegemony of ‘the loudest voice’, Bourke’s intervention avoids constructing a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’. The confluence of tropic strategies is, effectively, a democratisation of the historical stage; it permits the articulation of alternative voices. Bourke’s narrative positioning of folk-legend, oral story telling, court testimony, popular memory and journalistic reportage engenders a sense of unsettling ambiguity; a sense that accords with Laura E. Donaldson‘s conclusion that all narratives, gendered, racial or class, are necessarily overlapping. Donaldson writes: Such a story field denies the privileging of any plot (or gender identity) for women’s lives in its affirmation of stories (and genders); it also demands that each story negotiate its own position in relation to all other positions. This model aptly describes that ‘solidarity in multiplicity’ ... [it] provides the enabling conditions for feminism to its journey to a post-colonial liberation. (1993: 139) In a more contemporary appraisal of how gender has been refracted through a variety of theoretical prisms in contemporary Irish studies, Moynagh Sullivan argues that the discursive category of ‘woman’ or ‘gender’ is harnessed as ‘an object through which Irish studies can mediate its relationship to itself’ (2000: 250). In Sullivan’s view,



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within contemporary critical debates gender is outmanoeuvred in acts of containment. Its ostensible representation and articulation, in the recent additional two volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing for instance, constitutes a quarantining of female representation into a discrete space; essentially such a tactic ‘continues a logistical state of play wherein women’s writing continues to occupy a space which is representationally derivative and in excess of the primary or originary space’ (Sullivan, 2000: 250). While Sullivan’s initial point is valid, the latter argument is somewhat problematic, as it suggests a legitimate centre or locus of representational authority. Gender cannot persist as a relegated function of Irishness nor can it remain as a containing metaphor, as Sullivan rightly concludes. Equally, however, there must be an investment in the divination of alternative representational spaces and the recuperation of alternative historical stages. Bourke evokes a level of mystery in the persona of Bridget Cleary. This sense of the mysterious, firstly, forecloses Bridget Cleary’s deployment as an object of representational mediation or containment; and, secondly, Bourke’s text bypasses Sullivan’s call for a share of ‘originary space’ in weaving a fissiparous and unsettling alternative historical narrative. This is a narrative that does not privilege or fetishise gender, class or ethnic code; that is all the more inclusive and enabling for its representational ambivalence, and, as Beiner contends with respect to folklore, stands as ‘[a] living history [sic] ... a synthesis between elements of historical reality, imagination, invention and interpretation’ (Beiner, 2000: 169). The variegated reading strategies of postcolonial studies, women’s history and feminist critique can productively conspire in representing alternative historical narratives, which can prove politically and culturally enabling in the present and in the future. As Siobhán Kilfeather notes: Supported by the growing influence of postcolonial critique, Irish feminists have begun to be more interested in uncovering indigenous modes of thought and activity as models for feminist practice. In the last ten years there has been a growth of interest in folklore and the oral tradition, in collecting and representing women’s narratives, in facilitating groups which have had difficulty in gaining access to the public sphere –for example travellers, the economic underclasses, sex workers, survivors of violence, lone parents, asylum seekers. (2002: 759)





Partha Chatterjee exposes what he terms the derivative fabric of nationalist thought in India. Characterising nationalism as an elemental force in the processes of industrial–economic modernisation and state– ideological hegemony, he argues: Nationalist texts were addressed both to ‘the people’ who were said to constitute the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule nationalism questioned. To both, nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that the backward peoples were culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the conditions of the modern world. (1986: 30) The fomentation of a bourgeois nationalist consciousness is founded on a reactionary impulse, an impulse that concomitantly depends on the homogenisation of the national community. Simply, the liberatory rhetoric of elite anticolonial nationalism is subtended by, or rehearses, new forms of exclusion and politico-cultural domination. Nationalism proceeded as, Chatterjee continues, ‘a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of “modernity” on which colonial domination was based’ (1986: 30). In responding to the debilitating discourse of imperial control, and disempowerment through nationalistic modalities, anticolonial agitation remained within the philosophical, cultural orbit of its antagonist. The creation of a national community within anticolonial thought perpetuated the discursive/representational procedures of epistemological objectification. Or, as Chatterjee concludes, ‘it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (1986: 38). On the one hand, Chatterjee’s argument alerts us to the conservative character of this species of elite anticolonial nationalism, and in this sense performs quite a trammelled extraction from Fanon’s writings on the national consciousness. This mode of argumentation does not articulate the ways in which Fanon’s relationship to nationalism was not one based on outright suspicion and rejection, as we shall discuss in Chapter 5. But, on the other hand, Chatterjee’s work is a useful wedge with which to open a brief consideration of the vagaries of the historical relationship between Irish women, Irish feminism, and Irish nationalism, particularly bourgeois anticolonial nationalism and its conservative successor state-nationalism.



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The relationship between woman and nation is a complex and differentially transhistorical fixture of colonial and postcolonial societies. Within both anticolonial and state-led nationalisms, women are discursively ‘located’ as part of the narratives of struggle and consolidation. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis cite five ways in which women are accommodated within nationalist movements: as symbols of nation; as biological reproducers of the nation; as transmitters of national culture; as boundary guards between nations; and as active agents in nationalist struggles (1993). While the first four modes are ‘manageable’ within ‘the nationalism of the state’, the final manifestation of female agency within the national struggle drew ‘on subordinate popular traditions in a way that was deeply antithetical to the logic of the state formation’ (Lloyd, 1993: 81). In other words, the state demands, and creates, amenable versions of its own gendered communities, and the stable subject of modernity is a prerequisite of a consolidating postcolonial nation state. Cultural, political, genderised, sexual, or spiritual recalcitrance or ambiguity, therefore, was not conducive to ‘the singular history through which the state seeks to incorporate and regulate its political subjects’ (Lloyd, 1999: 84). Cynthia Enloe argues that ‘changes in relations between women and men necessitated by the exigencies of nationalist warfare did not survive once the new nation-state was established’ (1989: 54).7 While Enloe’s point captures the narrative excision of women and the political management of gender in post-independence Ireland, it bleaches the feminist or socialist mandates that were coterminous with the Irish nationalist enterprise. What is significant, then, is the recalibration of a polyvalent political and cultural ferment to a constructed and stable national and moral self-image. And embedded within this self-imagination was the vexed issue of gender politics, specifically the function of women as national ideals, national mothers and historical actors. Furthermore, in their ethical and political affiliations with the Catholic Church, Irish Free State governments brought the issues of gender and sexuality under their administrative purview.8 What emerged was, as Margaret O’Callaghan suggests, ‘a nation that had defined itself in terms of an external enemy no sooner lost that enemy than she had created a substitute within herself. In Ireland that internal enemy was immorality’ (1983: 70). Indeed, compacting both O’Callaghan’s and Enloe’s arguments, Howes observes: Despite its vexed and frequently antagonistic relationship with Irish feminism, Irish revolutionary nationalism had given women limited opportunities for becoming involved in national politics, and had




to some extent fostered a new atmosphere of freedom and equality between the sexes in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish war. However, the civil war and its aftermath entailed a return to a more repressive sexual and social order, and the Irish feminist movement became weakened and fragmented. (1996: 135) The construction of an integral national identity operates between the polarities of feminine national ideal (allegory) and the underlying belief in the carceral and moral corruptibility of the female body. In Foucauldian fashion, Howes notes, ‘the postcolonial pursuit of national self-definition meant that moral and sexual issues were more explicitly and more intimately bound up with actual or potential crises of national integrity and identity than elsewhere’ (1996: 136). Equally, matters of sexuality and gender were deeply informative of debates on Irish national identity and were interwoven with nationalist rhetoric. A naturalised ideal of Irish femininity was retailed through concatenated measures of constitutional law, religious dogma and nationalist rhetoric. In Howes’s view these measures were underwritten by the abstracted belief that the behaviour of women could ‘best embody and safeguard the national character’ (1996: 137).9 This conservative form of identitarian ‘embodiment’, in fact, confirms Lloyd’s historiographical contention that: history is written from the perspective of and with the aim of producing a non-contradictory subject. In doing so, history constitutes and differentiates the developed and the undeveloped, the civil and the savage, the rational and the irrational, the orderly and the violent. Resolution is the containment by the state of the crises constantly produced by the power of these differentiations. (1999: 17) As Lloyd, Howes, hooks, Gibbons and C.L. Innes10 acknowledge, the voices of female historical actors are not silent, but are marginalised within imperialism’s, patriarchy’s and conservative nationalism’s naturalising discourses of sameness. Howes asserts the differentiated and complex interactions of gender, sexuality and Irish nationalism. Echoing Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Howes reveals that ‘national discourses take up gender and sexuality as metaphors and as concrete realities with material resources and direct implications for political action’ (1996: 12). Reading through Yeats, she interrogates conceptions of nationalism as either a homogenous politico-cultural process or a linear historical discourse. In contradistinction to a nationalist




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continuum, in which nationalism is a staging post on the anticolonial vector, Howes accents ‘the power struggles, contradictions and ambivalences beneath an apparently unified tradition’ (1996: 65). In Howes’s terms, nationalist discourse is beset with subterranean ambiguities and tensions; despite the naturalising mechanisms of nationalist rhetoric, it is grounded in crisis and conflict. Again, Howes’s critique of Irish nationalism transfixes the veneer of bourgeois state-nationalism, and in so doing it chimes with contemporary postcolonial theory and the practices of women’s history. In denaturalising the retrograde reifications of gender, class and nation, Howes demonstrates their necessary material interaction, as well as signalling the underlying conflictual dynamics generated by such interaction. In her Gender and Nation, Innes traces how women responded and adapted to ‘the mythicization of Ireland itself as female’ (1993: 4), and she examines the political relations between Irish nationalism and feminism during the same period. Asserting the relative critical and historical neglect of female writers, journalists and political agitators, Innes notes: ‘an approach to history and to political change as the work of groups rather than individual personalities ... also typifies much literary and cultural activity carried on by women with a commitment to Irish nationalism’ (1993: 125). Both Innes and Howes accept the naturalising constructions of Irish femininity within and through nationalist political and cultural rhetoric. The patriarchal order of Irish literary and theatrical nationalism, according to Innes, operated in such a fashion that ‘women became identified with Ireland, both as images of an ideal order which they sought to restore, and as images of an Ireland that had been betrayed, or had collaborated in its own betrayal’ (1993: 178). This prescriptive paradigm demanded socio-political fixity in its metaphorical assertions of Irish womanhood and nationality. However, in recording the efforts of female Irish political activists, such as the Parnell Sisters, Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Countess Markiewicz, Lady Gregory and Anna Johnson, among others, in terms of their radical, political journalism, literary/dramatic output and political/military participation, Innes not only exposes the quantitative contributions of women, but also confirms the potent qualitative input of these radical female constituencies.11 These female constituencies reveal what Howes locates in Yeats’s ‘eugenic model of nationality’ (1996: 185). Postcolonial readings of Irish anticolonial nationalism confirm that ‘instead of secure and natural foundations, harmonious relations between the individual and the nation, and synthesis’, nationalism is subtended by ‘arbitrariness, violence, and irresolvable conflict’ (Howes, 1996: 185). Echoing Corbett’s




earlier point on the family structure and its role in imperial representation, Howes concludes that gendered postcolonial readings can present ‘in exaggerated and explicit form the things that often lurk behind the facades of more attractive versions of the nation ... by re-figuring and refusing, the naturalising work that conventional conceptions of gender, sexuality and the family often perform’ (1996: 185).

The Body, silence and resistance In The History of Sexuality, Foucault articulates the state’s necessary codification of its subjects’ physical bodies; sex and sexuality became at once the most ‘silenced’ and yet the most ‘articulated’ discourses within civil society. He writes: The state must know what is happening with its citizen’s sex and the use they make of it, but each individual must also be capable of controlling the use he makes of it. Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue and a public issue no less; it became invested by a whole network of discourses, new forms of knowledge, analyses and exhortations. (1979: 26) Gender and sexuality, then, became emplotted within the stabilising discursive necessities of social order. The control and codification of human sexuality became a mechanism through which naturalised conceptions of gender(s) were administered. In other words, under unambiguous classifications and institutional dictates, the codification of gender contributed to the realisation of a stable historical and political subject. In an Irish politico-cultural context, Susan Cannon Harris locates a similar operation in traditional, patriarchal versions of nationalism. She argues that the dichotomisation and regulation of gender and sexuality persisted in Irish counter-imperialist cultural and political discourses: At first glance, the relationship between Irish nationalism and orthodox medicine appears to be clearly antagonistic. Turn-of-the-century Irish nationalist writing explicitly identifies state-sponsored medicine as an imperial tool and attempts to inspire resistance to it. But that same nationalist movement tacitly accepts medical constructions of the body – in part because they are indissociable from constructions of masculinity and femininity in which the nationalist movement is heavily invested. (2002: 12)




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In Chatterjee’s terms, the human body, and especially the female body, was one of the fragments of the nation that required adequate representation. The act of textual or performative enunciation is an act of exclusion; the spoken or written word cannot exist without its ‘silenced’ others. In discussing the condition or experience of subalternity, again we encounter such ‘silence’ or representational elision. But, as my discussion elaborates, the ‘silenced’ subaltern is not devoid of agency; it may be unheeded or marginal but it is not entirely aphasic. Writing on the use of silence within the structures of hegemonic identity formation, Trinh T. Minh-Ha challenges the naturalised dichotomy of speech (male) and silence (female). She argues: Within the context of women’s speech, silence has many faces. Like the veiling of the woman, silence can only be subversive when it frees itself from the male-defined context of absence, lack, and fear as feminine territories ... Silence is so commonly set in opposition with speech. Speech as a will not to say or a will to unsay and a language of its own has barely been explored. (1997: 416) Minh-Ha effectively relegates speech, as a male-centred act, as the locus of value for feminist interrogations of patriarchal identity systems. The silences of imperial, patriarchal or state-nationalist representations are only considered so if these hegemonic systems are granted articulatory authority. Subaltern ‘silences’ are necessarily effects of the articulatory will of domination, but, as Minh-Ha outlines, they are potentially subversive in their alterity. Luke Gibbons offers a similar argument in his reading of Pat Murphy’s film Anne Devlin.12 In what amounts to an Irish cinematic representation of Minh-Ha’s resistant silence, Murphy’s film, according to Gibbons, ‘points to a political project in which the silent bearers of history, whether they be women or the labouring poor, cease to be instruments of social designs worked out by others ... but actively intervene in bringing about their own emancipation’ (1996: 116). Just as Harris, through Foucault, charts the classificatory sequestration of the (female) carceral under imperial and patriarchal nationalist discourses, Gibbons locates a resistant force in the ‘mute eloquence of the body’ (1996: 116). This somatic articulacy is an index of conscious female agency; resistance is literally embodied. Murphy’s historical–cinematic character is representative of a recalibrated speech/silence dichotomy; in Gibbons’s terms, ‘Anne’s silence is not a given, it is an achievement: it





is silence that comes from holding something back rather than from having nothing to say’ (1996: 116). Both the historical construction of gender and linear historical narrative are functions of a rational, classificatory agenda. Disciplinary history creates its own historical time and equally depends on the acceptance of a linear historical continuum. These factors, then, are contributive to the ideological manufacture of a stable, recognisable subject, which is effectively disembodied in its objective, discursive representation. Recording the centrality of bodily control within imperial and patriarchal discourses illustrates the literal disembodiment of historical subjects. The value of both Minh-Ha’s and Gibbons’s critiques is that they signal the possibilities of effective somatic resistance, reclaiming agency for the subjective and sundering the centrifugal forces of hegemonic objectification. In other words, they imagine beyond woman as man’s ‘other’ or beyond silence as speech’s necessary ‘other’, thereby removing the authority of the self-instituted self/centre. The idiom of silence informs the performance of resistance, or, as Gibbons concludes: ‘[Anne’s] suffering and endurance have nothing to do with acquiescence or passivity but are a mode of resistance, an act of intransigence which places a formidable barrier in the path of those who seek to exploit and dominate others’ (1996: 116). Both Minh-Ha’s and Gibbons’s arguments signal a positional redefinition of feminist/female resistance. Effective subversion does not depend on antagonistic engagements with, or structural inversions of, a centrally authorised hegemony.

Irish feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism As we have discussed, on the international stage there have been degrees of productive coherence or critical synchronicity achieved between postcolonial studies and feminist criticism based on a shared suite of critical goals and targets. However, although this coherence has been manifest in Irish postcolonial studies, its results and its reception have been uneven. Critical reappraisals of the politics and historiographies of Irish anticolonial nationalism and post-independence state-nationalism by Irish postcolonial critics and historians have been sympathetic to, and informative of, feminist counter-narratives of the limitations of mainstream Irish historical studies. Yet within Irish feminism there have been consistent dissenting voices who regard the nature of Irish postcolonial studies as constitutively nationalist and patriarchal. It is viewed as a field of criticism that selectively engages with the histories of Irish women and that is, in the end, out of touch



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with contemporary Irish feminist theory and activism, and the lives of contemporary Irish women. The most fulsome critique of Irish postcolonial studies from within the feminist camp was launched by the sociologist Linda Connolly in her essay, ‘The Limits of “Irish Studies”: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism’.13 For Connolly one of the major problems with Irish postcolonial criticism is that it seems to have assumed a dominant role within the general field of Irish studies. As a consequence of this perceived authority, the representation of other theoretical or critical schools within Irish studies has been curtailed. In other words, postcolonial criticism appears to be setting the terms of engagement and operation for contemporary Irish studies, which has resulted in a limited range of critical, historiographical and, crucially, political options being explored and articulated. Setting out the logic of her intervention, Connolly declares that ‘a ... key concern of this chapter is that the centre ground of postcolonial criticism has acquired an accepted definition and general understanding, which has marginalised several other important fields of inquiry and paradigms in Irish studies, outside of its dominant framework’ (2007: 190). Postcolonial criticism is, then, in this metacritical reckoning, figured as a part of the centre, the dominant in disciplinary Irish studies; it has itself become reified within the economy of the Irish studies industry and exerts undue, and debilitating, influence from this authoritative location. Of singular distaste to Connolly’s feminist palate is the fact that despite ‘the centrality of “hybridity” and “subalternity” in the language of postcolonial theorising, the mainstream of Irish postcolonial studies has become as exclusive and gendered in composition as the canonical historical paradigm it sought to refute in the first instance’ (2007: 197). Herein Connolly not only expresses incredulity at the assumption by Irish postcolonial studies of a retro-patriarchal posture, but, in a further metacritical reading, she alludes to a vacuity at the heart of the ostensibly liberatory vocabularies of postcolonial theorisation. Enumerated among Connolly’s supplementary charges against Irish postcolonial studies are, firstly, its inadequate engagement with the projects of Irish women’s history and, secondly, its unwillingness and/ or inability to reflect upon its own historiographical procedures. On the second charge, Connolly suggests that such dependence on Irish historical studies and its empirical research exposes fundamental contradictions at the core of the postcolonial field. Likewise, Irish postcolonial criticism is grossly neglectful of the empirical research findings within Irish women’s history that pertain to case studies of ‘subaltern’





Irish histories, while at the same time cleaving to ‘subalternity’ as an abstracted theoretical ‘sign’. But, returning to her initial indictment, Connolly argues that, despite adopting an antagonistic stance to the dominant strands of twentieth-century Irish historiography, and its narrow, gendered versions of Irish history, Irish postcolonial criticism has simply replicated the gendered hierarchies of erstwhile narratives. Although Connolly does grant some measure of coherence to Irish postcolonial criticism, her ultimate conclusion is that ‘despite some attempts to merge postcolonial criticism with feminism, women’s studies and feminist theory have not fared any differently in the more theoretically sophisticated arena of orthodox postcolonial criticism’ (2007: 200). At a general level, Connolly’s assessment here accords with that voiced by Margaret Kelleher some years previously, in which Kelleher concluded that ‘with the exception of some individual critics, Irish studies as a discipline remains singularly ill-informed of (and by) debates and concerns that have occupied Irish feminist criticism in the past decade’ (2003: 82). The relationship between Irish postcolonial criticism and Irish feminist criticism, as well as Irish women’s history, is, then, not based on any sense of parity of esteem. Feminist critiques of postcolonial criticism’s selective and opportunistic appropriation of aspects of Irish women’s historical studies suggest that it is merely employed as a service to the broader historical metanarratives of postcolonial studies. At stake is the degree to which Irish feminist criticism is permitted to alter the terms and parameters of Irish criticism rather than simply contribute as a minority strand without effecting any lateral structural change. This point intersects with a further concern raised by Connolly, namely that the empirical research undertaken on the lives of Irish women, both historically speaking and in the contemporary moment, fails to register within postcolonial criticism. In addition to its diminution as a fraction of a ‘postcolonial’ inflected Irish criticism, the lived complexity of Irish women’s histories is reduced, or actually elided, under the strictly theoretical exertions of postcolonial criticism. Addressing the work of Lloyd on Irish subalternity, Connolly highlights the culturalist accent of his work and its lack of engagement with the readily available historical research, which actually embodies Lloyd’s theoretical abstractions: In the case of Lloyd, attention to the mechanics of social movements in Ireland would unquestionably transform the prevailing culturalist or subalternist interpretation of social movements, such as the women’s movement, as always marginal. The fact that Irish feminism



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On this last point Connolly is explicitly supporting Graham’s earlier suspicion of Lloyd’s ‘ethically endowed’ subaltern; a theoretical location that, according to both Connolly and Graham, materially disempowers through an overdetermined theoretical ‘empowerment’. In the end Irish postcolonial criticism is, in Connolly’s estimation, a profoundly contradictory and partial critical and historical field. While it privileges postmodernist and post-structuralist theoretical approaches to historical metanarratives, it remains dependent on just such empirical, integrated narratives in many of its engagements with Irish history. Equally, although it claims to theorise the radical submerged agencies of subaltern cultural and political constituencies, postcolonial criticism does not attend to the data and case studies that have surfaced on foot of the labours of Irish women’s history. Such historiographical elision eventuates in a simplified appreciation of Irish gender, and of the roles and conditions of women in Irish history, or in, as Connolly remarks, ‘essentialism about Irish feminists, [and] Irish women’ (2007: 204). Connolly’s feminist metacritical survey has much to recommend it in terms of the conceptual fault lines it divines in Irish postcolonial criticism. Her reading underscores the attenuated ways in which gender has been mediated within the field and it also throws into relief the extent to which ‘the nation’ has been a primary preoccupation of its critical and historical outputs. Nevertheless, despite the validity of several of Connolly’s objections, there are moments in her critique where such undiluted criticism appears to be counterproductive. Summarising her argument, Connolly writes: The overview suggests that despite its self-styled status as the custodian of Irish studies, postcolonial theory has been applied in a limited mode. In particular, the analysis protests the narrow and problematic space the paradigm allots to ‘women’ as subjects and demonstrates how a restricting interpretation of subalternity is employed in relation to gender. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that postcolonial criticism is both sharply critical and inherently reliant on other prominent fields. (2007: 207) While it is easy to accept the majority of Connolly’s sentiments in this extract, the final sentence does not sit as comfortably. Presumably it is



has mobilised both in counter-cultural contexts and squarely within mainstream institutions cannot be accounted for in Lloyd’s framework. (2007: 209)


a part of the overall critical voice of the essay, but it fails to convince as a legitimate criticism of postcolonial studies. In simple terms, Connolly is intimating that Irish postcolonial criticism has an ambiguous relationship with other discourses in Irish studies. It draws upon these discourses yet, at the same time, because of its post-structuralist origins, remains interrogative, even sceptical, of their disciplinary coherence. However, pace Connolly, this actually seems like a justifiable critical ploy – it suggests a dynamic critical relation to other disciplinary fields, to the assumed integrity of disciplinarity itself, and might be considered as a form of dialectical engagement with equivalent critical discourses. Such a practice is not, of necessity, a negative feature but, on the contrary, displays a self-conscious fluidity. Indeed, Connolly hints at just such lateral critical transactionalism earlier in her essay: A truly hybrid, postcolonial reading of Irish feminist politics as subaltern imposes a more complex explanation of Irish politics on Irish studies. The importance of the liminal for postcolonial theory is its usefulness for describing an in-between space or spaces in which cultural change can occur ... As recently available archives show, hybridity in Irish feminism has resulted from real oppositional differences articulated among politically conscious women on the basis of class, religion, sexuality and nationality as well as conflicting interpretations of feminist ideologies, republicanism, unionism, colonialism, pacifism, socialism and so forth. An infinitely more comprehensive and theoretically sensitive view of feminism a propos difference is therefore vastly overdue in orthodox Irish studies. (2007: 204–5) To Connolly’s list of political bases we might now profitably add race and ethnicity in a contemporary Irish context. Although, on a superficial reading, Connolly seems to replay some of the laboured conceptual categories of postcolonial theory that were dissected in the previous chapter, her analysis indicates a more nuanced and historically specific mobilisation of these concepts. In fact, her nomination of an array of material contexts through which gendered experiences must be understood has echoes of Mohanty’s anticapitalist, feminist postcolonial methodology. Yet just as Connolly outlines a laudable, and logical, critical methodology, what is absent from her analysis, and from many Irish feminist critiques of postcolonial criticism, is any meaningful engagement with international postcolonial feminism. This absence, firstly, would supplement the intersections of both projects implicit in Connolly’s statement above; and, secondly, it would remove the



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critical blockage that prohibits many Irish feminists from working with postcolonial criticism at any level. The discursive and material mechanisms of imperialism and neo-imperialist capitalism are not extinct and it seems remiss to confine Irish feminist criticism from potentially enabling exchanges with its postcolonial counterparts. As Joe Cleary concludes, explicitly contradicting Connolly’s marginalisation of postcolonial criticism within Irish feminist studies: The ‘third world’ or postcolonial versions of feminism, which have insisted on forms of experience and oppression not accommodated in ‘Western’ feminist analysis, have themselves strongly contributed to a wider feminist appreciation of the diversity of women’s experiences, and ... postcolonial feminism has spoken powerfully to the concerns of some Irish women especially – Northern republicans, Irish speakers, and others – in ways that Anglo-American versions simply have not done. (2004b: 278) Connolly’s analysis diminishes the latitude for constructive engagement between postcolonial criticism and feminist criticism in an Irish context. But, in many ways, positing such a position actually belies the heteronymous nature of feminist scholarship since the 1970s. Feminist criticism has influenced, and in its turn exerted influences upon, a whole skein of disciplines. As Mohanty’s essay, cited above, indicates, and as Bahri’s synopsis of international postcolonial feminism reveals, feminist criticism has emphatically transcended the interrogation of power differentials in terms of universalist categorisations. In an Irish context postcolonial criticism is too readily conflated with old shibboleths such as nationalism and patriarchy, and in deferring to these positions Irish feminists, it seems, foreshorten the limits of their potential theoretical resources. This standpoint appears to replay, and to reconvene, a suite of arguments centred on binaries rather than ‘an orientation around pluralities’ (Finney, 2006: 115). Naturally an openness to the methodologies and interventions of postcolonial criticism embraces postcolonial feminist writing, but can equally enter into debate with male postcolonial critics, and with the combined historical representations, and counter-representations, of gender under colonialism. To simply locate postcolonial criticism, both historical and contemporary, within the domain of reconstituted patriarchy is, one suspects, a missed opportunity. Equally, it essentialises suffering as a preserve of female experience under colonialism; does not acknowledge the ‘construction’ of both genders under colonial conditions; and





elides the discursive interlacing of race, gender and sexuality within colonial epistemes. But in purely feminist terms it is urgent that contemporary Irish feminist criticism retain a cognisance of the theoretical and political opportunities of conversing with international postcolonial criticism. The value of this is, again, canvassed by Rosemary Marangoly George in her review of the field. She asserts the profoundly disruptive potentialities of this international scholarship and includes among its most noteworthy features: ‘the fashioning of cautionary signposts, the disclosure of absences, an insistence on what cannot be represented in elite texts, an emphasis on the more than “purely literary” and the persistent embedding of gendered difference in a larger understanding of race, nationality, class, and caste’ (2006: 211–12). Also emphasised by George is the necessary and ongoing dialectic within postcolonial feminist scholarship between the drive to unseat resolute, globally ascendant patriarchies, and a sensitivity to what Adrienne Rich terms ‘the politics of location’ (1984: 210–31). In fact, George’s postcolonial feminist agenda anticipates recent interventions within Irish feminist criticism by Emer Nolan and Suzanna Chan, both of which consider its future in terms of postcolonial studies and colonialism. Each of these is keen to highlight the international, cross-cultural commonalities of gendered discrimination, but, in addition, each of these critics is careful not to essentialise ‘postcolonial’ or ‘feminist’ experiences without due recognition of the politics of place. As George concludes: ‘Postcolonial feminist scholarship has ... become a shorthand for a scrupulous awareness of one’s relation and proximity to power. This awareness acts as a check on assuming the universality of one’s position, for it relentlessly draws attention to the location from which any theorization is launched’ (2006: 225). In this context it is worth turning to another recent publication that deals with the contentious relations between Irish feminist criticism and Irish postcolonial criticism: ‘Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland’ by Emer Nolan. Nolan’s piece represents a defensive manoeuvre on behalf of Irish postcolonial criticism against the critical strictures of polemics such as that advanced by Connolly. Although Nolan does not actually address Connolly’s essay, she does refer to many of the accusations levelled by Connolly against postcolonial criticism. Whereas Connolly’s intervention exhibits a ‘national’ focus, Nolan’s argument is firmly committed to locating Irish feminist criticism within an international continuum, and is sympathetic to opening up channels of theoretical conversation



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with international postcolonial feminism. As we have noted, one of the battlegrounds between Irish feminist criticism and Irish postcolonial criticism is the manner in which the histories of Irish women have been subsumed under the weight of the ‘national’, and ‘nationalist’, tale. Irish postcolonial criticism is accused of being addicted to reimagining and reassessing the histories of Irish nationalism. For feminists such as Connolly, Irish postcolonial criticism has singularly failed to register the complex ways in which Irish women engaged with nationalist politics and nationalist discourses at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, as Nolan reveals, such an obsessive concern with the ‘national’ has now become a feature of Irish feminism itself, and has precluded the development of an internationally inflected postcolonial feminism in Ireland – what she terms ‘a certain insularism in Irish feminism’ (2007: 337). In a further caveat Nolan warns against the development of a feminist ‘enclave’ in Irish studies, wherein the experiences of Irish women, both lived and represented, become comprehensible solely through exclusively feminist readings. Tracking gendered discrimination and oppression without extending the realms of feminist criticism clearly compromises the legitimacy and effectiveness of any critical conclusions. Of particular relevance to this point, which coheres with the agenda set by Mohanty, is Nolan’s rejection of Moynagh Sullivan’s oblique formulation that, until ‘the actual lost origin of the material womb is “unearthed” in Irish nationalist discourse, no woman in Ireland, regardless of her colour, religion, or race, can be a fully recognised citizen of the Irish state’ (2005: 463). Under such a feminist lens the other material indices of identity, and of social inclusion and exclusion, are relegated. Sullivan’s political schema is heavily (over)weighted in exclusively feminist terms, and naively evacuates race, ethnicity and religious faith to the margins of her critique. In addition, class and the consequences of economic status are entirely erased, which seems a grave omission when one considers the economic mutation of Irish society over the past two decades. How one can omit class out of hand in such a quickened economic climate exposes a constricted feminist methodology. Not only does the agenda alluded to here negate the deep impacts of race, class, and faith on the material lives of men and women, from a feminist perspective it proposes a homogenised categorisation of Irish ‘woman’ – in many ways it recycles the outdated universalist rhetoric of liberal emancipation. And one of the remedies to such ‘insular’ theoretical formulations is, arguably, to engage more productively, and consistently, with postcolonial feminist thought. To internationalise is not




to negate difference, or to endanger contextual specifics, but raises the prospect of critical solidarities across differential locations of gendered discrimination. Whereas Connolly’s and Sullivan’s feminist projects are curtailed by their attention to unstitching the complex relations between Irish women’s histories and the ‘history’ of the Irish nation, Nolan’s intervention moves from the ‘national’ to a more international postcolonial feminist mode. This international perspective is not simply designed, then, to activate cross-cultural dialogue but can also detail the limitations of isolated ‘national’ feminist projects. Irish feminist critiques of Irish nationalist history, and of the ambivalent positions of Irish women within that history, can only be abetted by a more complete interaction with ‘the wider world of empire and anti-imperial struggle within which these were fashioned’ (Nolan, 2007: 361). International postcolonial feminism, while critical of dominant nationalist histories, can illustrate that thinking through the national is not, of necessity, antithetical to advanced feminist projects. Recovering subsumed histories of women’s activism and thought within the ‘national’ of anticolonialism and postcolonialism can nourish contemporary discussions on the differential experiences of women across the globe. As we have seen in the utopian national Marxist thought of James Connolly, the national and the international, the local and the global, the micro- and the macrostructural can productively cohere in enabling materialist, anticolonial theory and practice. Gender is but one informant of a multifaceted postcolonial interrogation of empire in its historical, contemporary and future incarnations. And the contingency of its discursive relativity must be exposed; such critiques must also attend to the artificial national, racial, class-based symptoms of imperial oppression and/or bourgeois nationalist hegemony. In an Irish context, Nolan suggests, echoing earlier comments by Cleary, that, in launching frontal attacks on Irish nationalism and on the ‘nationalist’ politics of Irish postcolonial criticism, Irish feminist criticism allies itself with ‘variants of Irish revisionism and Irish modernisation theory, to metropolitan (largely American and British) critiques of very different “national literatures,” and to sometimes facile assumptions about what constitutes “transgression” in late capitalist societies such as Ireland’ (2007: 361). Irish feminism, then, moves beyond a critique of nationalism to an endorsement of the narrowly conceived horizons of Irish modernisation – a phenomenon that, as we have seen, has, legitimately, come under intense pressure from Irish postcolonial




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criticism. In partaking of the progressive zeal of modernisation theory, Irish feminism bypasses the urgent critique of the class consequences of Irish economic modernisation both within Ireland and, of course, in the developing world. Critics of Irish modernisation are not simply concerned with how it endows uneven economic privilege within Ireland, but are alert to the equally disfiguring results of our comparative economic buoyancy in other parts of the world. Thus, any critique that is not alive to the urgency of radical oppositional engagement with Irish modernisation evades its critical responsibilities. The intimacy of the preoccupations of international postcolonial feminist criticism and those of Irish feminism are also underscored by the Irish art critic Suzanna Chan. In her recent essay ‘ “Kiss my Royal Irish Ass.” Contesting Identity: Visual Culture, Gender, Whiteness and Diaspora’, Chan stresses that one of the lacunae of contemporary Irish feminist scholarship is the matter of race and how, specifically, ‘racial empowerment is embedded in issues of gender’ (Chan, 2006: 1). Chan’s argument belongs to the genealogy of feminist thought most forcefully articulated by Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes’, as she seeks to problematise universal assumptions of ‘Irish’ womanhood. While Chan’s contention may have been tendentious twenty years ago, in racial and ethnic terms, in contemporary Ireland there is no escaping the impacts of immigration and the resultant cultural and political questions these raise for conceptions of national identity, and, as far as Chan is concerned, gendered national identity. Hinging her argument around, firstly, the Irish Referendum of Citizenship in 2004 and, then, around the work of artists Cheryl Donegan, Frances Hegarty, and Fiona Fahy, Chan explores the ways in which ‘whiteness’ and Irish ‘whiteness’ are constitutively, following Judith Butler, ‘performed’ discourses. Furthermore, Chan reveals the extent to which Ireland’s colonial history – its experience of colonial racial hierarchies – contributes to the persistence of a naturalised ‘white’ version of gendered national identity in Ireland. Not entirely endorsing the theoretical procedures of postcolonial theory, and admonishing, again à la Mohanty, its levelling of contextual differentials, Chan, nevertheless, draws on its interrogations of race and, in so doing, productively opens Irish feminist criticism to international dialogues. Chan’s intervention, then, questions complacent homologies of ‘postcoloniality’, ‘Irishness’, and ‘femininity’, and she suggests that ‘these categories erase the experiences of non-white women in Ireland, collapse the complexities and experiences of “black” and “Third World women”,





and deny that questions of privilege pertain to Irish women’ (Chan, 2006: 12). Implicit in Chan’s argument is the link between race and politico-economic power. While Irish feminist criticism and Irish women’s history have been justifiably surveying and exposing the relative inequities suffered by generations of Irish women, as well as retrieving and celebrating the signal contributions of women, individual and collective, to Irish history, Chan, and other postcolonial feminist critics, remind us that such relative disempowerment masks relative empowerment under the current conjuncture. And such empowerment is not strictly across national boundaries but is manifest in political and economic conditions within Irish society. Indeed, entering Ireland into postcolonial feminist debates, as Nolan also does, can only enliven the critical resources of both fields, particularly in relation to the histories of colonialism and gendered racism. As Chan argues: ‘Whereas in the present day, the categories “Irish” and “white” are virtually synonymous with one another in national identity discourses, by having historically occupied both dominant and subordinate positions according to concepts of “race”, the case of Ireland emphasises the artificiality and instability of racial categorisations’ (2006: 6). We might add not only ‘racial categorisations’ but also ideas of ‘nationality’, ‘gender’, and colonialism. Recalling sentiments expressed by Mohanty, above, Bahri articulates the kind of international postcolonial feminist critique that, it seems, Nolan is urging for in Ireland. Displaying a cultural materialist methodology, Bahri argues that ‘gender and international politics are vitally intertwined ... [and] a feminist lens can reveal a great deal about the ways in which the global, the local, and gender are mutually constitutive’ (2004: 220). What is required, then, is for Irish feminist critiques to position themselves within the differential economy of international postcolonial feminism. Establishing such a relation will enable Irish feminism to profit from, and to contribute to, ‘transnational feminist activism’ (Bahri, 2004: 220). Ireland’s contested postcolonial status is, as we have argued, not a barrier to its critics participating in international postcolonial debates, but is a vital element of complicating received idioms, concepts and typologies within the international postcolonial field. Ireland’s accelerated and problematic integration into British imperial modernity, as well as its latter-day hastened economic growth, surely has implications for international postcolonial feminist studies. Invoking Spivak, Bahri concludes: A study of the position of women in any given location may have global or international ramifications and determinations; one need



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no longer assume that the issues are neatly bound by national boundaries. Although an understanding of women in globality is ‘an immense field of study,’ as Spivak notes elsewhere, a committed global perspective can gradually help us understand how multiple identities function in different situations. (2004: 203)




Fanon’s One Big Idea: Revising Postcolonial Studies and Irish Studies

The site of struggle within fields, however, is not just over possession of capital but over the very definition of what capital is at stake and what is valued ... Social fields are structured by the differential possession of forms of capital but individuals are also motivated to increase their possession of this capital. There is, therefore, a dynamic process of a reproduction of social fields.1

‘Weetabix theory’2 In their editorial introduction to the first issue of Postcolonial Studies, Sanjay Seth, Leela Gandhi and Michael Dutton readily acknowledge the recent, and still apparent, ascendancy of postcolonial criticism within university teaching and research: Once counter-canonical and enablingly amorphous in its motivations, the postcolonial has now acquired institutional validity. Respectable, popular, publishable and pedagogically secure, it is time for postcolonialism to become self-critical and introspective and, so also, to resist the seductions of canonicity and disciplinarity ... It [Postcolonial Studies] hopes, once again, to facilitate a critique of knowledges rather than to become the triumphant purveyor of a new epistemic orthodoxy. (1998: 9) Chapter 3 illustrates that there is a lateral recognition of the elevated ‘stock’ of Irish postcolonial studies, but more importantly the 182



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interventions discussed demonstrate the willingness of Irish critics to prevent the possibility of theoretical ossification or philosophical triumphalism on the part of Irish postcolonial studies. Rather than operating as a form of knowledge that produces definitive answers, Irish postcolonial studies continually poses radical questions of established forms of knowledge and modes of representation. As Seth, Gandhi and Dutton elaborate, these questions must also be continually focused on the theoretical, disciplinary and political procedures of postcolonial studies. Synchronous with the development of (Irish) postcolonial studies have been consistent, vigorous and, often, legitimate critical interrogations of its discursive practices and agendas. In this chapter I outline and critique a wide selection of both international and Irish critics – literary critics, historians, economists and sociologists – who have inveighed against the theoretical resources, historical foundations and political strategies of postcolonial methodologies. In summary, these critiques identify manifold shortcomings both within and around postcolonial studies, including: its apparent celebration of anachronistic nationalism; vacant language games; culturalist bias; ostensible neo-colonial pretensions as a dominant academic orthodoxy; the careerist opportunism of postcolonial theorists; its apparent betrayal or relegation of classical Marxist praxis; its homogenising tropes and theoretical universalism; its veneration of ‘abstraction’ over empiricism; its fetishisation of oppression; and its elision of contemporary neo-imperial exercises. While some of these cautions can be justified to various degrees, it is my intention to delineate, but also to engage with, the arguments of this critical constituency. I will, firstly, rehearse the arguments of the protagonists of an international conversation on postcolonial studies before examining the particular Irish critiques of postcolonial studies. The arguments will, of course, overlap, as many of the broader criticisms of postcolonial studies as an international discourse have been applied to its Irish variant. Nevertheless, there are also debates that are confined to Irish politico-cultural debate, but there exists an insistent impression that international criticism of postcolonial studies has been more nuanced, engaged, and, at times, constructive.

Materialist formulations In his brief, but informative, summary of ‘Materialist Formulations’ within and surrounding postcolonial studies, David Murphy suggests that cultures of mutual suspicion obtain between materialist Marxist



Revising Postcolonial Studies and Irish Studies

approaches to the study of imperialist histories and those pursued by what are considered post-structuralist postcolonialists (2007: 181–9). On the one hand, materialist critiques eschew the culturalist, or representational, foci of postcolonial studies, together with its diminution, and homogenisation, of the varied material exercises of global imperialism. By way of response, postcolonialists are deemed to be sceptical of Marxism’s cleavage to systemic explanatory models of historical processes, and they question the metanarratological foundations of structuralist Marxist thought. While such polarities are crude, they do grant a superficial impression of the long-standing, and persistent, theoretical fault lines that exist between Marxism and postcolonialism. Yet, inevitably, this does not do justice to the full complexity of either discourse and, in truth, does not tell the complete story of the relations and interactions between the fields. In this section I spotlight some of the major international critics who have, in various ways and at various stages, pitted Marxist thought and praxis against postcolonial studies. As mentioned, it is simplistic to assert that there is some sense of mutual exclusivity between the two discourses, and that productive dialogue has not ensued, and cannot ensue, across the respective disciplines. A more accurate characterisation, though perhaps no less contestable, is that a distinction can be made between those Marxist critics who engage postcolonial studies from within, and who see possibilities for constructive cross-fertilisation, and those Marxist critics who try to maintain a position external to postcolonial studies, and who reject its motives, ethics, and politics outright.

Objects of knowledge One of the earliest critical interventions from within the field of postcolonial studies that highlighted the lacunae of colonial discourse analysis was Benita Parry’s 1987 essay, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’; the critique centered on the notion of colonial ‘othering’ and the possibilities of effective resistance. Reading through Fanon, she argued that analysts of colonial discourse, particularly Bhabha and Spivak, were excessively concerned with the mechanisms of colonial ‘othering’ and that they attributed disproportionate agency to colonial discourse under which ‘the colonized [was] constructed by colonialist ideology’ (1987: 29). She applauds the achievements of colonial discourse analysis in ‘having freed the study of colonialist writing from an empiricist criticism and a liberal politics to disclose the ideological construction of colonialism’s objects of knowledge’ (1987: 33).




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Yet significant theoretical issues were generated by a refusal ‘of western historiography, [rejection of] a Marxist version ... and [disavowal of] liberationist histories accused of weaving a seamless narrative’ (Parry, 1987: 33). Though Parry cites Marxist theory, it is not laboured in this particular essay. Of more significance is her contention that ‘the notion of epistemic violence and the occluding of reverse discourses have obliterated the role of the native as historical subject and combatant, possessor of an-other knowledge and producer of alternative traditions’ (1987: 34). Principally interrogating Bhabha and Spivak, though Said and Abdul JanMohamed are also cited, Parry divines a series of reading methodologies that operate within an attenuated vista. In effect, the authoritative representations of the coloniser, and any moments of resistance enacted against such representational hegemony, depend exclusively on the agency of the colonial centre. Even in the location of the affective subversion of ‘sly civility’ and ‘mimicry’, Bhabha’s cultural politics exhibit narrow critical borders. As Parry argues above, the colonised is flensed of discursive agency in all areas of colonial discourse analysis; colonial authority is the historical locus of representational erasure and resistance, while latter-day theory denies the legitimacy of anticolonial texts and fails to register the alternative traditions of ‘the native as historical subject’ (Parry, 1987: 34). Parry’s critique was an instructive intervention at the time and certainly alerted colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies to its own critical limitations. By drawing attention to the idea of ‘alternative traditions’, Parry sidestepped the continued adherence to the authority of colonial texts. Regardless of subversive rereadings, it was a matter of exigency to escape the orbit of such narratives in an effort to expand both the remit and the efficacy of postcolonial studies. Parry’s theoretical and political exemplar is Fanon, whose anticolonial writing elucidates a committed programme of direct political and cultural action. In Parry’s formulation, then, the discursive analyses of Bhabha and Spivak, while striving to register protracted and ideological representational occlusion and also to trace instances of affective resistance, in fact exacerbates such occlusion. In locating affective resistance, syncretism or hybridity, Parry maintains, these critics delimit ‘the space in which the colonized can be written back into history’ (1987: 39). Consequently, we witness the rehearsal of a consistent argument within postcolonial studies: how does the location of affective resistance translate into an effective and genuinely resistant politics? The subtitle of Parry’s most recent, and most sustained, critique of postcolonial studies signals her continuing disenchantment with what





is laterally perceived as the discipline’s preoccupation with its own semiotic procedures, and how these procedures can be deployed to unravel the semiotics of imperial and, more recently, bourgeois nationalist representations. Parry’s book is designated a ‘materialist critique’ and is the fruit of two decades of critical confrontation within the field of postcolonial studies. Underwriting the book is Parry’s conviction that a materialist critique of historical and contemporary imperialism – in terms of systematic engagement with the political, the cultural, the economic and the social – has been a lost opportunity for contemporary postcolonial studies. Outlining the animus of her work from the outset, Parry declares: What these essays are concerned to suggest is that without moving in a direction where studies of actually existing political, economic and cultural conditions, past and present, are no longer separated from meta-critical speculations, or culture and discourse from histories that have happened or are still in the making, postcolonial studies will remain ensnared in an increasingly repetitive preoccupation with sign systems and the exegetics of representation. (2004: 12) Without an infusion of, or an orientation towards, materialist critical strategies, the field of postcolonial studies will continue as a wholly depoliticised and ahistorical suite of projects. Unmindful of its Marxist heritage, postcolonial studies can only degenerate into fetishising its own idioms, and remain ignorant of its essential rootedness in the economic conjuncture that dominates and exploits in neo-imperial, global forms. Parry’s original intervention and her subsequent appraisals of postcolonial studies are sceptical of the discourse’s ability, indeed its willingness, to engage productively with contemporary material exploitation. Reduced to a tautological exercise in the unravelling of complex semiotic systems, postcolonial studies, in this estimation, is an elitist, academic pursuit, which remains blissfully ignorant of, and untainted by, the actualities of the global capitalist world system. Alluding to the critical positions of two other prominent, and consistent, commentators on postcolonial studies, Parry underscores the widely held conviction that postcolonial studies has signally failed, and indeed continues to fail, to attend to the concrete material disparities of the world’s dominant socio-economic conjuncture. Parry’s language suggests that there is a conscious, or instrumental, force at work within postcolonial studies, which has adjudicated that its



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theoretical and historical investigations will remain solely committed to ‘cultural’ texts and discursive disenfranchisement. She notes that ‘Masao Miyoshi and Arif Dirlik find that the deployment of the postcolonial serves as a license for ignoring the contemporary actuality of global politics within a capitalist world system’ (2004: 57). As we will see, Dirlik poses his materialist objections to postcolonial studies in several forceful interventions. If, as Parry impresses, postcolonial studies, and in particular the writings of Homi Bhabha, ‘subordinate the cognition and explication of social forces, institutions and practices, which are ultimately dependent on empirical inquiry, to deconstructions of the signifying process; while the structure of linguistic difference and vicissitudes in the movement of the signifier are invested with the power to alienate and overwhelm’, what, then, is to be concluded from these allegations that the ‘postcolonial’, a term that is in itself left undifferentiated in critical appraisals, willingly remains unexercised by the profound inequalities of global capitalism? (2004: 59). In Parry’s estimation, which, by her own implication, accords with that of other critics of postcolonial studies, the projects pursued under the rubric of postcolonial studies are merely concerned with matters of form and fail to wrestle with details of acute material content. In other words, the post-structuralist divestment of meaning from content has sanctioned a one-handed superficial array of literary–historical and historiographical reading methodologies. Such methodologies are incapable of initiating radical social and political change. Under this sceptical critical optic a series of postcolonial theoretical and historical projects that advertises its commitment, and capacity, to imagine a radical cultural politics is, in fact, an impotent, even complacent, discursive consensus. The retreat into the realm of culture, with emphases on cultural difference, multiculturalism, marginality, representation, among others, is nothing more than the retail of abstract slogans, which have scant purchase in the material world of political activism. Moreover, not only is there a grim diagnosis of the ineffectual nature of these postcolonial projects, it is also imputed that this is exactly the limited range of political goals set by postcolonial scholars. Increased participation in the current socioeconomic conjuncture is the horizon of its ambitions – there is no imagination of revolutionary change beyond the present. No more bald statements of Marxism’s rejection of postcolonial studies could be found than those of Aijaz Ahmad. For Ahmad, the variety of semantic guises that the postcolonial industry has inaugurated has utterly, and insidiously, erased the historical and the contemporary




impacts and workings of imperialism from critical debate. Elaborating this process of ‘erasure’ by the essentially ‘neo-colonial’ manoeuvres of institutional postcolonialism, Ahmad writes that ‘when we encounter the term “postcolonialism” these days ... we think primarily of cultural theory, as it is enunciated in the field of literature for the most part, from which, then, it has wandered into the domain of certain deconstructive kinds of history writing’ (1995a: 11). Postcolonialism, then, is a linguistic exercise – a function of cultural inquiry that merely signifies textual ambivalence and narrative instability. And, while the semiotic unfurling of textuality and language in the 1970s and 1980s was, and still is, celebrated as a tool of representational liberation, and equalisation, for Ahmad it grossly devalues the memories and legacies of material colonial, anticolonial, and bona fide postcolonial events. In his view this buries the ‘memory of some earlier debates which had also posed the question, not in cultural theory but in political theory, and in relation not to literary production but to the class character and social projects of states and regimes that had arisen in Asia and Africa in the wake of decolonisation’ (1995a: 11). Ahmad’s historical lament for such ‘postcolonial’ amnesia is matched in the contemporary context, according to another Marxist critic, Epifanio San Juan Jr. He claims that the resolute antimaterialism of postcolonial studies and its resistance to historical materialism result in a situation in which its ‘obsession to do away with totality, foundations, universals, and systemic analysis leads to a mechanical reification of ideas and terminology ... culminating in a general relativism, scepticism, and nominalism ... that undercuts the postcolonial claim to truth, plausibility, or moral high ground’ (2002: 222). The scepticism expressed by Parry from her location within the field is matched by Ahmad in his penetrating, and exasperated, extrinsic critique of the theoretical narcissism of postcolonial criticism. Ahmad is a long-term and virulent interlocutor of the major personalities and ideas that convene around postcolonial studies, and his critical approach coalesces with that vocalised by Parry in so far as his impatience with the field stems from a perceived lack of cognition of conditions of economic inequality and impoverishment within its discursive exercises. In addition, Ahmad’s polemical readings of postcolonial studies are consonant with Dirlik’s implication that there is a vacuity at the core of postcolonial criticism’s posture of intellectual radicalism while its advocates remain cosily ensconced within the Western academy. Framed in more bellicose terms than Parry’s, certainly, Ahmad’s criticisms,





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For if we accept the more extreme versions of the Foucauldian propositions (a) that whatever claims to be a fact is none other than a trutheffect produced by the ruse of discourse, and (b) that whatever claims to resist Power is already constituted as Power, then there is really nothing for Theory to do except to wander aimlessly through the effects – counting them, consuming them, producing them – and in the process submitting to the interminable whisperings of Discourse, both as Origin and as Fate. This theory-as-conversation also has a remarkably strong levelling effect. (1992: 70) Contrary to its proposed liberationist effects, what is stressed here is that postcolonial studies readily accepts the inevitability of failure; an acquiescence that is symptomatic of its regression into discursive depoliticisation. Such a conclusion not only underscores the post-structuralist bias of postcolonial studies, but accuses the field of complicity in exploitation through inaction. Ignoring the materiality of ‘Power’, disenfranchisement, inequality, and discrimination, and by merely producing idiomatic commentary on such historical and contemporary experiences, postcolonial studies refuses to foment any real sense of crisis. By extension such inaction forecloses the necessity of confronting the field’s and its practitioners’ position vis-à-vis capitalist modernity. Surveying Ahmad’s critique of postcolonial studies, it is evident that a large share of the blame for its current academic prestige rests with the publication of Said’s Orientalism. As we have noted, Orientalism, as well as Said’s later and more direct interventions in Irish literary history, has been formative to the critical momentum of Ireland’s array of postcolonial projects. The central reservation that Ahmad expresses regarding Said’s narrative of colonial misrepresentation is, of course, rooted in the issues of economic exploitation and of class. Rejecting the homogenising instrumentality of Said’s Orientalist paradigm, Ahmad questions the legitimacy of Said’s contention that there was a willed uniformity to the representational procedures of Empire and, specifically, ‘orientalising’. For Ahmad, European imperialism did not have exclusive rights to exploitation and bigotry in the non-European world. And Said’s formulation is historically inaccurate and politically dishonest. In Ahmad’s terms: ‘It is also simply the case that the kind of essentialising procedure which Said associates exclusively with the “West” is by no means a trait



nevertheless, are representative of and consistent with those voiced by a range of critics of postcolonial studies:

of the European alone; any number of Muslims routinely draw epistemological and ontological distance between East and West, the Islamicite and Christendom’ (1992: 183–4). In line with a charge repeatedly levelled at Orientalism, Ahmad, herein, diagnoses the dearth of agency attributed to the East by Said. But Ahmad proceeds to underline the more significant criticism, in his estimation; one that has been most vociferously protested by critical opponents of postcolonial studies: What gave European forms of these prejudices their special force in history, with devastating consequences for the actual lives of countless millions and expressed ideologically in full-blown Eurocentric racisms, was not some transhistorical process of ontological obsession and falsity ... but, quite specifically, the power of colonial capitalism, which gave rise to other sorts of power [my emphasis]. (1992: 184) Capitalism, its structures of economic manipulation and attendant consequences of political and social alienation are the foundational causes of colonial expropriation and violence. The discursive misrepresentations tracked by Said, and subsequently pursued in numerous interventions and debates, are consequential to the machinations of colonial capitalism. In comparison with the ferocious and unremitting impacts of economic imperialism on the material lives of colonised societies, the semiotics of colonial misrepresentation is of secondary consideration. While Ahmad reserves particular critical venom for the overt conceptual contradictions and political quietism of Said’s seminal text, he is also concerned with the institutional and academic politics of postcolonial studies – a matter that is not unrelated to the previous point above. Again, this is an issue that we have cursorily addressed with respect to the work of Pierre Bourdieu in terms of Irish metacriticism. But Ahmad is equally sensitive to the careerist opportunism and intellectual capital attached to a reconfigured ‘leftist’ cultural politics, which makes a virtue of discursive protest. Where our discussion of Bourdieu foregrounded the contentious nature of the theoretical idioms of postcolonial studies, Ahmad’s argument suggests that broader macropolitical events and campaigns were seized upon by ‘leftist’ intellectuals in order to attain a level of dissident fashionability. Indeed, the two arguments are inseparable: subversive tropes provide serviceable signs with which to buttress counter-hegemonic political posturing: The characteristic posture of this new intellectual was that he or she would gain legitimacy on the Left by constantly and fervently




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referring to the Third World, Cuba, national liberation, and so on, but would also be openly and contemptuously anti-communist ... nor be affiliated in any degree with any labour movement whatsoever, but would invoke an anti-bourgeois stance in the name of manifestly reactionary anti-humanisms enunciated in the Nietzschean tradition and propagated now under the signature of anti-capitalism, anti-historicism, structuralism and post-structuralism, specifically, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Glucksman, Kristeva. (1992: 192) Now, while it is obvious that Ahmad is manufacturing an ‘essentialised’ composite portrait of the ‘postcolonial intellectual’ – a crime for which he indicts Said – Ahmad’s suggestion that the ‘leftist’ modishness of some postcolonial critics has been transfused with a self-contradictory anti-bourgeois spirit is legitimate. But what this generalised criticism does not acknowledge, certainly if we analyse Irish postcolonial criticism, is the extent to which Irish postcolonial critics have interrogated the roots of Irish bourgeoisation – namely critiques of and searches for counter-movements or historical alternatives to modernisation theory and capitalist modernity. From an international disciplinary perspective, there is no way to gainsay Ahmad’s allusion to the tropic solipsism of many facets of postcolonial criticism – a matter that has been discussed at length elsewhere and in summary here. Yet, again in an Irish context, the textual semiotic indeterminacy advocated by poststructuralist critics has proven enabling in the exposure of the political sympathies that existed between the dominant modes of historiography in twentieth-century Ireland and the lateral propagation of faith in the virtues of liberal capitalist modernisation. Combining two of the recurrent criticisms of postcolonial theory, and allying his project with those of Parry, Ahmad and San Juan Jr detailed above, Dirlik concludes: In other words, a critique that starts off with a repudiation of the universalistic pretensions of Marxist language ends up not with its dispersion into local vernaculars but with a return to another First World language with universalistic epistemological pretensions. It enables us, at least, to locate postcolonial criticism in the contemporary First World. (1994: 342) Dirlik diagnoses the persistent relegation and/or elision of material factors, specifically the rise of global capitalism, as a mitigation of the ‘pretensions’ of postcolonial critique. Questions of disenfranchisement





and representation, Dirlik argues, are abstracted from the economic realities of global capitalist development into the idiomatic mediations of post-structuralist theory. In reneging on the material praxis of Marxist theory, then, the ‘convoluted prose’ (Jacoby, 1995a: 17) of postcolonial theory seeks ‘refuge in aesthetic phraseology’ (Dirlik, 1994: 343). Dirlik is keen to illustrate that the eschewal of material, radical politics by postcolonial theory evidences its political enervation and inherent conservatism. Underlying his Marxist critique is an interest in presenting postcolonial studies as a neoconservative, First World orthodoxy. Such a conservatism and duplicitous self-interest is manifest in its idiomatic content, political inertia and institutional tenure. Postcolonial studies, then, falls foul of what Eagleton dubs ‘the Marxist heresy known as culturalism’ (1998b: 244). In weighting the political gravity of cultural representations, postcolonial studies reduces its material, political valence. It merely patronises a symbolic economy in its relegation of the exigencies of capitalist development and material class struggles. Elsewhere Dirlik asserts: Among the pasts that are erased by the postcolonial are revolutionary pasts ... The postcolonial has become a convenient way of naming and containing problems that have appeared with global reconfigurations ... Postcolonialism has assumed something of the power of a self-perpetuating discourse (aided, no doubt, by its marketability in academia and the publishing industry). Even the critique of postcolonialism is rendered readily into a vehicle for its propagation. (1999a: 156) While Dirlik’s second point has a degree of validity, his concluding assertions concerning the ‘marketability’ or ‘self-propagation’ of postcolonial studies are certainly mitigating. If we recall Bourdieu’s argument that academic disputes actually conceal a mutuality of interest, then Dirlik’s apparent, vociferous dismissal of postcolonial studies is compromised. If postcolonial studies is a ‘self-perpetuating discourse’, then, given the volume and frequency of Dirlik’s interventions, he has a vested interest in that ‘perpetuation’; indeed, he occupies a central function in its continued ascendancy. This is not to argue that criticism of postcolonial theory is invalid, but that self-interest disguised as dismissal is a retrograde mode of critical analysis. Postcolonial studies is, to all intents and purposes, a successful academic, critical industry in its own right. As Lazarus explains: Today ... postcolonial studies occupies a position of legitimacy and even relative prestige, not only within the Euro-American academy



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but also in universities in many countries of the formerly colonised world. Postcolonial studies centres have been set up in many institutions ... and innumerable conferences and colloquia have been convened ... Several dedicated academic journals have begun publication, and any number of other journals have devoted special issues to ‘postcolonial literature,’ ‘postcolonial theory,’ or ‘the postcolonial condition’. (2004: 1) But equally Dirlik and the other polemicists against postcolonial criticism should include their own work as part of this broader field of postcolonial criticism. These critics are as dependent on the publishing industry’s penchant for postcolonial theory as any of the critics that they indict. Allied to the Marxist critiques of both Dirlik and Ahmad, San Juan Jr further accents what he perceives as a rarefied and abstracted theoretical project. Diagnosing a political disingenuity at the core of postcolonial studies, San Juan Jr dismisses it as ‘metaphysical idealism’ (1998: 9). Such idealism merely institutes its own teleological ‘counterrevolutionary politics’ (1998: 9), and simultaneously ‘occludes its own historical determinacy by deploying psychoanalytical and linguistic conceptual frameworks that take market/exchange relations for granted. It takes as given the ideological assumptions of utilitarian individual as normative and natural’ (San Juan Jr, 1998: 9–10). San Juan Jr again emphasises the extent to which, he believes, the idiomacy of postcolonial studies has become estranged from the material conditions of both its genesis and its contemporary constituencies. Citing Ahmad and Parry, he contends that postcolonial theory, a body of projects that remain undifferentiated in San Juan Jr’s critique, functions within ‘the main cultural tropes of bourgeois humanism’ (1998: 265). Through abstracted paradigms and exorbitant language, postcolonial theory affects a retrogressive and counter-revolutionary exercise, which, significantly, disables urgent forms of ‘social praxis’ (Parry, 1987: 43). Dirlik and Ahmad excise the Marxist heritage of postcolonial theory in an effort to blunt or disavow both its ‘revolutionary’ capacity and genealogy. By artificially expanding the philosophical and historical hiatus between the praxis of liberation, anticolonial movements, with roots in Marxist thought, and the more recent discursive readings of postcolonial studies, they sequester postcolonial studies in a falsified academic, First World shell. Effectively, an essentialised narrative of postcolonial studies is created; a suitable theoretical and political straw man with which to endow ‘genuine’ Marxist theory with increased political currency. The legacies of colonialism are not simply economic




disparities or inequalities, but these legacies must be interrogated in terms of a slew of broader cultural and political factors, including ethnicity, creed, gender, geography and historiography, as well as class. Essentially, the circulatory system of global capital is understood as more than an economic system, it is perceived as a series of cultural and political processes. In eschewing and critically interrogating the philosophical and material trajectories of modernisation theory as well as remaining conscious of the localised implantations of capital across the colonial world, a Marxist-inflected postcolonial criticism can engage with the material rapacity of contemporary global capital. As Young argues: Postcolonial theory involves a political analysis of the cultural history of colonialism, and investigates its contemporary effects in western and tricontinent cultures, making connections between the past and the politics of the present ... postcolonial theory operates within the historical legacy of Marxist critique on which it continues to draw but which it simultaneously transfers according to the precedent of the greatest tricontinental anti-colonial intellectual politicians. (2001: 6) In reclaiming postcolonial studies’ Marxist heritage, Young directly contradicts the strategic critiques of San Juan Jr, Ahmad and Dirlik. Denying the Marxist genealogy of postcolonial studies enables critics to consign its projects to the domain of academic vanity and disciplinary ‘fashionability’, thereby evacuating it of all material political purchase and possibility. The accumulation and circulation of capital within the global economic system appears as the only legitimate generalisation in Ahmad’s theoretical matrix. In reading the dynamics of political, cultural and racial disparity within historically and geographically remote colonised locations, capital remains the dominant factor in this circulatory system of global imperialism. Ahmad thus suggests the transhistorical and transgeographical consistency of capital, not necessarily classical Marxist theory: it seems more appropriate to think of the many genealogies of this dominance than to speak of an undifferentiated ‘postcoloniality’ ... certain historical generalizations can be made, not on the basis of ‘postcoloniality’, but on the basis of the insertion into the global capitalist system of societies that had many other similarities, despite that fact that one was colonised and the other not; the basis for





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Similarly, at the core of Dirlik’s problematic is the notion that radical Marxist praxis is a sine qua non of revolutionary possibility and political action. In effect, the ostensible culturalist bias of postcolonial studies firstly diminishes ‘revolutionary pasts’ and, secondly, prohibits the enactment of future revolutionary action. Or, as he concludes in ‘Is there History after Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History’: ‘The postcolonial rush to culture is an escape not only from the structures of political economy, but more importantly from revolutionary radicalisms of the past, which are now denied not only contemporary relevance, but even past significance’ (1999b: 23). In the light of my discussion of the utopian impulses of Irish postcolonial studies, Dirlik’s assertion in that context seems tendentious at best, if not wholly inaccurate. Lloyd offers a salutary reminder of the responsibilities assumed by Irish postcolonial studies, as well as a categorical corrective to Dirlik’s unqualified generalisation: Irish postcolonial studies is dedicated to the work of retrieving the different rhythms of historically marginalized cultures and to the alternative conceptions of culture and social relations that account for their occlusion from written history. But it is no less dedicated to imagining out of that different knowledge the alternative projects that will convert the damage of history into the terms of future survival. (2003b: 62) Dirlik’s commentary is founded on an absence of self-reflexiveness; he operates in overtly oppositional terms, displacing the ‘tenets’ of postcolonialism with the ‘tenets’ of his own argument. Culture is usurped by ‘political economy’ and post-structuralism is chastened by Marxist theory. Confounding Dirlik’s inflexible Marxist critique, and arguing for a dialogic exchange between empiricist, imperial historians and postcolonial literary and cultural critics, Dane Kennedy warns: ‘it has made it clear that any assessment of this interaction which ignores the cultural dimension – that is, the realm of mutual representations of self and the other – is one that misses what may well be the most persistent and profound legacy of the imperial experience’ (1996: 359). Culture retains a signally enabling valence within postcolonial studies, and, contrary to Dirlik’s critique, it is not a matter of relegating one dimension of the colonial experience or privileging another. As Moore-Gilbert



generalization in this instance would be the history not of colonialism but of capital itself. (1995a: 26–7)


further underlines, referring to Kennedy’s earlier point: ‘Without greater willingness to engage with the “cultural” domain, imperial historiography is unlikely to be able to fully illuminate the continuities (and changes) in “structures of feeling”, systems of representation and cultural/political attitudes between the colonial and contemporary periods’ (1999: 409). Kennedy’s and Moore-Gilbert’s points are equally applicable in the case of Marxist critics such as Dirlik and Ahmad. Returning to Murphy’s essay on the materialist formulations within postcolonial studies, it is apparent that not all materialist critiques of the field are as searing and unconditional as those presented by Ahmad, Dirlik, and San Juan Jr. As Murphy makes clear, there are also Marxist scholars who attempt to enliven postcolonial debates with transfusions of material analyses, while at the same time redeeming the praxis of historical anticolonial activism. Of particular note in this vein of materialist postcolonial analysis is the work of the Warwick-based, South African critic, Neil Lazarus. As Murphy notes, Lazarus has ‘chosen to engage fully with postcolonial studies as a field of inquiry. Despite their disagreements with poststructuralist orthodoxy, these critics have consistently striven to map out the materialist dimensions of the field ... they are willing to acknowledge the value of key poststructuralist critical insights’ (Murphy, 2007: 186). As a respected literary scholar, Lazarus does not entirely disavow the profound impacts of postcolonial reading strategies, which have been such key features of interventions across the field of literary studies – indeed, in many cases, which have been foundational to the field and its multidisciplinary remit. Yet Lazarus proposes acute critical modifications to the practices of mainstream postcolonial studies, and is committed to rejuvenating the political and economic materiality of anticolonial praxis. As Crystal Bartolovich articulated in her editorial introduction to Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies: ‘It seems to us that Marxist theorists can and should engage with postcolonial studies in mutual sites of concern, and concede to the field the authentic insights and advances that have been generated within it’ (2002: 10). Lazarus, too, notes the inevitable short-circuiting of material political interventionism under the antirealist discourse of post-structuralist analysis. Indeed, Lazarus has been a consistent participant in these debates; notable interventions include his ‘Doubting the New World Order: Marxism and Post-Modernist Social Theory’ (1991) and his coauthored ‘The Necessity of Universalism’ (1995). While many poststructuralist and postcolonialist theorists and historians are resigned to the impossibility of egalitarian political representation, Lazarus,



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along with like-minded critics such as Satya Mohanty and Peter Rigby, believes that, while such representational retrieval is eminently difficult, it is not beyond reach entirely. Underwritten by a theoretical faith in Marxist thought, Lazarus certainly subscribes to the belief that material political activism through and towards representation is legitimate. Lazarus’s argument suggests that, contrary to the perceived limitations of postcolonial theory, a more ‘realist’, perhaps ‘humanist’, variety can foster the conditions for social transformation. In the interim, theoretical procrastination equates to institutional collusion and also breeds a cult of intellectual self-preservation, which is addicted to the rhetorical consolations of the status quo. The cases against the political passivity of post-structuralist postcolonial studies formulated by both Lazarus and Mohanty, then, are coherent with that made by Ahmad. In essence, these critics decry the depoliticisation of historical exploitation and the negation of resistant possibilities, which is effected through the apparent impossibility of ‘truthful’ representation. In turn this step coalesces with the political requirements of dominant discourses and the perpetuation of unequal material realities. Silence, idiomatic postponement, and theoretical transcendence are symptomatic of a combined disciplinary culpability in the view of these Marxist critiques. Cleaving to an aggregation of Romantic and Idealist tenets, we witness the creation of an ‘image of human communication as a ruse of illusory subjectivity [which] precludes the possibility of truthful statement on the ground that evidence ... is always-already prejudiced by the very nature of language itself’ (Ahmad, 1992: 194). The very instability of ‘the sign’ is a cornerstone of much counter-canonical postcolonial criticism – the play of meanings is understood as a method of unseating the anchorage of colonial and postcolonial narratives and identities. It is canvassed as a liberation into ambiguity, wherein hierarchies are no longer discursively tenable. Yet, Marxist critics seize upon this very attribute to undermine, firstly, the political and ethical purchases of its logic, and, secondly, the myopia of its methodology with respect to the material, lived ‘truths’, not simply the ‘truth-effects’, of colonialism and neocolonialism. As Nancy F. Partner writes: The danger inherent in capricious, opportunistic violations of the protocol of historicity is really not that millions of people will absolutely come to believe this or that, but that millions of people will come to be cynical, disabused and wary, to believe nothing and thus feel no connection with the polity at all. (Partner, 1995: 39)





An equivalent debunking of post-structuralist postcolonial criticism is provided by San Juan Jr; and both Lazarus’s and San Juan Jr’s efforts coincide, to an extent, with the metacommentaries of Chapter 3. In asserting the liberatory ‘free-play’ of hybrid or syncretic identities, postcolonial theory offers an ethical cultural politics. The difficulty surfaces, however, in the delineation of conceptual apparatuses; in Bourdieu’s terms, a hiatus exists between the theoretical mobilisation of hybridity and its practical political currency. As Kirkland notes above, there is a significant danger that such political currency may be smothered by degrees of theoretical or idiomatic diffusion. In his material analysis of the dearth of political purchase of post-structuralist postcolonial criticism, San Juan Jr diagnoses the presence of ‘ineluctable constraints’ (1992: 3) on the ‘free-play’ of identities; effectively that identity can neither be formed through non- consensual dictation nor, alternatively, by way of postmodern predilection. San Juan Jr argues: Identities can be deconstructed and reconstructed, as the current postmodernist orthodoxy claims, but I think only up to a point: Ineluctable constraints exist ... Constraints of the historical past, the force of what Bourdieu calls inherited habitus, public perceptions maintained by the media and other ideological apparatuses of civil society, the official and received consensus hypostatized as acceptable ‘commonsense’, immigration laws, the routine discourse of business and private occasions – all these no doubt circumscribe the available space and the hospitable occasion in which to invent one’s identity by fiat. (1992: 3–4) Specifically, then, we encounter Bourdieu at two levels: firstly within the very structure and machinations of critical theory, and secondly in the macrostructures of theoretical engagement. Simply, as critical metatheory outlines, the objectifications of analytical idioms must not enact prohibitive gestures but rather must retain a fluidity or malleability that can either flourish or fail in the diversity of colonial/ postcolonial societies. Identities, then, are contingent but not exponential; postcolonial theory is in itself a contingent discourse. ‘Habitus’ influences the full range of postcolonial experiences; theorists, theorised and theory itself do not operate as mutually exclusive political constituencies, nor can the very real differentials of these locations be elided in critical typologies. Infinite deferral and theoretical diffusion is neither a viable nor a desirable politico-cultural option.



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San Juan Jr focuses on two arenas of postcolonial debate: terminological representation and the ethics of equality and liberation. Just as Kirkland’s caveat against ‘containing metaphors’ is indicative of a broader concern with postcolonial tropes, San Juan Jr engages with the politics of theoretical nomination. In a similar vein to Kirkland, he notes: ‘throughout this book, I argue against the culturalist abuse of “ethnicity” to mask hegemonic domination under the pretext of pluralist toleration’ (1992: 15). It is one of the features of contemporary postcolonial theory that there is a delimited range of discursive exchange and cross reading. In compiling a critical survey, one notes the undoubted assimilation of ‘foreign’ ideas but noticeably within a concentrated (and repetitive) cabal of international critics. Not only does San Juan Jr’s admonition echo in Kirkland’s caveat, but it also resounds with equal force in Gibbons’s remark on hybridity: ‘the risks inherent in uncritical adulations of “hybridity” as an empowerment strategy for diasporic or post-colonial identity – particularly when it involves accommodation with the values of powerful expansionist cultures already built on racism’ (1996: 176). To mix the critical terminology of Irish and Philippine–American, containing metaphors are the embodiments of hegemonic domination. The ethical impetus of postcolonial studies depends on the political purchase of its critical interventions. Again we return to San Juan Jr’s juxtaposition of postmodernism and Bourdieuian theory; he concludes: ‘in dissolving the subject as possible agent of critical transformation postmodernism ignores those developments and apologizes for the status quo’ (1992: 16). Postmodernism’s cataclysm of identitarian possibility is superficially liberating and, in fact, fosters increased and shrouded degrees of pluralist homogeneity. In vacating any sense of identitarian anchorage, postmodernism effectively depoliticises individual and communal relations. Infinity of choice is, in effect, an incarceration in a debilitating gyre of self-absorption. The politics of liberation and solidarity, canvassed by Mallon, Gibbons, Lloyd and San Juan Jr, regards such pluralism as fundamentally devoid of ethical concern. Postcolonial ethics are preoccupied with diffusing and accommodating individual and communal identities, but equally they canvass a sense of lateral ethical awareness. Reading through Mike Davis, San Juan Jr articulates, in parvo, the wider theoretical ethical trajectory of a constructive postcolonial studies: ‘Any political strategy concentrating on the axial problem of the revolutionary-democratic struggle for equality must be built on the increasing solidarity between the liberation movements in Southern Africa and Latin America and the movements of the Black and Hispanic





communities in the USA’ (1992: 18–19). San Juan Jr indicts what he calls ‘the force of “cultural pluralism” ’ for nurturing a ‘myth of oneness via precisely the empty, all-purpose signifiers of diversity, pluralism and so on’ (1992: 37). The ostensibly pluralist agenda of liberalism is exposed as a dubious ruse of qualified inclusiveness. Significantly San Juan Jr’s admonition intersects with two relevant arguments in current Irish cultural debate. As I have explained, his argument intersects with Kirkland’s analysis of postcolonial taxonomies. However, simultaneously, in revealing the self-fulfilling myths of liberal pluralism, San Juan Jr is also linked to Whelan’s, McCarthy’s and Cleary’s explication of modernisation theory and revisionist historiography. Liberal modernisation subscribes to an unequivocal telos of progress and development, in other words, a projective temporal vector. No matter how inclusive such an ideological discourse appears to be, the diversity embraced is necessarily subsumed within its modernising teleology. Equally, as I have outlined in relation to Lloyd, Whelan, Gibbons, McCarthy and Cleary, the revisionist and modernisation projects harbour their own ‘myth of oneness’, and in this context Ireland belongs to a broader politico-cultural matrix of liberal modernity. It is the function of postcolonial studies to redress the synchrony of liberal pluralism and to representatively address the diachrony of historical difference. San Juan Jr, unwittingly, strikes the keynote of postcolonial studies, as it is currently conceived of in terms of literary representation; he warns: ‘literary theory is thus not innocent of political complicity by way of the framework or paradigm that inform it, together with its ethical and moral implications’ (1992: 39). Although literary criticism is a single facet of postcolonial studies, San Juan Jr’s statement is apposite. Regardless of the ethical implications of postcolonial studies, including its commitment to a liberatory cultural politics, it cannot obviate its fundamental political temper. San Juan Jr’s point underscores the idea that, simply because postcolonial studies reads political and cultural discourses in terms of liberation, representation and counter-hegemony, this does not warrant any idealisation or sanctification of its theoretical paradigms or manoeuvres. In Chapter 2 we touched upon the utopian retrievals within Irish postcolonial studies, as they have differentially manifested over the past two decades. And we also discussed the utopian energies that infused early twentieth-century Irish anticolonial nationalist projects. In particular, we addressed the national Marxism of James Connolly, which has been latterly exhumed by Dobbins, Lloyd, Thompson, and Young. And it seems that there are opportunities for the material outlined



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in that specific discussion to converse with the equivalent national Marxist thought proposed by Lazarus in his Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. One of the lessons that can be taken from Chapter 2 is that, while there are consistent utopian dimensions to both Irish anticolonial thought and activism, and within many contemporary postcolonial projects, the idea of a radical Irish nationalism cannot remain undifferentiated. Contrary to what is often attributed to mainstream postcolonial studies in Ireland, there is no ‘nationalist’ singularity that is universally conceded to by Irish postcolonial critics and historians. And, in fact, what we see in the work unearthed and theorised by Lloyd, Whelan, Dobbins, Mathews, Kiberd, and Gibbons is a medley of ‘nationalist’ actors within Irish anticolonial nationalisms. Such distinctions are crucial to Lazarus’s alignment of nationalism and Marxism in a postcolonial context. While not trying to conflate Lazarus and these Irish postcolonial critics, it is apparent that there are areas of shared methodology. Lazarus begins Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World by reiterating the conclusions we have discussed above, acknowledging that: ‘The fact that postcolonial studies should have constituted itself as an arena of scholarly production within which Marxism occupies a very marginal status obviously poses a special problem for Marxist readers and writers ... The temptation ... to repudiate the field tout court, to insist upon its fundamental irrelevance, is sometimes irresistible’ (1999: 13). Lazarus neatly summarises the work of the aforementioned Marxist critics without emulating their polemicist tones. What distinguishes Lazarus’s analysis is his readiness to admit that ‘it seems to me that the Marxist theorist in the field of postcolonial studies would be best served were he or she to begin both by conceding to the field the authentic insights and advances that have been generated within it, and to committing himself or herself never to fall behind these’ (1999: 14–15). He continues by offering what might be termed a clarion call for Marxist critics now to enter and engage with postcolonial studies and ‘to oblige the field to tilt in the direction they favour’; they can, and must, demonstrate the analytical superiority of their arguments in order to evacuate the field of ineffectual ‘problematics currently prevailing in the field’ (1999: 15). And one of the key features of Lazarus’s imports into postcolonial studies is a return to the exemplary political urgency of Fanon’s anticolonial writings. The ‘leftist’ anticolonial heritage of postcolonial studies, as embodied in the works of Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, and Samir Amin, has been undermined by post-structuralist divestments of metanarratives, history, and structural




analysis. For Lazarus a renovated national Marxism mediated through Fanon is a possible invigorating addition to contemporary postcolonial studies. It is rarely prudent to subscribe to political consensus, and the prevailing consensus among many recent critics (postcolonial and otherwise) is that the ‘nation’ is an exhausted form. With the onslaught of late capitalist globalisation, the political and economic muscle of the nation has, apparently, atrophied incurably. Yet to wish away the historical achievements, legacies and solidarities of nationalism(s) is, it seems, both unwise and premature. Unburdening ourselves of the nation as a political and critical resource merely leaves us defenceless in the face of unfettered global capital, and its insidious demands and consequences. Equally, such a choice exhibits a profound ignorance of the past; it relinquishes the laterally liberatory and cohesive nationalist movements that combated and, eventually, ousted long-standing colonial regimes. If we are really to imagine more egalitarian utopian futures, it will not be by jettisoning the past yields of nationalism, but by opening ourselves to its historical variety and its particular revolutionary potentialities. Furthermore, just as much postcolonial critical and historiographical writing has focused on the regressive character of bourgeois nationalisms across colonial and postcolonial societies, we must assume a ‘critical’ historical perspective in our engagements with anticolonial nationalisms. The point to stress is the multiplicity of nationalist possibilities and ‘consciousness’, rather than decommission nationalism as, inter alia, conservative, reactionary, racist, fascist, bourgeois, and Eurocentric. In particular, Lazarus is suspicious of several subalternist critiques of nationalism, history, and modernity – specifically, the work of Chakrabarty and Chatterjee, both of whom have departed significantly from Guha’s foundational subalternist politics. For Lazarus, both have equally manufactured essentialised versions of the broader narratives cited above and, through their attribution of dedifferentiated universality to these narratives, Chakrabarty and Chatterjee foreclose any sense in which, for instance, the national might be deployed as a discourse of resistance and liberation. Such critiques, then, hasten the redundancy of systemic analysis within postcolonial studies, and usher Marxism to the margins of contemporary anticolonial debate. In ‘provincialising’ Europe Chakrabarty brackets nationalism and Marxism within the same continuum of universalist epistemic violence as equivalent imperial, Western discourses. There is no historical discourse external to Chakrabarty’s conceptual ‘Europe’ and, therefore, both nationalism




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and Marxism are implicated, and disqualified, at the same time. Chakrabarty’s conclusion, in Lazarus’s estimation, runs counter to Marx, and, in fact, commits to post-structuralist disavowal of signification, which renders the analyses ahistorical and relativist. Postcolonial critiques that delegitimise the liberatory narrative of nationalism and/ or Marxism, then, partake of a Foucauldian methodology, which asserts the impossibility of objective analysis, and by extension, decommissions the possibilities of material resistance to discursive and political oppression. Nevertheless, as the editors of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond maintain: Postcolonial studies has the intellectual potential and tools for subtly tracking both residual forms of national sovereignty within global institutions and emergent views of transnational power. For this effort, it still draws conceptual resources from the decolonizing strategies generated by struggles for national liberation, even while expanding the frame of the nation so as to include different models of political mobilization and solidarity. (Loomba et al., 2005: 16) Loomba et al. touch upon several of the key issues that animate Lazarus’s Marxist renovation of postcolonial studies. Present in both programmes are a differential approach to nationalisms; a recuperation of the past, with its informing narratives of exemplary resistance and liberations; and an awareness that there are latent ‘potentials’ within postcolonial studies – ‘potentials’ that have always been present but silenced under the sway of post-structuralist priorities. What is equally important to such a renewed suite of postcolonial projects is to map the relations between the ‘national and transnational forms of government, economy, society and culture’ (Loomba et al., 2005: 22). Lazarus’s project is hinged around the work of Fanon, who is seen as advocating not just a nationalist supersession of a dominant colonial order but also ‘a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing social order’ (Lazarus, 1999: 79). Decolonisation is not confined to political seizure of power and a restoration of a national culture; Lazarus’s Fanon envisions an international consciousness which radically challenges the future of capitalism. Fanon’s critique of bourgeois nationalism in ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ is seen as proleptic of the ways in which many postindependence nationalist regimes degenerated across the postcolonial world at various junctures across the twentieth century. While Fanon’s critique of bourgeois nationalism has been read as evidence of his





rejection of all forms of nationalism, such a conclusion is clearly disputed by Lazarus. Under his formulation Fanon’s writings are integral to contemporary struggles for national and international political and economic transformation. Far from eschewing the universalist categories of ‘the nation’, or ‘modernity’ tout court, Fanon called for a radical rethinking of these concepts towards national liberation. In these ways Lazarus can insist that ‘the moment of nationalism retains its indispensability not only to the struggle against colonialism but also, beyond that, to the struggle for socialism’ (1999: 138). Because the nation state is still very much a part of the operational structures of global capitalism, and has emphatically not been transcended or become outdated, ‘it is only on the basis of nationalitarian struggle – that is of a (global) struggle for socialist internationalism but one centred (locally) on the terrain of the nation – that the overthrow of imperialist social relations can plausibly be envisaged’ (Lazarus, 1999: 139). Lazarus extends his criticism of postcolonial studies beyond its theoretical and political limitations, arguing that in its readings of postcolonial literatures such criticism has effectively erected a nouveau literary canon. In its literary–critical manifestation, Lazarus contends, postcolonial studies refers ‘to a woefully restricted and attenuated corpus of works’ (2002: 2). Rather than functioning as theoreticians/ theorists or historians of resistance, representational politics or material exploitation, ‘the pomo-postcolonialists misdiagnose [sic] a discrete and restricted mode of practice as a cultural universal’ (2002: 13). The tendentious traditions of authorised canonicity are not, Lazarus rightly argues, relieved by the delimitation of a restrictive alternative canon. Canonicity as a discursive manoeuvre is subtended by a politics of selectivity and exclusion, and thereby cannot be laterally representative. In Lazarus’s view, then, postcolonial studies not only arrogates a position of institutional tenure through dense theoretical codification, but also operates a system of counter-canonical consecration in postcolonial literary studies. He indicts ‘the sheer opportunism of so many of the critical readings currently being produced’ and pessimistically concludes: ‘to read across postcolonial literary studies is to find ... the same questions being asked, the same methods, techniques, and conventions being used, the same concepts mobilised, the same conclusions drawn, about the work of a remarkably small number of writers’ (2002: 4). It is a portrait of a homogenised, and homogenising, methodology; reading between the lines of Lazarus’s conclusions, this homogeneity is both a function and an index of the politically ineffectual capacities of postcolonial practice. Homogenisation and counter-canonicity become the



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instruments of consolidation, stability and institutionalisation. Critical engagement with postcolonial literary representation, then, is as politically benign as either of its theoretical or historiographical corollaries. In Ahmad’s view, ‘it is this sense that some British universities seem to be institutionalising that singular pedagogical object called “new literatures”, “emergent literatures” and postcolonial literatures’ (1995b: 8). Lazarus’s contention that a reconstituted postcolonial canon, largely populated by the novels of Salman Rushdie, has a degree of validity, and certainly alerts us to the consecrational pretensions of academic criticism. Consecrational procedures are, as Bourdieu outlines, functions of all fields in which symbolic and cultural capital are at stake. This monograph is illustrative and in itself is symptomatic of/vulnerable to a consecrational process within a delimited field of academic research. Equally, canons or traditions, while never natural givens, are functions of the inherent political fabric of cultural interaction, exchange and authority. And, as Lazarus urges, there is an undeniable need for the inclusion of an expanded corpus of postcolonial literary works within both critical research and academic pedagogy. As I argue above, there is little doubt that the machinations of the various spheres of academic management, promotion and production are ferociously political, and that, as such, levels of consecration and exclusion are operational. My argument is, however, that this alone is insufficient to disqualify or jettison an entire field of theoretical and historical projects. There are manifold limitations and contradictions inherent in all areas of academic theorisation and pedagogy, including postcolonial studies.

Bourdieu and the critic If we return to a Bourdieuian moment of clarity, even in the very act of critiquing and ultimately vilifying the presumptions and culturalism of postcolonialism, Ahmad, Dirlik, and San Juan Jr actually accept the value of the stakes involved in this critical debate. Most explicitly, both Ahmad and Dirlik indict ‘ethnic’ or ‘postcolonial’ academics for behaving disingenuously, and for exploiting their ethnicity to careerist ends by promoting the proliferation of postcolonial studies. The perceived fashionability and opportunism of Spivak or Bhabha is unapologetically condemned by Dirlik and Ahmad; Ahmad notes: ‘this aggrandized sense of the term [postcolonial], as connoting generic definitions of periods, authors and writings, gathered force through a system of mutual citations and cross-referencing among a handful of influential writers and their associates’ (1995a: 28). While Ahmad’s assertion may




very well have a degree of truth, he fails to see the irony of his own critical position. Such intra-academic invective confirms Bourdieu’s belief that all academic debate, however antagonistic, buttresses the positions of both sides. Both sides of a critical debate recognise that the debate is worth conducting. Debates on postcolonial studies, then, implicitly and explicitly accept its legitimacy as a series of discursive practices. In dealing with the vagaries of one’s own field the critic is confronted with foundational ‘epistemological problems’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 1). According to Bourdieu, the critic is ‘involved’ in the proximate social world. I would argue, however, that even in the act or process of studying that particular social world such involvement does not cease. Simply because one chooses to objectify the academic field in terms of a critical survey, a scholarly précis or theoretical polemic, this does not voluntarily sever the practical or scholarly involvement of the author–critic. Irish postcolonial studies is certainly an object of critique/study within the monograph, but concurrently I cannot remove myself from this academic matrix. The significance of Bourdieu, then, rests in his initial self-reflective animus, his concern with the qualitative nature of academic language and his valid observation that the academic field is a value-laden and politically charged social world. Bourdieu rather mischievously writes: ‘Another property of fields, a less visible one, is that all the agents that are involved in a field share a certain number of fundamental interests, namely everything that is linked to the very existence of the field. This leads to an objective complicity, which underlies all antagonisms’ (1993: 74). Every intervention within a critical debate, however internally divisive such an intervention may seem, is subtended by a tacit acceptance of the need to reproduce the particular field. Within any academic field, then, any engagement that is complementary, qualificatory, or explicitly polemic is hard-wired with the desire ‘to produce belief in the value of the stakes’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 74). Even though there are critics who ostensibly intervene in debunking the paradigms of postcolonial theory and its relevance to Irish studies, the spectre of ‘false oppositionality’ reappears. As academics we are adequately sensitive to the stakes at play within our field of production; in other words, we are aware of ‘the terms of play and the specific stakes involved’ (Lucas, 2001: 2). The current text is just one such self-aware intervention within the field of Irish academic studies or, more specifically, what might be designated as the subfield of Irish postcolonial studies. There is no question but that there exists a gap in our understanding of the field, specifically vis-à-vis its machinations at the levels of




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theory and practice and in terms of the relationship between the two. My intervention fully accepts the stakes involved and is conceived of as a summary critique of the subfield of Irish postcolonial studies as it is constituted as a battery of theoretical resources, as an institutional– educational phenomenon and as a practical, political vehicle of social criticism and participation. While there is a traceable Irish inflection of postcolonial theory, Irish history, culture and politics are not reducible to universalist typologies of postcoloniality, but neither are they entirely exceptional; a fact that is widely canvassed within Irish postcolonial debates. Contrarily, Dirlik, Ahmad and San Juan Jr enthusiastically declaim postcolonialism’s readings of imperialism and colonialism as unified historical entities, but ironically their own critiques betray homogenised conceptions of postcolonial studies. The variegated projects and interventions that constitute Irish postcolonial studies embrace the economic, political and cultural elements of Ireland’s colonial history. Similarly, and with one eye on the future, they seek to transfuse Ireland’s current postcolonial experience with dynamic agents of its political and cultural revolutionary and counter-modern pasts. The deployment of ‘theory’ as tool of engagement with colonial histories and postcolonial legacies is not simply a recrudescence of colonialism in new forms of epistemological control, but rather, as Said explains, ‘The work of intellectuals ... [who] address the metropolis using the techniques, the discourse, the very weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European, now adopted for insurgency or revisionism at the very heart of the Western center’ (1990: 29).

What’s in a name? The title of Ahmad’s 1995 essay cited above, ‘Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?’, is revealing of much contemporary critical theory, but equally it is suggestive of the solutions to these prevailing quandaries. Debating the legitimacy, the sinister implications or the vacuity of critical disciplines with sole reference to their titular designations is merely tautological. Postcoloniality remains a political, cultural, economic and ethical experience, and its theorisation is only possible through a battery of differentiated discursive resources that is neither strictly analogical, transhistorical nor transgeographical. Rather, these interventions and conceptual mobilisations are animated by differentiated ethical considerations of inequality, non-representation, oppression and disenfranchisement. In fact, by deliberating the declensions and conjugations




of ‘postcolonialism’ or parsing the structure of ‘postcoloniality’, critics dematerialise and devalue the historical and contemporary currency of what are and can be instructive critical resources. Academic language or critical idiomacy are crucial to any discussion of academic, critical, historical or political fields, including the field of postcolonial studies. Indeed, negotiations within and about the politics of theorisation constitute surging disciplinary pursuits in themselves. The feminist critic Elaine Showalter dismisses the tautological, and politically impotent, jargon of literary and theoretical studies: ‘The problem with literary jargon, however, is not that outsiders resent it. The problem is that the habit of expressing one’s ideas in a highly conventional idiom gradually incapacitates the ability to write with clarity and force, and sometimes even to have opinions at all’ (2001: 11). Showalter’s conclusion, then, concurs with Bourdieu’s interrogations of both academic discourse and the academic field, as politically conservative and self-aggrandising entities. Jim Merod broadens the critical context, but retains a sceptical view on the radical, political potentialities of critical intervention. He argues: Too often the act of criticism and/or act of interpretation is overdetermined by the precise ‘institutional’ location of the critical/ academic aspirant rather than by the diffuse historical/contextual conditions of the discourse under critical interpretation. The act of criticism, then, is over-written [and undermined] by the demands of the self-perpetuating ‘institutional’ structure. (1987: 12) Each of these critical caveats is valid, as they reaffirm the necessity for a persistent self-reflexive, metatheoretical practice. Both Showalter’s and Merod’s points emphasise the urgency of a politically and materially proactive praxis, yet, following Bourdieu, both accent the pessimistic prospects of such a development. Postcolonial studies offers instructive critical resources with which to initiate such a process; if we are to overcome the delimited ethical, historical and theoretical vistas of critics like Dirlik, Ahmad and San Juan Jr, it is vital that we admit the strategies of postcolonial critique to our critical analyses. As outlined throughout the book, this is not an assertion of a postcolonial critical or ethical programme, but merely suggestive of the enabling interdisciplinary, critical resources of postcolonial projects. Perhaps we can take instruction from Jean Paul Sartre’s comments on the nature of the intellectual, ‘now, it is a fact, that an intellectual is someone who fails to mind his own business’ (1972: 12).





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The most vocal scepticism pertaining to Irish postcolonial studies has been voiced by critics who have largely operated under a loosely defined, perhaps often crudely defined, rubric of revisionism. Before proceeding to discuss the specific personalities and arguments constitutive of this series of critiques, it is worth considering what exactly ‘revisionism’ as a literary–historical and historiographical phenomenon entailed. To this end I want to invoke the work of the historian and geographer Kevin Whelan, whose unwavering suspicion towards revisionist practice and politics provides a suitably provocative starting point with which to preface the subsequent detailing of revisionist positions. Whelan’s historiographical interventions, then, are continuous with the general pessimistic view of Irish modernisation held by Irish postcolonial critics. In an article on the historical and memorial legacy of the Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, Kevin Whelan invokes the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.3 Whelan reminds us of Ricoeur’s dictum concerning the victims of political injustice: that to be forgotten is to die again (2003a: 51). For Whelan the past is not a lumpen corpse of historically deceased facts and events; rather, it retains signally enabling and politically charged valences. In fact, Emmet’s speech from the dock embodies, both verbally and performatively, the resonant legacy of Ireland’s republican and nationalist histories. Within this dialectic, memory is coterminous and covalent with the documented historical past as Whelan defers to Milan Kundera’s oft cited, and enduring, maxim, ‘the struggle for power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ (1998: ix–x). The politics of historical representation is deeply imbricated with the wider social processes of representational politics. Contra the positivist delineation of historical record expounded by revisionist methodology, memory, interpretation and rememoration subtend Whelan’s historiographical practice. Whelan’s work is primarily devoted to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ireland, specifically the geneses, events and legacies of United Irish and republican history. The intricacies of this historical period are clearly beyond the scope of the current discussion, but of immediate relevance are the methodological and theoretical principles that underwrite Whelan’s historiographical method.4 The most profitable point of departure is actually the very last sentence of Whelan’s 1996 monograph, The Tree of Liberty. Referring to the narrative representation of the 1798 rising in subsequent nineteenth-century records, Whelan concludes: ‘The very instability of the narrative of ’98



The Echo chamber of Irish history


since ’98 is a salutary reminder that past and present are constantly imbricated and the positivist reading of historical texts is no longer adequate to the enterprise of historical scholarship’ (1996a: 175). We are confronted with two essential points here. Firstly, it is untenable to conceive of the relationship between past and present as a divisive vacuum separating one from the other ad infinitum; rather, it is more accurate to envisage the structure of a rememorative ‘echo chamber of Irish history’ (2003a: 51). Secondly, at a representational or textual level, Whelan draws on Hayden White’s tropic interrogation of historical writing, exposing the interpretative fabric of all historical narrative representations. By dramatising the interpretative cast of an always already present historical past, Whelan transfuses historical reading and writing with an explicit political import. Whelan’s rereading of the historical narratives of the 1798 rebellion registers the diverse political, cultural and social parties that sought to appropriate the ‘significance’ of the event. Through historical readings of the pre-rebellion period, various degrees of aspersion, eccentricity and suspicion were cast on the insurgent United Irishmen. Whelan’s research reveals a demonstrable political investment at work in the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. However, such political rereadings of ‘decisive’ or ‘divisive’ acts of anti-imperial insurrection are consistently dismissed as nationalist apologia. Through an ideologically aware postcolonial historiography, Whelan registers the constructed artifices of strategically motivated historical narratives. It is this politicised reading of cultural and historical texts and practices that represents the most enabling of postcolonialism’s theoretical resources. Again referring to the narrative mobilisation of 1798 in nineteenthcentury historical accounts, Whelan writes: The struggle for control of the meaning of the 1790s was also a struggle for political legitimacy, and the high drama of the Union debate was dominated by a discussion of 1798. The interpretation of 1798 was designed to mould public opinion and influence policy formation: the rebellion never passed into history because it never passed out of politics. (1996b: 133) Whelan assails the diffuse rehearsals of depoliticising interpretations of the rebellion and emphatically registers the cogency of the political, intellectual genesis and structure of the actual rebellion, in contradistinction to the ill-conceived conflagration that was portrayed for public digestion. As Jim Merod argues, in a different context,



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the depoliticisation of cultural, literary and historical narratives and actions are themselves political or ideological strategies (1987: 1–37).5 Historical interpretation and narrative representation are matters of selectivity and, as White outlines, they are tropological in nature as well as being freighted with ideological interests. In challenging and debunking a historiographical framework underwritten by an ostensible objectivity or self-professed apolitical stance, Whelan undermines what he terms ‘the baneful binary of modernisation and tradition – the Hegelian view that all that is lost to history is well lost, the Scottish Enlightenment paradigm in which what is sacrificed to progress is retrieved imaginatively as nostalgia’ (2002: 60). The separation of poetry and politics, and the telos of Hegelian progress, are intimates within a revisionist, modernising dialectic. If cultural discourses remain fixed as artistic artefacts, their artistry can remain as testimony to the cultural progress of a society in tandem with that of its liberal economics and politics. In a sense there is a level of stability between text and political context within this liberal spectrum, but little creative tension. The disjunction between political hegemony of imperial and/or postcolonial societies and unrepresented cultural discourses is one facet of colonial history that Whelan and postcolonial theorists at large attempt to chart. In concert with international postcolonial literary and historical practice, Whelan recovers both the marginalia and the broader sociopolitical events of Irish history; the significance of a historical event is never solely registered within the confines of the archival record. The differential projects that contribute to postcolonial studies, including its Irish franchise, problematise the regulatory function of historical and literary representations. In effect, the reimagination and representation of cultural and political texts and practices within postcolonial projects abides by Benjamin’s injunction that ‘in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (1992: 247).

‘angels of intellect and rationality’6 Shakir Mustafa provides a concise summative comment on the utility of the mythic within what he calls ‘revisionist texts’ (2002: 71) in Irish historiography. The mythic ‘seems to have lost its potency as a way of knowing the world and has consequently been demoted to a synonym of the archaic, the occult, the atavistic’ (Mustafa, 2002: 71). Mustafa’s conclusion again elaborates the rigidity of empirical evaluation and categorical assignment, which foreclose the potential open-endedness





ascribed to mythos by Richard Kearney (1984: 23–4). Such texts exhibit what Mustafa terms ‘[a] mythophobic attitude’ (2002: 76). Indeed, it is the persistence of such methodological procedures that, according to Eagleton, is elemental to recent internecine political and disciplinary agons in Irish academia. He writes: Hamstrung by his empiricist education, the revisionist historian is sometimes slow to appreciate the symbolic dimension of action, and must accordingly go to school with the cultural critic. No historical event is finally separable from the way it is symbolised in social consciousness; and if this truth had been more surely grasped by a positivistically-inclined historiography, as it is by the historians of mentalité, much tedious argumentative spadework might have proved unnecessary. (1998b: 319) On the same theme, Whelan affirms that his readings of recent and contemporary Irish historiography are firmly in opposition to revisionist historical writing. Whelan outlines the urgency of these ongoing historiographical debates: Over the last three decades in Ireland, a vigorous and at times vicious historiographical debate has proceeded alongside the Northern Troubles. In a country where current political divides were based as much on the past as on contemporary social divisions, and where the past was claimed as a mandate for political action, the appeal to history was ever present in public discourse. (2004: 179) The continuing pressure occasioned by the omnipresent immanence of violence in Northern Irish society in the names of republican separatism and militant loyalism infused historical reading and writing with profound political implications. As Deane, McCarthy and Cleary have discussed at length, revisionist historical practice was doggedly conservative in its politics and in its methodological discourse. Spawned in the 1930s, historical revisionism maintained an avowedly antinationalist posture, instead actively denigrating the mythic genealogy and agency of Irish political and cultural nationalism. In effect, as Whelan outlines, the project of historical revisionism cohabitated with what might be termed a counter-revivalist geist of the post-independence Irish establishment. Embodying the intellectual vanguard of the revisionist mentalité were Irish Historical Studies7 and The Bell;8 both publications were part



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of a powerful post-independence mindset of consolidation within the state rather than any type of celebration of the nation. In fact, they are emblematic of what Lloyd describes as the ‘conjunction between the disciplinary formation of history and the institutional legitimation of the modern state’ (1999: 40). As Whelan convincingly argues, the early revisionist project was a federated assault on the legacy and energies of the erstwhile Irish Literary Revival; it was, in fact, symptomatic of a broader atmospheric positivism of the 1930s. In a way, then, the impetus of Irish postcolonial studies derives from an interest in reinvigorating the generative traditionalism of political and cultural moments such as the Literary Revival. But more relevant to our discussion is the latter-day orthodoxy of revisionist methodology in Irish literary and historical studies. In the wake of a recrudescence of concerted militant republican violence in the North, the political demands of the Southern Irish establishment were partially served by an academic legitimation of modernisation and a synchronous marginalisation of political nationalism. Echoing McCarthy’s lengthier examination of revisionism, Whelan notes, ‘in this sense revisionism represented a strategy of containment, stressing the urgency of reformatting popular attitudes to the past in order to undermine the appeal of republicanism’ (2004: 192). Inverting L.P. Hartley’s famous aphorism, the revisionist recalibration of Irish history was so urgent precisely because the past was not a foreign country in many people’s minds.

‘fuzzy thinking on Irish history’ In the introduction to his seminal treatise, The Interpretation of Cultures, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz admonishes against the ‘infallibility’ of any one theoretical school or discipline. Drawing on the work of Susanne Langer, Geertz caricatures the supine devotion of academia to cyclical changes in theoretical hierarchies: The sudden vogue of such a grande idée, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she [Langer] says, ‘to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives’. (Geertz, 1973: 3) To many Irish critics and scholars Geertz’s and Langer’s comments would seem particularly apposite to recent Irish cultural and historical





writing, accenting as they have the colonial dimension of Irish literary, political and economic history. In broaching the notion of ‘Irish’ postcolonial studies, one must delineate the counter-arguments that maintain the gross inapplicability of a postcolonial methodology to Irish cultural and political history. This section will relate the variety and intransigence of argumentation against Ireland’s situation within a postcolonial theoretical matrix. By considering the interventions of Edna Longley, Stephen Howe, Francis Mulhern, Roy Foster, and Michel Peillon, a dual purpose will be served. Firstly, it will highlight the specifics of these critical responses to Irish postcolonial studies, and their dissonance or consonance with international critical ripostes to postcolonial theory. More significantly, however, the cursory nature of many of these engagements will, I intend, obviate the validity of the revisionist position. Cleary demonstrates that there are a number of principal grounds on which critics disqualify Ireland’s ‘postcolonial pretensions’ (Kennedy, 1992/93: 107). They are economic grounds and geographical location; an unwillingness to accept historical responsibility wherein ‘postcolonial melancholy’ (Mulhern, 1998: 158) is an easy method of transferring responsibility onto an oppressive colonial heritage; and finally, because Ireland achieved independence over eighty years ago, there should have been ample time to transcend the traumas of colonial and postcolonial experience. Cleary summarises these objections in concluding: ‘Naïve objections to the proposal that the Irish historical experience can be considered a colonial one seem often to assume that there is such a thing as a typical colony and a standard or one-size-fitsall colonial experience against which Ireland’s claims might be weighed and measured’ (2003: 29). Such criticism depends for its foothold on an essentialist rationale; the assertion conceals and exposes a moment of self-betrayal. In deriding a perceived theoretical or paradigmatic simplification, these critics become enmeshed within a corollary simplification. Furthermore, we shall return at length to the charges of theoretical fashionability, idiomatic modishness and critical chic that ricochet wildly around revisionist critiques of Irish postcolonial studies. However, there is a Bourdieuian resonance to the practice of revisionist critique of Irish postcolonial studies. By emphasising or trying to attach a sense of fashionability to the co-option of postcolonial methodologies to Irish literary and historiographical studies, critics demonstrate an awareness of the contingency of academic discourse. At a superficial level, and in Bourdieu’s terms, reading the proliferation of postcolonial theory as a form of symbolic capital accumulation is perfectly



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legitimate. Bourdieu counsels the critical practice of ‘epistemological vigilance’; effectively that theoretical languages and disciplines cannot function adequately, or legitimately, without consistent moments of self-reflexiveness. Postcolonial studies has realised a position of relative prominence within contemporary Irish literary and historiographical studies, and, as such, interventions reflecting upon or interrogating its internal machinations and/or institutional practice are urgent. The problem that arises, within Irish academic studies, is that literary and historiographical debates in the last three decades have been largely inseparable from, but not reducible to, the Northern Troubles. The volatile proximity of violence, culture, history and politics on the island has certainly informed debate within academic spheres. Thus, while criticism of postcolonial studies can be read, perhaps retrospectively, within or through Bourdieu’s paradigm of self-reflexive critique, it is more plausible that such criticism has its genesis in more concretely political motives. As Cleary recently noted, ‘the emergence and the reception of postcolonial studies in Ireland must ultimately be linked not only to intellectual currents and intersections, however, but to the prevailing political climate on the island as well’ (2003: 18).

More martyrs to abstraction Brenda Maddox characterises the minatory spectre of postcolonial studies in the following, overstated terms: ‘Irish studies is riding the crest of the larger more sinister wave known as “post-colonial studies”. This is a politically correct vogue for elevating the grievances of newly independent nations to academic status’ (1996: 21). Similarly, speaking in interview in 2001, Roy Foster implicitly targets postcolonial representations of Irish history, memory and literature, urging a rejection of ‘the victimhood package that has been responsible for a great deal of fuzzy thinking about Irish history and Irish identity’ (2001a: 20). Between these two statements we see the crystallisation of the mindset, and the argumentation, of critics who refute Ireland’s postcolonial condition. The recurrent tropes of such critique accent the ‘fashionability’ of postcolonial studies, its threatening disciplinary authoritarianism and, as Foster notes, its abstract and ambiguous theoretical resources. Underlying these criticisms, in an Irish context, are deep-seated political divisions, which include identity politics, nationalism, historical ‘origins’ and questions of cultural representation. Reviewing Longley’s The Living Stream, Peter McDonald elaborates on the politicising influence of postcolonial studies on Irish literature.




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In the case of Irish literature, such pre-determined political meanings are hardly in short supply, and much contemporary criticism concerns itself with finding them, however, the political elements of such criticism often resemble very closely the orthodoxies of an Irish nationalism from the museum, enshrining old grudges and prejudices in the name of an ideological purity and a venerated narrative of oppression and struggle. (1995: 27) In other words, a necessary politics precedes, but does not proceed from, postcolonial critical engagements with Irish literature and Irish history. Following Mulhern’s argument, the nation and its successful realisation are the political loci of postcolonial readings. This macropolitical urge, then, is serviced and legitimated by the dissimulating cultural politics of ‘Fanon’s One Big Idea’ (Foster, 2001b: 20). As my discussion of Field Day illuminates, Longley is a long-time antagonist of the ‘colonial model’ of Irish criticism. Her own critical output is underwritten by an insistence on the mutual autonomy of poetry and politics; she practises a New Critical method of ‘close’ reading of literary texts. As McCarthy summarises, her work is indicative of ‘the stress on (New Critical) technocracy, on the separation of fields, the refusal of a narrative projection of intellectual activity, the refusal of utopian thought, the resistance to totalising thought or theory’ (2000: 211). In effect, her critical methodology embodies much of what postcolonial practice works against, specifically in terms of its redemption of tradition and memory; its readings of discursive imbrication; its sustenance of an ethical, utopian criticism and its navigation of the interfaces and interactions of totalities and localities. Confronting Ireland’s colonial pretensions, Longley writes: ‘although the term “colonial” may fit some aspects of Irish experience, most historians would qualify or specify its uses, and dispute the one-size-fits-all zeal of most theorists’ (1994: 30). With such a conclusion she explicitly questions Ireland’s colonial status, but simultaneously Longley implicitly forecloses any suggestion of Ireland’s postcolonial pretensions. Her terminology perpetuates the disingenuous implication that postcolonial critics operate under the rubric of an undifferentiated theoretical paradigm, a point that ventriloquises the arguments of Dirlik, Ahmad, and San Juan Jr. It is a misconception that Foster also promotes, ‘faced with the complications and confrontations of Irish history, where axes and whetstones lie conveniently



He endorses Longley’s disparagement of the field, and Field Day, arguing:

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to every hand, there is an understandable temptation to simplify the story by adherence to one big idea’ (2001b: xviii). In such dialectics the ‘postcolonial paradigm’ is construed as a unifying narrative of dispossession and disempowerment, which can, and does, sanitise and legitimate a reconstituted, but still traditional and militant, nationalist politics. Just as Dirlik and Ahmad diagnose a neoconservative political impulse behind postcolonial ‘chic’, critics of Irish postcolonial studies divine a similar political conservatism, in the guise of atavistic nationalism. Theoretically recharged in the afterglow of ‘intellectual holiday romances in a post-colonial never-never land’ (Longley, 1994: 28), Foster argues that ‘the old form of narrative continues to exert a compelling attraction’ (2001b: 20). The fault lines of these critiques are apparent; there is an oversimplification of postcolonial theory and an evident reduction of its politics. In a recent editorial Lloyd repudiates any sense that Ireland is emblematically or paradigmatically colonial or postcolonial. His comments persuasively dispel the assertions of both Longley and Foster. He argues: The distinctiveness of Ireland’s colonial history of colonial domination precludes any so direct an application of generalizing or ‘transferable’ theories ... Ireland has always been both a template and an anomaly ... That uneasy contiguity of subalternity with modernity, of the subaltern in the modern, is an as yet uneradicated phenomenon in Irish society, and often offers crucial means to defying the uncomprehending forces of modernization. (2003c: 318–19) In referring to Ireland’s templative role, Lloyd is not canvassing any prescriptive or modular paradigm, nor is he arrogating any degree of idealised exemplarity for Ireland’s colonial experience. Rather, as Kiberd, Young and Said all attest, Ireland’s colonial and anticolonial experiences have been, and are, accessible and instructive to subsequent international anticolonial movements. Indeed, Denis Donoghue is both historically and ethically incorrect in stating: ‘It is improbable that a critical or theoretical vocabulary designed to meet certain political conditions in Algeria, Germany, France, India, or Palestine can usefully be transferred to Ireland and enforced upon Irish literature’ (1998: 365).9 Donoghue misses, or elides, the salient fact that Ireland has occupied, and still retains, a position within a protracted historical continuum of anticolonial ideational transaction. As Carol Coulter argues, ‘far from being ashamed of our colonial past, we should be happy to acknowledge and even embrace Ireland’s status as a post-colonial society ... [our]




fellow former colonies [are] the centre of fresh thinking about politics in the world’ (1990: 22). It is a philosophical nexus that is both nurtured by, and generative of, ethical political and cultural languages, languages that are not rooted in the correspondences of sameness, but, as Gibbons outlines, ‘address cultural difference’ (2003a: 236). Gibbons elaborates, at length, the ethical trajectory so deficient in Donoghue’s, as well as Foster’s and Longley’s, polemic appraisals of postcolonial studies. Again taking Burke as exemplar, he concludes: In bringing his aesthetics to bear on the politics of sympathy, Burke is tracing the lineaments of what might be seen in contemporary debates as a post-colonial ethics, one that relates to the universalism of human rights not through a process of abstraction from one’s own culture but rather by means of a shared solidarity and a history of oppression, however variegated. (2003a: 235–6) Rather than demarcate the discrete ‘spaces’ of literature, politics, history and theory, in the manner of Longley’s New Critical methodology, postcolonial studies urges an ethical cross-disciplinary dialogue; critical exchanges that promote ‘cross-cultural communication and solidarity’ (Gibbons, 2003a: 236). It is neither a question of diluting one’s own identity with the demands of universalist ideals nor a case of ‘ethnic solipsism’ (Gibbons, 2003a: 237). As we have discussed at length above, extracting ethical examples from Burke and the United Irishmen, Gibbons, in Benjaminian fashion, redeems a discourse of the past for employment in the present and towards the future. Postcolonial ethics cannot sacrifice the local to the global, but neither can critics hermetically ignore the global agents of oppression or resistance. As Gibbons reflects: For Burke, as for the radical cultural currents in the United Irishmen, international solidarity did not consist in the relation of one abstract human being to another, divested of their cultural differences, but in the affiliations between individuals who saw in their own histories and attachments ways of reaching out to others. (2003b: 236)

‘Telling Tales’ in postcolonial Ireland Concluding his 1988 Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Foster serves notice on the colonial locus of Irish historical writing. Foster surmises: And this highlights a theme that is evident from the seventeenth century, and recurs in this book: the concept of being ‘more’ or ‘less’





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In Foster’s terms, to be Irish is to exist in a constant state of agitation. Evacuating the Anglo-Irish colonial relation of identitarian import, Foster argues for ‘a less constricted view of Irish history’ (1988: 596). Such a reconfigured historical landscape is not, however, unspoilt by new borders or enclosures. Myth, the centrality of Britain’s protracted colonial occupation and the reading strategies of ‘theoretical euphemisms’ (Longley, 1994: 31) are either inadmissible or heavily qualified. Foster fails to see the irony in calling for a more liberated, or liberal, Irish historical narrative and the notion of Irishness as a simple national, or residential, qualification. Irishness, in Foster’s preferred modality of a supposedly inclusive historical narrative, is rooted in stability, residence and ultimately liberal political inertia. Foster rightly indicts the ‘narrow’ version of Irish history, but to reduce all colonial and postcolonial readings of Irish history to this ‘version’ is reductive and disingenuous. Equally, Foster’s idea of ‘residence’ ignores the historical tensions, usurpations and collusions that predicate the attainment of so-called ‘residency’; it is a signally dehistoricising term. Foster’s argument is that the past belongs to history, in both epistemological and ontological terms. His narrative is cast, as McCarthy argues, in the idiom of modernisation; it is implanted in the present, but compelled forward by Benjamin’s ‘storm of progress’. In his most recent publication, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000, Foster, somewhat facetiously, sets up an ideological binary between those Irish commentators who welcomed and celebrated the arrival of the Irish Celtic Tiger period (he terms them ‘Boosters’) and those critics who recoil from the compromised political and social values that underpinned this phenomenon (nominated as ‘Begrudgers’). Foster’s ‘Begrudgers’ seem, on closer inspection, to register as Irish postcolonial critics by another name. They are squarely homogenised under a sardonic pseudonym and profiled by Foster as ‘often coming from the left, or from the nostalgic shores of neo-nationalism, part of their argument stems from a suspicion of creeping Anglicization, and a dislike of what an earlier age would have called “rootless cosmopolitanism” and liberalism’ (2007: 9). The tenor of the arguments attributed to these ‘Begrudgers’ does seem to bear striking affinities with the general thrust of postcolonial critiques of the shortcomings of contemporary Irish society. Certainly the ‘left’ tendencies of utopian postcolonial analyses explored above would seem to accord with Foster’s typology.



Irish than one’s neighbour; Irishness as a scale or spectrum rather than a simple national, or residential, qualification; at worst, Irishness as a matter of aggressively displayed credentials. (1988: 596)


But what is perhaps most revealing is Foster’s contention that these critics originate in the sub-Yeatsian ‘shores of neo-nationalism’. Herein Foster implicitly gestures to the familiar collusive relation that exists between Irish postcolonial criticism and residual Irish nationalism. His characterisation bespeaks a discourse of ‘begrudgery’ that shrinks into default idioms of antimodernisation, anticapitalism and atavistic Anglophobia. So, while we can readily identify affinity, if not synonymy, between Foster’s descriptors and Irish postcolonial studies, what is less apparent from Foster’s caricature is who exactly he is describing and what are the precise details of their individual and combined works that warrant such reductive corralling. As an isolated instance to answer these questions, Foster offers the following: ‘Peadar Kirby and others prefer to target what they call “neo-liberalism” as the malign force that has entered Ireland along with globalization and Europeanization, at uncounted human cost’ (2007: 10). As we have already discussed, ‘Kirby and others’, in this case his co-editors of Reinventing Ireland, offer rigorous critiques of the negative impacts of liberal capitalism within Irish society. They convincingly debunk the myth that such neo-imperial monetarist expansion in Ireland is a positive modernising and equalising agent. Tellingly, Foster’s exposition of the ‘Begrudgers’ begins and ends at this point, with a caricatured portrait and a vague allusion to a cabal of leftist Irish commentators. Rather than furnishing a protracted critique of the contexts and genealogies of these crucial analyses, he dismisses them almost out of hand. But this tactical approach is not atypical of Foster’s engagement, or refusal of engagement, with postcolonial criticism in Ireland. Foster performs a similar act of cursory demotion in his 2001 The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It up in Ireland. On the surface, a text that deals with issues of historiography and the contentiousness of narration in Irish history might have been expected to engage with, or at least to acknowledge to some extent, the narratives, and counter-narratives, of Irish postcolonial criticism – yet this is emphatically not the case. Despite the decades-long interrogation of the dominant procedures of mainstream Irish historiography and the existence of several concurrent projects that have undertaken to pursue submerged narratives in Irish history, postcolonial criticism is effectively silenced in Foster’s own narrative. The narrative strategies of simplification and elision that appeared in the first example discussed above were preceded in this earlier publication. Glaring exhibits of such tactics are readily available in The Irish Story, as Foster seeks to usher postcolonial narratives into irrelevance. Once again equating postcolonial criticism with a



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monochromatic Irish nationalism, Foster suggests that early twentiethcentury nationalist histories tended to involve ‘forgetting a lot; and it is that rigid morality tale which Irish historians have tried to query in recent years – though in some quarters it has just been replaced by a simplistic application of Frantz Fanon’s One Big Idea to an Irish situation sweepingly redefined as “post-colonial” ’ (2001b: 20). At an earlier point, but in an equivalent vein, Foster asserts: Colonial discourse analysis, applying the venerable ideas of Frantz Fanon more or less across the board, has hit Irish studies running. This has produced some invigorating debate, but has also – as Stephen Howe has pointed out in a magisterial and exasperated survey – resuscitated the idea that progressivism and rationalism are innately imperialistic ideas. What some recent critics seem to opt for instead is an anti-developmentalist view, condemning any linear notion of history as whiggish in effect and colonialist by implication. (2001b: xii) There are a number of revealing points between these two citations from Foster’s text – the most notable being their isolation from any considered critique of particular theories, agendas or critics. Notwithstanding the neat avoidance of theoretical confrontation by Foster, there are several other issues which his assessments raise. What is obvious is that Foster assumes that Fanon’s work is the predominant, if not the sole, informant of contemporary Irish postcolonial criticism. His glib neologism, ‘Frantz Fanon’s One Big Idea’, deflates a range of contiguous historical agents: first, Fanon’s revolutionary thought and writings; second, the myriad anticolonial nationalist activists who learned from Fanon’s example; and third, the diversity of influence and derivation that actually characterises Irish postcolonial criticism. But such an ostensibly offensive neologism betrays an underlying defensiveness on Foster’s part; it masks the weakness of the overall argument. Equally, such a manoeuvre attempts to discharge and to disarm the field of Irish postcolonial studies by simply refusing to engage with its writings; essentially an effort to will it out of existence. Foster’s analysis leans heavily on Howe’s more extended, but equally polemical, survey of the postcolonial field, and, deferring to Howe again, Foster further simplifies Irish postcolonial projects when he suggests: ‘The assumptions behind comparative post-colonial studies, and the undifferentiated (and undefined) meanings of “colonialism” employed by those addicted to the subject, have been comprehensively examined by Stephen Howe’




(2001b: xiv). While Howe shoulders the metacritical weight of Foster’s rejoinder to postcolonial criticism in the two extracts just cited, it is worth paying closer attention to the language of Foster’s argument. As summary examples, his use of such figurations as ‘resuscitation’ and ‘addicted’, in the first and second pieces respectively, are superficially consistent with the glibness of the earlier neologistic diminution. But Foster’s implication that critiques of ‘progressivism’ and ‘rationalism’ are brought back to life is profoundly misleading. His metaphorised contention seems to be that challenges to ‘modernisation’, ‘progress’, ‘linear history’ are not just obsolete but, in fact, unnecessary acts of critical exhumation. For Foster modernisation and progress are dominant and desired, whereas postcolonial necrophilia is unquestionably regressive. Thus this first incidence of figuration exposes Foster’s commitment to the very social programmes critiqued within Irish postcolonial criticism. Secondly, by figuring the critical preoccupations of postcolonial studies as some form of ‘addiction’, Foster implies that there is something constitutively irrational about these discourses. In many ways it ties in with his, and others’, identification of extreme Irish nationalism with postcolonial studies, as it raises the spectres of emotion, dependence, illness and unreason. While these two figurations may appear as stylistic flourishes of Foster’s rhetoric, they are actually consciously aligned with the persistent political and critical trajectories of his antipostcolonial, revisionist position.

Questioning the Dutch schoolmaster The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman provides a signally dour reflection on the ambition, and the intentions, of contemporary intellectuals. Bauman characterises an almost Social Darwinist milieu in which intellectual elites (and aspirants presumably) compete for evolutionary supremacy. He notes: ‘discreditation of other experts is seen as the surest way to elevate one’s own prestige, the collegial critique is on the whole soaked with malice and envy, and the prospects of professions uniting to assume collectively the responsibility of the “intellectuals” are slim and remote’ (Bauman, 1995: 234). While I have no intention of caricaturing the internecine disputes, rivalries, and tensions of both inter- and cross-disciplinary academia, it is notable that frequent reviews and/or reaction pieces to postcolonial theory never venture far from the facile discreditation cited by Bauman. As the material under scrutiny in this chapter demonstrates, Irish postcolonial studies has been interrogated




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from a variety of perspectives and under the remit of diverse agendas; such interventions have ranged from single reviews to journal articles to entire chapter-length essays. Significantly, despite the strength of the anti-theory invective, only a single book-length engagement, which deals explicitly at any length with the material under scrutiny in this dissertation, has emerged thus far: Stephen Howe’s Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History. One of the overriding preoccupations of postcolonial studies is the state’s ability and ambition to censure and mediate the narrative representation of its own history. A process of political editorship, as we have seen, characterises the struggle for verbal representation. Thus the power of selectivity or the facility of authorship is a central component in the manufacture of any narrative thread. It is a truism to say that narratives must be closely scrutinised and monitored for wilful, strategic inclusions and elisions. Such a caveat is relevant to communal and national discourses of historical representation, but my present focus is a recent ‘narrative’ of Irish postcolonial studies: Howe’s Ireland and Empire: Colonial legacies in Irish History. Howe provides what is, to date, the most representative overview of recent and contemporary Irish postcolonial studies, and my intention is to expose the grave and insidious narrative elisions and strategies of Ireland and Empire. In a sense Howe’s intervention responds to a contemporary ‘Dutch school master’ and is symptomatic of a school of thought that ‘eats heartily without postcolonial theory’.10 Howe’s work is not exclusively dedicated to the interrogation of postcolonial tropes and methodology, but is designed as an exploration of the genealogy of ‘colonial legacies in Irish history’, as the subtitle states. Ireland and Empire treats of many of the issues at stake in the present discussion, including nationalist and revisionist historiography; colonialism and postcolonial theory; Ireland and the European mainland; and the Field Day enterprise. It may prove instructive, therefore, to consider some of the misgivings articulated by Howe in his scathing critique of Irish postcolonial studies. Even before he reaches his specific discussion of the theories and formulations of Irish postcolonial criticism, Howe, in his ‘Introduction’, informs us that he arrives at ‘largely negative judgements about the empirical, theoretical and political adequacy of colonial and postcolonial frameworks for analysing contemporary Ireland’ (2000: 4). These introductory remarks reveal the core limitations of Howe’s methodology: he positions ‘colonial and postcolonial frameworks’ and the




‘European context’ as polar opposites within his critical cartography. It is as if these polarities are entirely mutually exclusive, and can have no recourse to mutual information, however minimal or contentious. Secondly, Howe’s confinement of Ireland to the ‘European context’ belies the well-documented genealogy of productive international theoretical exchange that was characteristic of many Irish anticolonial nationalist factions. Likewise, Howe’s schema forecloses any contemporary avenues of cross-cultural theoretical transaction, which might meander outside the sealed borders of the European mainland. Furthermore, confining a discussion of Ireland to the European context surely reprivileges ‘Europe’ as a historical actor, both physical and discursive, and, consequently, negates the mutual impacts of European colonial/colonised societies and those of non-European origins. One might finally ask: can an anticapitalist critique genuinely emerge from a perspective such as that canvassed by Howe? A materialist study of contemporary and historical Irish colonial experiences must incorporate non-European societies, given the global expanse of imperial capital, and latterly neoimperial and globalised capital, together with their attendant, but context-specific, consequences. The upshot of these preceding remarks is that Howe’s ensuing analysis of individual postcolonial interventions within Irish studies is conducted under a flawed methodological framework. But, additionally, as we shall discuss, these individual exegeses of Irish postcolonial critics are further compromised by Howe’s unremittingly polemical, and monological, readings. To Howe’s credit, though, his is the most inclusive genealogy of the critics and publications convened under the fraught rubric of Irish postcolonial studies. His account does, at least, demonstrate a close familiarity with many of the key arguments, critical alliances, personalities, and political agendas of the field. Howe negotiates his way systematically through the works of Deane and Field Day, Cairns and Richards, Gibbons, Lloyd, Kiberd, Smyth, Graham, and Wills. Yet, as we have noted, his discussion is always already pitched against the field as a whole, as a result of which the specific discussions seem to serve as mere fodder to a prefabricated polemic. Indeed, in prefacing his exposition of Irish postcolonial criticism, Howe simplifies the field as a homogenous and second-hand version of its international equivalents. Irish postcolonial criticism is introduced as ‘a rather derivative offshoot ... of a far wider “colonial discourse” and “postcolonial” intellectual trend’ (2000: 108). Again disparagement is the modus operandi, and Howe’s comments are startlingly condescending towards a field of inquiry that has been theoretically innovative and that has traded productively with




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the vanguard of international postcolonial theory. There is no gainsaying the guidance taken from European, Asian, African and American scholars by Irish postcolonial critics in their work, but does that necessarily warrant its dismissal as abjectly derivative? A more balanced evaluation might suggest that this is a key to all resourceful intellectual work: exchange, influence, and modification. But the polemical temper of Howe’s narrative blinds itself to such an appraisal. In point of fact, if we follow Howe’s logic and apply it to his own critique, we might impute that several of the generalised shortcomings ascribed to Irish postcolonial criticism are unattributed derivations from international critics of postcolonial studies, as we discussed in the previous section of this chapter. As selected instances we could include, inter alia: ‘Much current writing in this vein thus treats colonialism as homogenous and all-powerful ... [this] systematically denies or underrates historical variety’ (Howe, 2000: 108–9); ‘the presumption that the tools and techniques of literary criticism can stand in for those of historical, social, and economic analysis’ (2000: 109); ‘an overwhelming culturalist bias: indeed a cultural reductionism’ (2000: 109); and, most alarmingly: It typically fails to consider the extent to which colonial rule in general, and the British Empire in particular, was a patchwork quilt, an enormously varied set of forms of rule and domination, largely the product of improvisation and full of internal contradictions and strains, rather than a deliberately constructed global system. (Howe, 2000: 110) Such ripostes have become standard fare in critical studies of postcolonial criticism and Howe’s enlistment of them for his disputation of Irish postcolonial studies does not make them any more convincing. These specific criticisms rely on a reductive telescoping of the most pedestrian critiques of postcolonial studies and bear little relation to the most sophisticated work undertaken within the field, as many of the Irish and international interventions outlined here amply testify. If we concentrate on three points of contestation raised by Howe, we can quite easily expose the limits of their accuracy. Firstly, it is inconceivable at this stage of postcolonial theory’s evolution that any sensible postcolonial critic or historian would intimate that colonialism is a globally uniform experience, either historically speaking or in a contemporary context. Second, Howe’s dismissal of the value of literary theory ignores the fact that literatures and writers were, and are, hugely





constitutive of cultures of resistance and solidarity in colonial and postcolonial milieus – literary theory does not replace the political, the economic or the historical; it is implicated in all of them. Literature and literary theory are facts of material culture, as Cairns and Richards, and Field Day, argued within an Irish postcolonial context two decades ago. And, finally, simply because the exercise of imperialism is contingent, fragmented or polyphonic, this does not disqualify postcolonial studies as a discipline that attempts to represent and to mediate cultural and political occlusion. Marginalisation, oppression and trauma are equally likely to be apparent social realities under an unsystematic colonial regime – colonial disenfranchisement is not soothed or absolved merely by an absence of unidirectional ideology. Howe’s point seems to verge on an apologia for the impacts of colonialism. Perhaps where Howe distinguishes his case against an ‘Irish’ variant of postcolonial studies from the international objections to the field is, as we briefly noted earlier, in his conviction that analyses of Irish society are properly conducted within the European context. Ireland is, for Howe, part ‘of the North Atlantic archipelago, [and] of Europe’ (2000: 145). But again Howe’s geographical exactitude fails to appreciate the specificity of the Irish case. As Joe Cleary makes explicit in his consideration of Ireland’s problematic, accelerated and uneven incorporation into capitalist modernity, framing Irish colonial history within progressive models of European histories does not capture the anomalies of the Irish experience. While nations such as Britain, France and Germany had modulated progressions into capitalist modernity, were engines of European modernisation, Ireland experienced what could be described as a ‘coerced modernisation’. Modernisation could be anticipated, championed, and celebrated in the industrial heartlands of Europe, but such euphoria did not herald Ireland’s co-option to the mechanics of modernity. As a result in ‘Ireland ... the lived experience of modernisation meant something quite different to what it did to its near neighbours in Europe where modernity was associated with domestic innovation, industrial trailblazing, national aggrandisement and even global preeminence’ (Cleary, 2005: 9). In Cleary’s acute appraisal the Irish experience of modernity was enforced and traumatic, and in these ways had much in common with the experiences of other colonised, and often non-European, societies. This line of reasoning does not negate Ireland’s specificity as a European country, but it does question the validity of reading Irish colonial and postcolonial histories in exclusively Eurocentric terms. If we move to contemporary times, Howe’s insistence that Ireland be framed in these Eurocentric parameters betrays



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a familiar political agenda, and intersects with many other ‘revisionist’ arguments. Committing Ireland to a contemporary European context conscripts Irish society to the principles of liberal modernisation and liberal capitalism. The erstwhile social democratic projects of ‘old’ Europe have, it seems, been forgotten and in the ‘new’ Europe there is a firm subscription to the tenets of global capitalism. Tethering readings of Irish culture and history to these European terms delimits the possibilities for imagining projects that seek to undertake systematic oppositional critiques of such global capitalistic imperialism. To confine discussions of Ireland to this monocontinental paradigm, and to reject the resources of postcolonial studies, unburdens criticism of very urgent material responsibilities beyond Europe in the developing world, and, in the end, it bleaches away our implication in the conditions of those societies. Of equal concern to Howe is the extent to which Irish postcolonial studies has become an intellectual proxy for the rehabilitation of a narrow-gauge Irish nationalism. And again such suspicions of any form of totalising sympathy for Irish nationalism, as we have noted, are symptomatic of a general revisionist mentality. On foot of the combined energies of IRA violence during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and the decentralising economic modernisation accrued as part of Ireland’s membership of the EEC/EU, so-called atavistic or regressive political, social and cultural movements were deemed as pollutants of the mainstream of Irish society. The fact, firstly, that Irish postcolonial criticism was considerably influenced, in many respects shaped, by Northern Irish cultural critics and by the Northern Irish-conceived and based Field Theatre Company, and, secondly, that this criticism began to reread Irish political, cultural, and social histories in terms of British colonialism, suggested to revisionist commentators that postcolonial studies was little short of an intellectual alibi for discredited forms of Irish nationalism. Typical of Howe’s sustained assault on the collusion of Irish postcolonial studies and an attenuated species of Irish nationalism are his concluding comments on Gibbons. Acknowledging Gibbons’s proficiency in dealing in sophisticated theoretical terms in his critique of modernisation and revisionism, Howe nevertheless finalises that Gibbons’s ultimate goal is to legitimise a constricted form of nationalism. Sympathising with Mulhern’s extended critique of Gibbons’ apparent nationalist leanings, Howe believes that despite the ‘invocation of a literary-critical avant garde’ in Gibbons’s work, these simply ‘serve ... [to] underpin a return to a somewhat old-fashioned politics’ (2000: 128). Congruent with his exposure




of Gibbons’s ‘green’ credentials, Howe echoes a familiar charge against Deane and Field Day. Despite the tentative inclusiveness of the Field Day pamphlet series in the mid-1980s, the overriding political impulse of the enterprise is the return of a restricted version of a nationalist metanarrative. Chiming with Colin Graham’s critique of Deane’s limited postcolonial analysis of Irish nationalism, Howe suggests that Deane is typical of Irish postcolonial approaches to nationalism. These postcolonial critiques are willing to disavow and to expose the fault lines of bourgeois, Catholic nationalism, and, in postcolonial fashion, ally this breed of nationalism with a reactionary state formation. But, as far as Howe and Graham are concerned, there is never a requisite full rejection of nationalism. Howe is, of course, correct to pressurise the ways in which nationalism and ‘the nation’ are, and might be, mobilised in Irish postcolonial studies, and this aspect of his analysis accords with Antoinette Burton’s recent inquiry: ‘we wish to ask whether and how the nation remains central, possible, desirable, inadequate, and/ or indispensable to history writing’ (2003: 16). But what is different about Burton’s speculation, and those of her contributors in the volume After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, is that there remains an openness to the continued viability, the necessary variety and enabling volatility of the nation in the contemporary conjuncture. Howe, however, simply polemicises against what are deeply flawed versions of Irish nationalism without ever offering alternatives out of the theoretical cul-de-sacs that he so eagerly points towards. Is the nation obsolete; residual; anathema within Howe’s historical and critical methodologies? In this sense, while one can concede that Howe engages at length with Irish postcolonial criticism and ventriloquises some of the internationally voiced criticisms of the broader field, he does not offer equivalent routes beyond the current state of affairs in the field, as a critic like Neil Lazarus does, for example. As we have seen, the applicability of postcolonial readings to Irish cultural and political histories has been sharply contested from within literary–critical studies, and historical studies, but it has also come under attack from the field of sociology. In his 2003 essay, ‘Agency, Flows and Post-Colonial Structure in Ireland’, the sociologist Michel Peillon attempts to debunk entirely the relevance of postcolonial methodologies to recent and contemporary Irish social developments. Conflating ‘dependency theory’ with ‘postcolonial theory’, Peillon’s argument is premised on the belief that a deterministic ‘postcolonial model’ (2003: 71), which is ascendant in Irish cultural studies,




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consistently strives to explain all recent Irish history in terms of its postcolonial and dependent condition. This ‘post-colonial model’, which, in fact, remains largely undifferentiated throughout Peillon’s essay, arrogates all explanatory power for itself in detailing the progress of contemporary Irish society. Peillon’s intervention, then, strikes a chord with Mulhern’s dismissive relegation of contemporary theories of Irish ‘postcolonial melancholy’. And Peillon echoes the resolution of his precursors in asserting that ‘the construction of a post-colonial paradigm is meant to fix the picture, even for a moment, and to provide a unified interpretation of Ireland’ (2003: 73). The reductiveness of this statement cannot be overemphasised; not only are a range of internationally influenced, and differential, literary, theoretical and historiographical projects diminished to a ‘paradigmatic’ type, no concrete evidence is furnished at this point, or at any point in the essay, that might, even tentatively, corroborate the author’s position. In fact, there is a lateral failure to engage dialectically with the wideranging materials that contribute to the flexible and mutable series of postcolonial projects in Ireland. Part of Peillon’s counter-argument against the theories and practices of Irish postcolonial studies is his conviction that because ‘postcolonial theory’ is synonymous with ‘dependency theory’, the ‘post-colonial paradigm’ (2003: 73) is ill-equipped to explain the economic successes and social changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger period. The ‘postcolonial’ is, according to this analysis, conceptually redundant. Peillon concedes that the financial gains of this period are not entirely products of indigenous enterprise, and that a certain level of necessary dependence persists, but absolute ‘post-colonial’ dependence is a nonsense. Evidencing such ‘indigenous industry’ (2003: 74), Peillon produces the following triumphant exhibit: The post-colonial model does not allow for a significant development of indigenous industry, and more particularly in those sectors which require a high level of knowledge. In that context, the development of the software industry appears baffling. Over the last ten years a software industry has developed in Ireland which now employs close to 20,000 people. A large proportion of firms operating in this sector are Irish-owned. Not only that, but some Irish-owned companies now compete successfully on the international scene. A new generation of Irish-based international companies has now materialized. (2003: 74)





The prosperity of Ireland, and many of its entrepreneurs as well as citizens, cannot be gainsaid, but what Peillon fails to understand is that postcolonial studies is not simply focused on how postcolonial societies and cultures retain cultural, political and economic ‘traces’ of their erstwhile colonial governors. As my discussion of utopia and postcolonial studies above amply outlines, postcolonial studies is committed to critiquing, and exposing, the exploitative economic, social and cultural imprints and legacies of the very breed of modernisation and prosperity that Peillon is eager to celebrate. Peillon’s argument, then, is complicit with the intellectual cheerleading of neoliberal modernisation in Ireland diagnosed above by Kirby. In, at best, disavowing and, at worst, misrepresenting the politics and methodologies of postcolonial studies, Peillon eschews a powerful and effective skein of counter-hegemonic critical strategies. In addition, Peillon proceeds to characterise ‘the post-colonial model’ as the theorisation of victimhood – a discourse of passivity: ‘Post-colonial theory contends that the culture of a post-colonial society remains distorted and subordinated to the culture of past colonial powers, or of “imperialism” in general’ (2003: 77). Again little is provided by way of specific theoretical testimony for this aspersion, other than a generalised bibliographic reference to Lloyd’s three major book publications, but these are not engaged with at any sophisticated theoretical level. Furthermore, Peillon’s summary remarks here, as I have said, do not allude in any way to the historiographical and theoretical writings on indigenous resistance, or to the ongoing retrieval of utopian moments in Irish anticolonial theory and practice. Ironically, given the title of Peillon’s piece, there is no ‘flow’ of native ‘agency’ under the ‘postcolonial structure’ that he has manufactured. Peillon’s critique essentially revolves around the (mis)conception that postcolonial studies demands an utterly vanquished and pliant Irish society for its theories to flourish. If there is even the slightest indication of indigenous economic or cultural efflorescence, for Peillon, this disqualifies the entire field of postcolonial studies from Ireland. In the end, the essay, in a manner similar to that evident in many of the other pieces considered in this section, is vitiated by its own deterministic caricature of the ‘postcolonial’ in Ireland. This, and other interventions, remain unconvincing because of the polemical nature of their stances, which, as we have seen, commit repeated errors of commission and omission. Peillon’s positivistic polemic represents an absolute misreading of the mechanics and trajectories of Irish postcolonial studies – a misreading partly attributable to a failure to engage sufficiently with the theoretical,



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literary–critical and historiographical material that has been produced within the field over the course of three decades. If, as he suggests in the concluding section of his essay, ‘the post-colonial framework does not give the full picture’ (2003: 79), firstly, it never has claimed to (and what set of critical projects would ever make such a hubristic claim?), and, secondly, Peillon’s own piece is an even more partial ‘portrait’ of an enabling field of critical resources. Postcolonial theory, then, is an ephemeral discursive practice within Irish cultural and political studies; it is willed into transience in the hope of convincing those critics, already converted to its inherent malignance, that what they already believed to be true is in fact true! If postcolonial theory is merely an academic fad or trend, then why bother with such impassioned and empirical defensiveness? Precisely because postcolonial methodology involves the mechanics of the local and the material, such a theoretical ‘vogue’ transfuses cultural criticism with a ‘rootedness’ that is strategically capable of destabilising the discursive certainties of Irish modernisation. Postcolonial theory exposes the contradictions and elisions of the individual’s relationship to the state; by valorising discourses such as memory formation, historiography, gender relations, and class distinctions, postcolonial theory scrutinises the very foundations of economic and political authority within the postcolonial nation state. In Norman Vance’s opinion: The jury is still out on whether postcolonial theory in Ireland has indeed supplanted the rhetorical binaries of unreconstructed nationalism to illuminate the complexity of the Irish experience and rescue subaltern identities, or whether, it simply slightly adjusts the familiar rhetoric of blame giving us caricatures or stylized diagrams of what we already knew about historical oppression and marginalization and endemic cultural incompetences. (2001: 182) But, while we await a conclusive verdict on its illuminative progress and potential, my aim is to furnish a contextual genealogy of these critical deliberations. It is not so much an interim report as an interactive commentary on the evidence as it currently presents itself. Indeed, Vance’s legal parlance implies that postcolonial theory is on critical ‘probation’ lest it transgress the sensibilities of contemporary Irish academia. Pursuant to such idiomatic critique, several questions arise as to the nature of this sequestered judicial caucus, and when shall a conclusive verdict be provided? With suitable irony, then, the




very contextual specificity of divergent and fractious communities canvassed within postcolonial analyses is elided by the convergence of a dogmatic theoretical judgment. One of the most enabling features of recent postcolonial criticism is the recognition that there is not and cannot be a singular postcolonial experience, theory or location. While such theoretical parsing has often, correctly, been dismissed or derided as little more than idiomatic ‘cento’, splitting the terms ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘postcolonial’ promises the possibility of materialising debates on colonial history and postcolonial legacies. The discussions of radicalising or ‘localising’ postcolonial experience and representation are predominantly enacted within academic contexts, (journals, seminars, conferences); however, the metacritical recognition of these limitations is a gesture towards a more constructive praxis. The irony of many of the polemical interventions against postcolonial studies is that their critiques are couched in archaic critical idioms. Instancing such a practice, Peillon notes, ‘the postcolonial model claims its greatest relevance in relation to culture. It contends that colonialism proves most effective “in colonizing the mind” ’ (Peillon, 2003: 72). Of necessity, Peillon invokes a unitary target for his critical inquiry: the identifiably modular postcolonial experience. Peillon emphatically simplifies the nature of postcolonial studies as an integrated, organic critical paradigm. But, significantly, as this chapter illuminates, Peillon’s argument is not unique. It is symptomatic of a broader economy of disingenuous critical practice. Engagements with postcolonial studies, in an Irish context and elsewhere, deploy a strategy of deliberate reductionism; it is remarkable that the level of interaction is predominantly antagonistic, cynical and cursory. McCormack ultimately resolves that: All of this lucrative activity has generated a suitably impressive series of theoretical covering positions – post-colonialism, postcontemporary interventionism, post-modernism, post-structuralism. All of these come under the general heading Theory, though it might be more theoretically acute to note the tenurial continuity inscribed with longing in the iterated posts, each of them a certificate of professional survival in the American academy ... [Theory] is an Althusserian gesture, originally deployed to neutralize the historical method, and now appropriated as a career move [my emphasis]. (1994: 22)




Writing in 1999, Robert Young diagnosed a characteristic flaw in operation within postcolonial studies when he noted: ‘the field of postcolonial studies has already tended to become limited to the invocation of orthodoxies and the impasse of self-referential critiques’ (1999: 33–4). It is imperative, then, according to this logic, to curtail the proliferative, yet characteristically insular, rhetoric of postcolonial studies, and there must be an assumption of political and critical responsibility by those with access to political and cultural discourses. Young continues: ‘we [the editors of Interventions] seek to reinvoke the politics, political objectives and commitment through which, historically, postcolonial critique was originally generated’ (Young, 1999: 33–4). The politics of the ‘local space’ and the dynamics of material circumstances, then, have been elided from the gilded, academic forms of postcolonial critique. Therefore, it is incumbent on postcolonial theory, firstly, to remain sensitive to its own fractious conception and gestation, and, subsequently, to represent adequately identitarian diversity rather than simply assert or cosmetically fetishise specific marginal identities. Much cultural theory is distinguished, even defined, by the urge to assimilate, to stabilise and, most evidently, to know. It is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the linguistic basis, and medium, of critical theory, that a form of knowledge or a critical trope is both confined to, and confining within, the parameters of a linguistic process of ‘naming’; an objective process of imposition that can effectively negate the particularities of the individual subject or community. In the editorial cited above, Young echoes Paul De Man on the nature of criticism in moments of crisis. Young underlines the fractious genesis of colonial discourse analysis and he furnishes postcolonial scholars with a salutary reminder of the ‘material’ circumstances under which the discipline emerged. 233



Conclusion: Postcolonial Studies and Contemporary Politics

In Young’s terms, then, it is the responsibility of postcolonial theorists to transfuse their criticism with material, political import, and to recognise the socio-economic contexts of contemporary postcolonialism. Part of the impetus, and the relevance, of the current discussion is its conviction that postcolonial studies offers a concerted and proven series of critical options with which to pursue acutely necessary interrogations of both the legacies, and the continuing assertions, of imperialisms. Though the discussion largely focused on the recent histories of Irish postcolonial criticism, the lessons and the resources exposed therein retain singular valence in the contemporary, and potential future, political, economic, and, most worryingly, military contexts. Citing the renowned Marxist historian, Giovanni Arrighi, Cleary alerts us to the falsely held assumption that empire and its study are anachronistic critical pursuits. ‘Not so long ago’, according to Cleary, ‘the historiography of empire was a sedate enterprise with the air of a somewhat inconsequential intellectual tidy-up operation in which mostly Western historians deliberated the characters of European empires gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre’ (2007: 11). As Marxist analysis lost favour in Western intellectual circles, so too ‘imperialism’ became a term that could be safely consigned to obsolescence. However, ‘as Giovanni Arrighi has remarked, the “E” and “I” words are very much back in fashion and, what is more, the study of empire and imperialism has lost much of its aura of retrospection, its romance of requiem’ (Cleary, 2007: 12). The ‘romance of requiem’ has not been entirely lost, however, as the work of imperial rehabilitation, undertaken by commentators such as the historian Niall Ferguson in both Empire and Colossus, or American think-tank operatives such as Max Boot and Dinesh D’Souza, are evidential. Nevertheless, Cleary is correct in his view that the vocabularies and methodologies of empire studies are now not only accepted, but in many ways ascendant in contemporary cultural and political studies – in both academic and popular commentaries. This renewed interest in empire under the modalities of postcolonial studies has clear implications for Irish criticism’s engagement with the future trajectories of political and economic commitment in Ireland. Postcolonial studies is rightly viewed as ‘one of the most dynamic forces for innovation in Irish studies since the 1980s’ (Cleary: 2007: 49), and it has enabled positive international intellectual transactions in relation to Ireland’s colonial history as well as underscoring Ireland’s contribution to and dependence upon current patterns of imperial exercise. Here, and elsewhere, Cleary’s postcolonial criticism is at the forefront of materialist critique within Irish studies. For Cleary, postcolonial analyses relocate




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In contrast to a nationalist conception of Irish studies, obsessed with the discovery of chimerical ‘national’ identities, and a liberal area studies alternative that hesitates to look beyond the horizon of the British Isles or Western European state formation, postcolonial critique impels Irish studies in the direction of a conjunctural global analysis. From such a perspective, the national arena still remains a crucial site for social struggles, but a true understanding of those struggles can only be grasped contextually within a wider global frame. (Cleary, 2006: 34) Once more reiterating his belief that postcolonial studies requires a more material commitment to contemporary political and economic exploitation, Lazarus places the development of the field in the context of the current imperial occupation of Iraq. Disenchanted with the continuing mystifications of the field, Lazarus attributes a degree of culpability to postcolonial critics. His view ‘is that postcolonialist writing of this kind, which has always been mystificatory, has today, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, become no longer merely mystificatory, but – in its abstraction and wilful obscurantism – actively political, and actively malign’ (2006: 21). In these terms the political quietism of postcolonial studies in the context of current, and ongoing, imperial campaigns is deemed an index of passive complicity. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, this does not disqualify the entire field in Lazarus’s view; Lazarus’s version of postcolonial studies accords most closely with that retailed by Cleary, as well as with Loomba et al. In fact, Lazarus explicitly endorses the postcolonial agenda set by Loomba et al., in which they name the crisis and do not hedge politically by using evasive theoretical language: The shadow the 2003 US invasion of Iraq casts on the twenty-first century makes it more absurd than ever to speak of ours as a postcolonial world. On the other hand, the signs of galloping US imperialism make the agenda of postcolonial studies more necessary than ever. In a context of rapidly proliferating defenses of empire ... by policy makers and intellectuals alike, the projects of making visible the long history of empire, of learning from those who opposed it, and of identifying the contemporary sites of resistance and oppression



Ireland in an international, global economy of ideas and material relations, and are key to provoking self-reflexive intellectual and politically informed dissent under the current conjuncture. In his view:

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As Cleary’s citation of Arrighi makes clear, the ‘E’ and ‘I’ words are currently resurgent, and this is obviously not confined to the subtleties of postcolonial criticism, but pervades popular political commentary as well as informing elite political policymakers in the major nation states, as well as their agents within ‘right-wing’ intellectual institutions. There is a repackaged version of empire that now emphasises the relative advantages accrued by those societies that undergo, and that have historically undergone, protracted periods of colonisation. Numbered among the apologists for historical and contemporary imperialism are, as briefly cited earlier, Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, and Dinesh D’Souza, as well as Stanley Kurtz and Martin Kramer, to name but a handful. What seems to unite these critics is a firm subscription to the ideas of liberal imperialism, and an investment in the United States of America’s ability to realise and to manage such a political dispensation. Under this world view colonialism is exactly the mechanism which brought relative enlightenment and modern social, economic and political cohesion to the shadowy corners of the globe. It transformed benighted communities and individuals into functioning and ambitious ‘subjects’ and, by implication, can and must do so again. In such a spirit D’Souza implores Western academic sceptics to abandon their puerile suspicion of colonialism. ‘The academy’ must, in his opinion, ‘shed its irrational prejudice against colonialism’ (2002: B7). The reason for adopting a more accommodating appreciation of colonialism is that, D’Souza maintains, it ‘was the transmission belt that brought to Asia, Africa and South America the blessings of Western civilization’ (2002: B7). Clearly D’Souza’s conviction that global cultural and political homogeneity represents some form of desirable social outcome runs starkly counter to the utopian impulses that we have discussed with respect to Irish postcolonial studies, and is also anathema to the renewed ‘left’ energies within international postcolonial studies, exemplified in the work of Lazarus. In contemporary terms, D’Souza continues: ‘Many of these cultures continue to have serious problems of tyranny, tribal and religious conflict, poverty, and underdevelopment, but that is not due to an excess of Western influence; rather, it is due to the fact that those countries are insufficiently Westernized’ (2002: B7). Such provocative statements of imperial presumption are not a voice in the wilderness, but represent a standard and widely accepted form of global political calculus. And, as Seumas Milne warned very recently,



that have defined postcolonial studies have, arguably, never been more urgent. (Loomba et al., 2005: 1)

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the changing of the guard in Washington with the assumption of power of Barack Obama on a mandate of change will emphatically not silence muscular lobbying for American imperialist actions, nor will the new administration drastically reduce American imperial projects (Milne, 2008: 35). In a prescient point that coheres with these expectations of continued imperial exercises, Graham Huggan argues that ‘the wide-ranging cultural effects produced by changing patterns of capitalist globalisation have thus arguably become the focal point for a “new” postcolonial studies less obviously concerned with confronting the colonialisms of the past than with negotiating the imperialisms of the present’ (2004: 32). The dynamism of current Irish postcolonial criticism is, as we have seen, apparent in its utopian commitment to the celebration and divination of historical and contemporary challenges to liberal capitalist modernisation. And in this it has much in common with, and much to learn from, other politically utopian initiatives. Among the challenges to the homogenising tenacity of global capital that seem to intersect with the concerns of postcolonial studies are, as cursory examples, green politics and ecocriticism; and the reorienting of the ‘national’ as a political force against the global dilution of cultural difference. Both of these political agendas have deep roots in the history of empire and anticolonial activism, and can be viable and complementary alternatives to contemporary imperial missions and their debilitating physical and cultural effects. And these are complementary political projects that have immediate relevance in the Irish context, as well as to the international political arena. In the conclusion to their co-edited volume, Kirby, Cronin and Gibbons propose a critical project that ‘liberates the potential within particular cultures, a potential that remains buried if it is impervious to diversity, and to an encounter with other cultures’ (2002: 196–7). They continue by ‘arguing for a form of modernity which contests exploitative forms of modernization, the aim is not to substitute a reified past for an uncertain present but to provide a space of utopian possibility for the radical forces in Irish society’ (2002: 207). The dynamics of Irish postcolonial studies effectively cohere in this editorial conclusion. The Benjaminian prospects of amelioration through rupture, or the imagination of realms of alternative political possibilities, are thematics that subtend all challenges to neo-imperial consensus. This ‘space of utopian possibility’ eschews the structural integers of unfettered capitalism and programmatic ‘Western’ modernisation. Alternatively, it facilitates the imagination of ethical critical, political and artistic languages remote from the iconoclastic, enlightened





a political engagement with cultural possibility that looks to radical, transformative energies in the Irish past and present. In linking radical, dissenting, alternative traditions in the Irish past to individuals and groups and movements which contest the present neo-liberal orthodoxy in Ireland, a critical culture can emerge that allows people to situate themselves not only in place and time but in a shared community of liberation. (Kirby et al., 2002: 206) Ireland and Postcolonial Studies has been an attempt to delineate the principal critical and historiographical debates that have proceeded, and continue to unfold, within Irish postcolonial studies. The presiding, and recurrent, concerns of these debates are questions of ethics, in the writing of Irish colonial history, the use of critical languages and the modes in which the Irish past is imagined and potential futures are remembered. Irish postcolonial studies is not unique, nor is it reducible to a consolidated corpus of global postcolonial theoretical practice. As we have shown, just as Irish anticolonial and nationalist initiatives were instructive to commensurate international political and cultural projects, Irish postcolonial studies both imports and exports, with necessary contextual modifications, postcolonial theoretical strategies. Adding further complexity to Irish colonial histories and postcolonial studies was and is Ireland’s spatial proximity to the imperial metropole; a location that, contradictorily, operated within a distantiating temporal or stadial economy in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the conscious participation of Irish people in the execution of empire is often suggested as a convincing disqualification of Ireland from postcolonial debates. Contrarily, as my discussion elaborates, postcoloniality, colonialism, and imperialism cannot be treated of in uniformly paradigmatic ways. Rather than viewing participation or proximity as potential disqualifiers, it is more instructive to read them as indices of the complexity of colonial histories themselves. Primary among the complicating factors of Ireland’s experiences of colonialism and imperialism are the condition of modernity and the attendant processes of modernisation. As the critics discussed above suggest, doing justice to the variety of Irish histories is not a matter of fetishising oppositional or ‘traditional’ practices or discourses against a monolithic, oppressive



rhetoric of latter-day imperial apostles. In conclusion, and confining ourselves to the immediate Irish context, Irish postcolonial studies converges with the ‘cultural politics of dynamic rootedness’ (Kirby et al., 2002: 206). Such a cultural politics enables:

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modernity. Rather, such critics seize political, historical and cultural agency in exposing the countervailing agents of Ireland’s alternative historical spaces and its counter-modern social constituencies. In proposing the retrieval of alternative modernities, or, in Gibbons’s and Whelan’s cases, alternative Enlightenments, Irish postcolonial studies services the radical reimagination of the past and remembrance of alternative futures. Lloyd again accents the counter-revolutionary aspect of the newly independent, postcolonial nation state: That is, at the moment of formal independence, the project of decolonization is arrested. And what happens of course is what Benedict Anderson talks of, when the people take over the mansion and flick the switch and all the electric lights go on in the right places. You take over the whole apparatus of the imperial state, and ultimately except for the bourgeois elite within the anti-colonial struggle, nothing very much changes. (1995) Lloyd’s edificial conceit observes the limits of anticolonial bourgeois nationalist projects. The absolute space of the architecturally integrated state-nationalist narrative precludes the registration of discordant or alternative nationalisms. Such discourse is one of the signal preoccupations of Irish postcolonial studies. Its rigid configuration of the histories of nationalist space and time structures attenuated remembrances of the past and consequently the delimited imagination of the future. The spirit of postcolonial ethics is not advanced through mutual abstraction, intemperate antagonism or forms of nouveau orthodoxy, whether these relate to critical theory, historiography, political history, political philosophy, gender studies, class, race, economics or literature. Ranajit Guha convincingly convenes an ethical animus that embraces the progressive postcolonial ethical critiques adumbrated in this book when, in talking about the projects of subaltern and elite historiography in India, he encourages ‘the recognition of ... co-existence and interaction’ (1988: 43). Such a recognition concerns the relations between the internally differentiated experiences of coloniser/colonised, but is also germane to the dynamics of past, present and future; history and memory; and tradition, modernity and counter-modernities. Critical surveys can never be laterally inclusive or objective in their delineation of academic or disciplinary fields. Just as my argument within this discussion concerns the politics of selectivity that suffuse memory, history, myth, and canonisation, so too there are necessary limitations of selectivity that afflict the corpus of criticism broached




within the book. There has been no effort to compose a story, a narrative of Irish postcolonial studies, although there is a discernible sense of chronological development within the field. Clearly there are critics who, some will feel, warranted more extended critique in relation to others who have received it; again, such criticisms only strengthen my overriding argument with respect to the political texture of literary and historical discourses. One does not propose, as Bourdieu has done in Homo Academicus, a ‘Hit Parade’ of Irish postcolonial studies; the survey offered constitutes a subjective, yet self-reflexive, reading of Irish postcolonial studies. The discipline is refracted through the broader disciplinary initiative of global postcolonial theory and equally interrogated under the general theoretical sociology of Bourdieu. Importantly, however, I am not striving to fetishise the notion of self-reflexive criticism; the function of such a methodology is not narcissistic or definitive, but is motivated by the need to produce further moments of self-reflection within Irish studies, including literary and historical studies. Following Bourdieu: Thus reflexivity is not at all a form of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Its end-goal is not to contemplate my private backyard; it is to find out what is in my backyard in order to look at what lies behind its fence. But as long as I do not know what goes on in my own backyard, I cannot see anything; I do nothing but project my blindness. (Wacquant, 1989: 23)




Introduction: Ireland: ‘A Supreme Postcolonial Instance’? 1. From an interview with Edward W. Said conducted by Kevin Whelan and Andy Pollak in Dublin, 24 June 1999. For a full transcript of the interview see Eóin Flannery, ed. (2007) Postcolonial Text – Special Irish Issue, 3.3. 2. See Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, p. 596. 3. On the relationship of modernisation and colonialism, Mulhern notes, ‘the discourse of modernisation is itself no longer new. Forming as a theory of historical process in the European centres, it duly expanded into the colonised world, to offer a model account of the future there’ (The Present Lasts a Long Time, p. 22).

2


1. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. 2. Bill Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’. 3. For a problematic discussion of postcolonial literatures and utopia, including Ireland, see Ralph Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures. 4. See Rory O’Donnell, 2000, ‘Public Policy and Social Partnership’. 5. See Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. 6. See Conor McCarthy, ‘Seamus Deane: Between Burke and Adorno’. 7. For example, see his ‘Unapproved Roads: Ireland and Post-colonial Identity’ and ‘Guests of the Nation: Ireland, Immigration and Postcolonial Solidarity’. 8. As Trisha Ziff, the curator of the Distant Relations exhibition, writes The artists, authors, and composers participating in this project come from different sides of the world: Ireland and Mexico; England and the United States. What they share in common is how their work has been marked by the experience of colonialism, whether as members of a dominant culture, whether they emigrated and became part of a minority culture far from home, or whether they were born in a country where the dominant culture was not theirs ... this project is about identity, culture, and colonialism, a dialogue relevant to the Irish and Mexican experience. (‘Identity/Hybridity: Ideas Behind this Project’, pp. 26–7) The exhibition included work by artists such as John Kindness, the photographer Willie Doherty, Javier de la Garza and Ruben Ortiz Torres. It opened at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham on 18 November 1995, moving to London, Dublin, Santa Monica, before ending in Mexico City on 15 May 1997. 9. See Moane’s ‘A psychological analysis of colonialism in an Irish context’ and her ‘Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History, and the Quest for Visions’.

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Notes

10. Elsewhere in Edmund Burke and Ireland, Gibbons refers to such ethical solidarity as ‘clandestine cultural allegiances’ (p. 107). 11. Kirby reiterated this juxtaposition in his plenary lecture, ‘Sinn Fein (We Ourselves)?: Reflections on a Century of Irish Political Utopianism’, during the Utopian Studies Society conference, ‘Bridges to Utopia’, at the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland, 3–5 July 2008. 12. See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, especially chapters 1–4. 13. This reference is from an interview with Kiberd conducted by Andrew Morrison and Aidan Fadden at Queen’s University, Belfast, on 7 May 1998. It is available for consultation as part of the Imperial Archive: Ireland: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. www.qub.ac.uk/en/imperial/ ireland/kiberd.htm. Again the references are unpaginated and cited as (Kiberd 1998b).

3


1. Daniel Cotton, ‘Discipline and Punish’, p. 463. 2. Eric Ashby, ‘Ivory Towers in Tomorrow’s World’, p. 417. 3. On the notion of ‘conscientization’, see Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 4. See Henry A. Giroux, ‘Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism’. 5. See Frank Shulze-Engler’s ‘Universalism with a Difference: The Politics of Postcolonial Theory’. 6. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, p. 260. 7. Acknowledging the initiatives of Indian subaltern scholars in regaining ‘the lost voices of the oppressed’, Beiner gestures towards the democratising possibilities of oral history in retrieving elided subaltern experience. He argues: ‘Oral history, having preceded these progressive trends, offers tools for advancing this direction. Since the 1960s, oral history in different regions has spearheaded the effort to democratise history and liberate it from focusing on hegemonic narratives. Oral history lends an ear to the alternative histories of the disinherited who, being oppressed and vanquished, are often not able to document their story but may have cultivated and preserved oral tradition’ (To Speak of ’98, p. 32). 8. Schulze-Engler rejects the interventions of Spivak, Bhabha and the Subaltern Collective; he maintains that they overlook the reality that ‘it is the interaction of communicating people that constitutes the world of language’. 9. For a similar argument see Smyth’s ‘Decolonization and Criticism: Towards a Theory of Irish Critical Discourse’, p. 43. 10. The authoritative linguistic structures interrogated by postcolonial critics at the level of ideology and culture repeat in the theoretical and idiomatic discourse of postcolonial analysis itself. Bourdieu comments: ‘We learn that the efficacy of a discourse, its power to convince, depends on the power of the person who utters it, or, what amounts to the same thing, on his “accent” functioning as an index of authority’ (‘The economy of linguistic exchanges’, p. 653).



242 Notes

Notes 243


1. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an essay in spatial history (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 326. 2. See Arnold’s On The Study of Celtic Literature; Arnold’s delineation of the constitution of the Celtic character is predicated on a belief in the existence of a heart/mind, Irish/English union: ‘no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy’ (p. 85). The underlying message here is that the temperamentally unstable Celt requires the stability provided by the more cerebral English character. 3. Ailbhe Smyth refers to such idealised versions of Irish femininity in her article, ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi’. 4. As Elleke Boehmer argues: ‘anti-colonial nationalism emerges as an allusive, cross-cultural, intertextual, or interdiscursive phenomenon, strung across borders of different descriptions as well as staked out within geopolitical boundaries. It is haunted by (in Anderson’s own recent phrase) “spectres of comparison” with apparently like-minded movements located in sometimes very different political spaces’ (Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920, p. 3). 5. See Gerda Lerner, ‘Placing Women in History: A 1995 Perspective’. 6. See my Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture, pp. 37–54. 7. Cited in Louise Ryan ‘ “Furies” and “Die-Hards”: Women and Irish Republican in the Early Twentieth Century’, p. 257. 8. Taking his lead from Margaret MacCurtain, Lloyd reiterates the delimited political and cultural structures of post-independence, Free State Ireland. He concludes that ‘a dynamic of convergence was superseded almost entirely by the subordination of a narrow version of the nationalist project, by the establishment of a conservative national state, to the detriment of both the feminist and the labour movements’ (Ireland after History, p. 39). 9. In his 1984 Field Day pamphlet, Myth and Motherland, Richard Kearney’s argument is closer to Innes’s than it is to Howes’s when he concludes: ‘Yeats offered the myth of Mother Ireland as spiritual or symbolic compensation for the colonial calamities of historical reality. The mythological Mother would restore the lost national identity by calling her sons to the sacred rite of blood-sacrifice whereby they would re-enter the sacred time which transcends historical time – and thus undo the wrongs of history. In short, since reality told a story of division and dispossession, Yeats replied with answering symbols of unity and self-possession.’ (p. 14) 10. In Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 Innes argues: Repeatedly in their works, the gendered discourse of colonialism and anti-colonialism explicitly or implicitly influences the characterisation of the women and the structuring of plots in which the contestation of patriarchal authority is marked by the struggle to claim authority over Ireland ... When the women who had been constructed as representing Ireland turned to hear different speakers or, worse still, spoke up for



4

Notes

their own version of the Irish conscience, they were ridiculed, reviled, or ignored. (pp. 178–9) 11. On this issue see Breda Gray, ‘Longings and Belongings – Gendered Spatialities of Irishness’; Gray invokes the work of Catherine Nash, arguing: ‘Catherine Nash argues that nationalists in the newly independent state, while excluding women from the body politic, conceived of the landscape as female, facilitating “a masculinist relationship to place”.’ In a postcolonial context, she suggests, the emphasis is on recovering ‘an effective relationship with place’ and overcoming ‘displacement and crisis of identity’. This is achieved through the symbolic use of ‘woman’ as in ‘Mother Ireland’ and feminisation of land and landscape, which is constructed as bearing the opposite characteristics to the land of the coloniser. The concern with cultural purity and preservation of identity in the early post-independence years was projected onto the West of Ireland landscape, which was seen as providing ‘the greatest contrast to the landscape of Englishness’ (p. 201). See also, Catherine Nash, ‘ “Embodying the Nation” – The West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity’ and her ‘Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland’. 12. Anne Devlin, Pat Murphy, 1984, British Film Institute. 13. Connolly’s essay was originally published in Irish Studies Review in 2004, but I will be referring to a later version published in Eóin Flannery and Angus Mitchell, eds, 2007, Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Literature, Historiography and Imperialism.

5 Fanon’s One Big Idea: Revising Postcolonial Studies and Irish Studies 1. Lisa Lucas, The research ‘game’: a sociological study of academic research work in two universities. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Warwick, 2001, pp. 103–4. 2. W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett, p. 19. McCormack continues, ‘One is not wearied of theory, but rather of its simulacrums, the schoolboy debater’s recitation of names, of the big word which make us happy, and the profitable disguise of nationalist rhetoric as cosmopolitan chic’ (pp. 19–20). 3. See Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Memory and Forgetting’. 4. For critiques of Whelan’s historiographic practice, especially his involvement with the commemoration initiatives of 1798, see Stephen Howe, ‘Speaking of ’98: History, Politics and Memory in the Bicentenary of the 1798 United Irish Uprising’ and Tom Dunne’s Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. 5. In argument that is strikingly akin to Bourdieu, Merod makes the point that: ‘Critical awareness has achieved sufficient intellectual sophistication to undo its professional self-encasement by constructing both the conceptual and institutional means for evaluating the ways in which research of every kind gains legitimacy, mainly in the university, to enforce its technical or professional authority within society as a whole. Our own research as literary specialists and theorists is not excluded’ (The Political Responsibility of the Critic, p. 25).



244

6. See Whelan’s ‘Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial Memory’, p. 98. 7. Founded in 1938 by Robin Dudley-Edwards and T.W. Moody. Again see McCarthy’s Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 for a protracted discussion of its history (pp. 80–134). 8. The first issue of The Bell appeared in October 1940 under the editorship of both Sean O’Faolain and Peadar O’Donnell; it ran until December 1954. It did not appear continuously, with a significant gap in publication from April 1948 to November 1950. For a selection of articles from The Bell, see Sean McMahon’s edition The Best from The Bell: Great Irish Writing. 9. For further comments on Irish Studies and postcolonialism, see Donoghue’s ‘Fears for Irish Studies in the Age of Identity Politics’. 10. ‘ “You may easily believe,” said he, how great a difficulty to persuade my father that all necessary knowledge was not comprised in the noble art of book-keeping; and, indeed, I believe I left him incredulous to the last, for his constant answer to my unwearied intreaties was the same as that to the Dutch schoolmaster in The Vicar of Wakefield: “I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek [my emphasis].” ’ (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, p. 61).



Notes 245

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Adam, Heribert, 67 Adorno, Theodor, 24, 26, 37, 48, 61 Ahmad, Aijaz, 121, 187–91, 193–4, 205, 207–8, 216–17 Alderson, David, 149 Althusser, Louis, 45, 46 Amin, Samir, 201 Amin, Shahid, 89 Anderson, Benedict, 11, 83 Anthias, Floya, 165–6 Arnold, Mathew, 149 Arrighi, Giovanni, 234 Ashcroft, Bill, 48–9, 72, 100, 148 ‘Critical Utopias’, 48 The Empire Writes Back, 72 Attridge, Derek, 144 Auerbach, Erich, 2 Mimesis, 2 Baccolini, Raffaella, 49, 52, 82 Bahri, Deepika, 147, 150, 175, 180 Balibar, Etienne and Pierre Macherey, 38 ‘Literature as an Ideological Form’, 38 Bartolovich, Crystal, 196 Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, 196 Battersby, Eileen, 42 Bauman, Zygmunt, 222 Becket, Fiona, 149 Beiner, Guy, 25, 163 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 24, 26, 36, 61, 120, 162, 211 Berger, Peter, 9 Facing up to Modernity, 9 Bhabha, Homi, 16, 106, 118, 134–7, 158, 184–5, 187, 205 Bloch, Ernst, 48, 50 Boot, Max, 234–5 Boss, Michael, 31

Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 15, 16–18, 102–8, 110, 142–5, 190, 198, 205–6, 208, 215, 240 Homo Academicus, 105, 240 Bourke, Angela, 161–3 The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story, 161–3 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 49 Bunzl, Matti, 148 Burke, Edmund, 61, 100, 218 Burton, Antoinette, 97, 148, 228 After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, 228 Butler, Judith, 179 Cabral, Amilcar, 85, 201 Cairns, David, 33, 43–7 Writing Ireland, 43–7 Callaghan, Dympna, 23, 33 Interview with Seamus Deane, 23, 33 Carter, Paul, 31 Cesaire, Aime, 49 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 68–9, 88, 130, 202–3 Chan, Suzanna, 176, 179–80 ‘“Kiss my Royal Irish Ass” Contesting Identity: Visual Culture, Gender, Whiteness and Diaspora’, 179–80 Chatterjee, Partha, 90, 130, 160, 164, 168, 202 Christian, Barbara, 140 Claeys, Gregory, 49 Cleary, Joe, 7, 13–14, 25, 26, 54–5, 69, 99, 114–17, 118, 138–40, 150, 175, 178, 200, 212, 214–15, 226, 234–5 on Edward Said, 114 ‘Postcolonial Ireland’, 69 Coetzee, J.M., 49

263



Index

Connolly, Claire, 34, 42 ‘Theorising Ireland’, 42–3 Connolly, James, 91–100, 178, 200 Labour in Irish History, 97 Connolly, Linda, 118, 151, 171–8 ‘The Limits of “Irish Studies”: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism’, 171–5 Corbett, Mary Jean, 159–60, 167 Corcoran, Margaret, 7 Cotter, Lucy, 7–9 Coulter, Carol, 217 Coulter, Colin, 53 Cox, Pamela, 158 Crane Bag, The, 20–1, 32, 43 Cronin, Michael, 59, 237 Darby, Philip, 136 Davis, Mike, 199 Davis, Nira Yuval, 165–6 Davis, Thomas, 45 Deane, Seamus, 19, 22–6, 28, 29, 31, 33, 41, 45, 60, 61, 77, 85, 128, 132, 159, 212, 228 ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, 33 Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, 28, 33 Defoe, Daniel, 49 Robinson Crusoe, 49 Denby, David, 59–60 ‘Ireland, Modernization and the Enlightenment Debate’, 59 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 34, 118 Dirks, Nicholas, 138 Dirlik, Arif, 187–8, 191–6, 205, 207–8, 216–17 ‘Is there History after Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History’, 195 Dobbins, Gregory, 92–3, 96–7, 200 Dollimore, Jonathan, 43, 44 Political Shakespeare, 44 Donaldson, Laura E., 162 Donegan, Cheryl, 179 Donoghue, Denis, 217 D’Souza, Dinesh, 234–5 Dutton, Michael, 182

Eagleton, Terry, 3–5, 24, 111, 125, 192, 212 After Theory, 111 on Edward Said, 3–5 Emmet, Robert, 209 Enloe, Cynthia, 165 Fahy, Fiona, 179 Fanon, Frantz, 26, 28, 30, 46, 57, 73, 85–7, 91, 133, 164, 184–5, 201–4 The Wretched of the Earth, 57, 73 Ferguson, Niall, 234–5 Colossus, 234 Empire, 234 Ferguson, Samuel, 45 Field Day, 19–43, 23, 45, 216, 228 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 21, 32, 33, 37, 38–42, 163 The Field Day Review, 23 Foster, John Wilson, 34–6, 43 Foster, Roy, 94, 214–15, 218–22 The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It up in Ireland, 220 Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000, 219 Modern Ireland 1600–1972, 218 Foucault, Michel, 33, 34, 45, 46, 47, 168–9 The History of Sexuality, 168 Fournier, Valerie, 73, 83 Freire, Paulo, vi, 112 Literacy: reading the word and the world, vi Friedman, Susan Stafford, 142 Friel, Brian, 19, 41, 45 Gandhi, Leela, 182 Geertz, Clifford, 213 The Interpretation of Cultures, 213 Geoghegan, Vincent, 49, 99 George, Rosemary Marangoly, 176 Gibbons, Luke, 2, 7, 8, 37, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62–70, 136, 139, 141, 159, 166, 169–70, 199–201, 218, 227, 237, 239 on Edmund Burke, 62–70



264 Index

Gibbons, Luke – continued Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime, 62 ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’, 37, 67 Transformations in Irish Culture, 8, 136 ‘Unapproved Roads: Ireland and Postcolonial Identity’, 66 Gilroy, Paul, 82 Giroux, Henry A., 112, 116 Glissant, Edouard, 49 Godwin, William, 125–6 Caleb Williams, 125–6 Gonne, Maud, 167 Goodwin, Barbara, 49 Graham, Colin, 6, 7, 8, 14, 29, 32, 55, 107, 117, 118, 119, 123–5, 128–32, 134, 137, 139, 142–3 Deconstructing Ireland, 55, 119, 124 ‘A Warmer Memory: Speaking of Ireland’, 123 Gramsci, Antonio, 27, 45, 46, 47, 89, 126, 130, 132 Prison Notebooks, 132 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 82, 167 Griffin, Michael, 55 Griffiths, Gareth, 148 Guevara, Che, 69 Guha, Ranajit, 30, 68, 88, 202, 239 ‘The Prose of CounterInsurgency’, 68 Hall, Stuart, 135 Harris, Susan Cannon, 168–9 Harsono, Yukun, 113 Hartley, L.P., 213 Heaney, Seamus, 19, 41, 45, 46, 77 ‘Digging’, 46 ‘Yeats as an Example’, 77 Hederman, Mark Patrick, 20 Hegarty, Frances, 179 Herron, Tom, 38 Hill, Christopher, 87 Hillen, Sean, 7 Hobsbawm, Eric, 87 Hoff, Joan, 157–8 Holderness, Graham, 43 The Shakespeare Myth, 43

265

hooks, bell, 151, 153–4, 166 Hooper, Glenn, 118 Howe, Stephen, 94, 214, 221–2, 223–8 Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History, 223 Howes, Marjorie, 144, 160, 165–7 Huggan, Graham, 15, 108–18, 237 The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, 108, 115 Hughes, Eamonn, 25–6 Hutcheon, Linda, 24 Innes, C.L., 166, 167 Gender and Nation, 167 Inventing Ireland, 124 Ireland and Modernisation, 9–15 Ireland and Utopia, 48–101 Jacoby, Russell, 50–1, 192 The End of Utopia, 50–1 James, C.L.R., 201 Jameson, Fredric, 26, 48, 50, 101, 162 JanMohamed, Abdul, 185 Jenkins, Richard, 103–4 Johnson, Anna, 167 Joyce, James, 45, 78–9 Ulysses, 78–9 Kaplan, Caren, 152, 157 Kaufmann, David, 50 Kaul, Suvir, 148 Kearney, Richard, 20, 31, 32, 212 Keating, Sara, 26, 29 Kelleher, Margaret, 172 Kennedy, Dane, 195–6 Kennedy, Liam, 94 Kiberd, Declan, 20, 45, 53, 55, 71, 72–80, 85–6, 133, 136, 216 Inventing Ireland, 72, 136 Kilfeather, Siobhan, 163 Kirby, Peadar, 51–4, 59, 70–1, 99, 220, 237 ‘Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger’, 52 Kirkland, Richard, 8, 27, 118, 133–4, 136–8, 142–4, 198–200 on Field Day, 27 Kramer, Martin, 235 Kuhling, Carmen, 55



Index

Index

Kumar, Krishan, 49, 75 Utopianism, 75 Kundera, Milan, 209 Kurtz, Stanley, 235 Lacan, Jacques, 118 Laird, Heather, 130 Subversive Law in Ireland, 130 Langer, Susan, 213 Lazarus, Neil, 15, 28, 29, 30, 130, 192, 196–8, 201–5, 228, 235 ‘Doubting the New World Order: Marxism and Post-Modernist Social Theory’, 196 Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, 201 ‘The Necessity of Universalism’, 196 Lerner, Gerda, 161 Levine, Philippa, 146–7 Gender and Empire, 146 Levitas, Ruth, 49, 50 The Concept of Utopia, 50 Lloyd, David, 7, 9, 60, 67, 82, 88–90, 93–7, 126, 129–31, 139, 154, 166, 170–1, 199–201, 213, 217, 239 Ireland after History, 94 Longley, Edna, 36–7, 41, 43, 94, 214–19 The Living Stream, 215 Loomba, Ania, 148 Lucas, Lisa, 206 Luddy, Maria, 157 MacCurtain, Margaret, 160 Macey, David, 85 MacLaughlin, Jim, 11 Maddox, Brenda, 215 Makdisi, Saree, 58, 64, 65 Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, 64 Makki, Fauod, 139 Mallon, Florencia E., 67–8, 140, 199 Mandela, Nelson, 69 Marcuse, Herbert, 48 Markiewicz, Countess, 167 Martyn, Edward, 82 Marx, John, 116

Mathews, P.J., 31, 71, 77, 81–7, 91 Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement, 81–7 McCarthy, Conor, 11–12, 14, 15, 21, 24, 27, 46, 61, 105, 117, 118, 120, 200, 212–13, 216 McCarthy, Gerry, 42 McClintock, Anne, 40 McCormack, W.J., 37, 232 The Battle of the Books, 37 McDonald, Peter, 215 McGuire, Charlie, 91 McLeod, John, 81 The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 81 Merod, Jim, 208, 210 Milligan, Alice, 167 Milne, Seumas, 235 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 169–70 Miyoshi, Masao, 187 Moane, Geraldine, 67 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 15, 151–7, 174–5, 177, 179, 180 Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, 154 ‘Under Western Eyes’, 152, 155, 179 Mohanty, Satya, 197 Moi, Toril, 102 ‘The Challenge of the Particular Case: Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture and Literary Criticism’, 102 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 141, 195–6 More, Thomas, 49 Utopia, 49 Moylan, Tom, 49, 55–7, 75, 94 Mulhern, Francis, 10, 12, 38–40, 94, 214, 216, 227 on The Field Anthology of Irish Writing, 38–40 Murphy, David, 183, 196 Murphy, Pat, 169 Anne Devlin, 169–70 Mustafa, Shakir, 211 Muthu, Sankar, 62 Enlightenment Against Empire, 62



266

Nandy, Ashis, 73, 121–2 Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 41 Nolan, Emer, 117, 131–2, 150, 156, 176–9, 180 ‘Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland’, 176–9 Obama, Barack, 237 O’Brien, Eugene, 38, 118 O’Callaghan, Margaret, 165 O’Connor, Frank, 45 O’Connor, Pat, 160–1 O’Donnell, Rory, 53 O’Dowd, Liam, 123 O’Dowd, Mary, 160 O’Faolain, Sean, 45 O’Grady, Standish, 45 Parry, Benita, 158, 184–8, 191, 193 ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, 184 Partner, Nancy F., 197 Paulin, Tom, 19, 31, 41 Peillon, Michel, 214, 228–31 ‘Agency, Flows and Post-Colonial Structure in Ireland’, 228 Pollak, Andy, 20 Pordzik, Ralph, 55 Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, 4, 148, 203 Prakash, Gyan, 89, 90 Probyn, Elspeth, 82 Rea, Stephen, 19, 26–7 Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, 59, 124 Rich, Adrienne, 176 Richards, Shaun, 33, 43–7 Writing Ireland, 43–7 Ricoeur, Paul, 209 Rigby, Peter, 197 Rushdie, Salman, 49, 205 Said, Edward W., 1–5, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 34, 41, 45, 46, 47, 73, 77,

267

88, 114–15, 122, 128, 132, 185, 189–91, 207–8, 217 Orientalism, 1, 22, 45, 189–90 The World, The Text, The Critic, 115 ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, 73, 77 San Juan Jr., Epifanio, 15, 126–7, 188, 191, 193–4, 198–200, 205, 207–8, 216 Beyond Postcolonial Theory, 126 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 49, 84 Sargisson, Lucy, 49 Sartre, Jean Paul, 208 Scott, Joan Wallach, 159–60 Seth, Sanjay, 182 Shakespeare, William, 49 The Tempest, 49 Shohat, Ella, 135–6, 142 Showalter, Elaine, 208 Simecka, Milan, 101 Sinfield, Alan, 43, 44 Political Shakespeare, 44 Singh-Mehta, Uday, 141 Smyth, Gerry, 73, 118, 120–3, 125, 128, 133 Spivak, Gayatri, 16, 106, 118, 141, 153, 158, 162, 181, 184–5, 205 Stam, Robert, 142 Subaltern studies, 87–90, 126–33 Selected Subaltern Studies, 88 Suleri, Sara, 110 Sullivan, Moynagh, 117, 162–3, 177–8 Suvin, Darko, 49 Synge, John Millington, 82, 85 Textual Practice, 48 Theorising Ireland, 124 Third Text, 5 Thompson, E.P., 87 The Making of the English Working Class, 87 Thompson, Paul, 70 The Voice of the Past, 70 Thompson, Spurgeon, 98, 200 Tiffin, Helen, 148 Toibin, Colm, 76 Vance, Norman, 231



Index

268 Index Williams, Raymond, 44 Wilson, Mick, 5–7 on Ireland and postcolonial theory, 5–7 Worthen, W.B., 30 Yeats, W.B., 45, 77–8, 82, 160, 166 Young, Robert, 92, 137, 194, 200, 217, 233 Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, 92 Interventions, 92



Wacquant, Loic, 105, 145 Walcott, Derek, vi, 49 What the Twilight Says: Essays, vi Ward, Margaret, 160–1 Whelan, Kevin, 20, 60, 74, 82, 98, 132, 159, 200–1, 208–13, 239 The Tree of Liberty, 209 White, Hayden, 210–11 Wilde, Oscar, 75–6 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, 75

Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism (Essays and Studies)

Postcolonial Translation Theory (Translation Studies)

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond

Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography

Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (Postcolonial Studies in Education)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

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Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

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Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism (Essays and Studies)

Postcolonial Translation Theory (Translation Studies)

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond

Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography

Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (Postcolonial Studies in Education)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies

Gender and Discourse (Sage Studies in Discourse)

Discourse Studies (Sage Benchmarks Discourse Studies)

Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel

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