Ireland and Postcolonial Theory 0268022879, 9780268022877

Citation preview

Ireland and © Postcolonial

Theo

with an Afterword by Edward Said

47,50/6.98 Britain & Ireland

—

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory is the first book of its kind; a collection that gathers together twelve new essays by leading Irish intellectuals and international postcolonial critics as they debate Ireland’s past and present experience of postcolonialism. The approach in all the essays is theoretical, historical and comparative. The first two essays by Joe Cleary and David Lloyd analyse the development of theories that explain the emergence of cultures, and investigate how colonialism relates to Ireland and how Irish Studies has influenced the development of postcolonial critique internationally. The next six essays ask how and why decolonising criticism emerged in Ireland from the time of the Renaissance. They apply postcolonial perspectives to Irish cultural history and the context of cross-colonial

identifications between native Irish and Amerindian cultures that developed during the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century. Essays by Kevin Whelan and Seamus Deane explore the after-life of the famine and its effects upon Irish politics,

writing and art. The final selection of essays is devoted to the comparative study of postcolonial interactions _ between Ireland and India. Edward Said, the founder of postcolonial studies and one of the leading oppositional voices to imperialism, concludes these essays with an afterword that reflects on Ireland’s position in relation to postcolonial struggles around the world.

Cover Image: “The Trail of the Serpent”, taken from Criminal History of the British Empire (1915) by Patrick Ford, Reproduced courtesy of The New York Public Library Design by Kunnert and Tlerney, Cork

|

: b;

rchive om ion

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

lreland and Postcolonial

Theory

edited by

CLARE CARROLL and

PATRICIA KING

» University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Published in the United States in 2003 by University of Notre Dame Press 310 Flanner Hall Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved And in Ireland by Cork University Press University College Cork, Ireland

© The Editors and Contributors 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ireland and postcolonial theory / edited by Clare Carroll and Patricia King.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-268-02286-0 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-268-02287-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ireland-Historiography. 2. Postcolonialism-Ireland. Historiography.

I. Carroll, Clare, 1955-.

3. Ireland-Civilization

II. King, Patricia, 1940-

DA908 .1735 2003 941.5'007'2-de21 2003011968

‘Typeset by Tower Books, Ballincollig, Co. Cork Printed by Creative Print and Design Group, Harmondsworth

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

1x

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory Clare Carroll ‘Misplaced Ideas’?: Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

16

Joe Cleary

After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies David Lloyd

46

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals: Translating Civility in Early Modern Ireland Clare Carroll

63

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment: The United Irishmen, Cultural Diversity and the Public Sphere Luke Gibbons

81

Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial

Memory

a2

Kevin Whelan

Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland Seamus Deane

109

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism Amitav Ghosh

122

Irish Orientalism: An Overview

129

Joseph Lennon

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization: James Cousins, the ‘Irish Poet from India’ Gauri Viswanathan

158

Afterword: Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism Edward W. Said

177

Notes and References Bibliography Index

187 223 237

Pd

POM

viet

| il an Mog

nobet

te’ an Srey

-

AA

Pa

ning

w ow, ieu atpaldaS bas esn . imutt bined ai.

igen 1t9 heme4

| — eS

atts

peltacs

sora] aurea

eka a ee

natu

S.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all those who helped us bring this project to completion. We are grateful to the Fulbright Commission for a Fellowship that was granged to Clare Carroll in 2000-2001 at Trinity College Dublin. We also want to thank those who read parts of this manuscript while it was in progress and gave us helpful criticisms, especially Ali Jimale Ahmed, Luke Gibbons, Agustin Lao-Montes, P. J. Matthews, and Daniel Scanlon.

They are not responsible for any errors here. Both Elizabeth Pallitto and Inger Forland provided much needed assistance on the preparation of the bibliography and endnotes. Thanks for all the work of our editors at Cork University Press, especially Sara Wilbourne and Caroline Somers.

Vii

ae

7

rf

Notes on Contributors Clare Carroll is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Circe’s Cup: cultural transformations in early modern writing about Ireland (2002).

Joe Cleary is a lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Among his publications are Partition and Postcolonialism: Literature and the Nation State in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002), and Ashes of

Empire (forthcoming). Seamus

Deane,

poet, novelist and critic, is Keough

professor of Irish

Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991), the novel Reading in the Dark (1996), and Foreign affections: Burke, Ireland and Europe (forthcoming). Amitav Ghosh, novelist, anthropologist, and essayist, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. His two most recent books are the novel The Glass Palace (2001),

and a collection of prose pieces entitled The Imam and the Indian (2002). Luke Gibbons is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are Cinema and Ireland (1988), Transformations in Trish Culture (1996) and Edmund Burke and Ireland (forthcoming).

Patricia King has been Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University.

Joseph Lennon is an Assistant Professor of English at Manhattan College. He is the author of The Oriental and the Celt: Irish Orientalism and Empire (forthcoming).

Edward W. Said is University Professor at Columbia University. Among his publications are Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, The World, the Text and the Critic, Culture and Imperialism, and Out of Place, A

Memoir. His most recent books include: Reflections on Exile (2000) and Power, Politics, and Culture (2001). Gauri Viswanathan is the Class of 1933 Professor of the Humanities and

Director of the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University. Her publications include Masks of Conquest: literary study and British rule in India (1989), Outside the Fold: conversion, modernity, and belief (1998), and most recently her interviews with Edward Said Power, Politics, and Culture

(2001).

x

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Kevin Whelan is Michael J. Smurfit director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin. Among his publications are The Tree of Liberty (1996), Fellowship of Freedom (1998) and Acts of Union (2001).

Introduction The Nation and Postcolonial

Theory

CLARE CARROLL

‘To use the past to justify the present is bad enough — but it is just as bad to use the present to justify the past.’ Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

This epigraph cautions us against arguing both that the suffering inflicted by the violence of colonialism justifies the political repression of postcolonial governments and that the suffering inflicted by the violence of postcolonialism justifies the political repression of colonial regimes. While Ghosh’s character utters this cautionary maxim when lamenting both the police state of Myanmar and the British conquest and colonization of Burma, one could just as well heed this warning in interpreting other, though not identical, ravaged sites of colonial and postcolonial rule. One of these ravaged sites is Ireland. On the one hand, there is a past history of colonialism: conquest, confiscation of land, religious persecution, famine, mass immigration, and the loss of the Irish language. On the other hand, there is a more recent history of postcolonialism: a civil war that ended in the exile or execution of recalcitrant revolutionaries; a Free State

that imitated colonial institutions more than it lived up to the revolutionary ideals of 1916, and a state-sponsored Catholicism whose tragic abuse of power has in large measure meant the loss of the spiritual authority it once had as an outlawed Church. Postcolonial Ireland is also an island divided into two states. In Northern Ireland, there is a Protestant majority (a minority in the entire island) who feels besieged in the wake of reforms of the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998. They fear the loss of what they perceived as their privileged status with the participation of nationalist Sinn Féin in the Belfast government, and they have doubts about their safety despite the IRA’s current compliance with decommissioning. There is also a Catholic minority in the North, who, though they have achieved some gains educationally and economically, are threatened by such ongoing problems as police brutality, sectarian harassment and violence, and a still not entirely responsive legal system.

2

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

The effects of the colonial past are far from over in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The interpretive strength of postcolonial theory in analyzing these effects is to be critical of both a blithe narrative of modernization and an unreflective narrative of nationalist traditionalism. If modernization theory" would rationalize away past sufferings caused by the violence of modern economic and political history as a necessary stage in the achievement of the greater political and economic gains of the present, an unreflective narrative

of nationalist traditionalism, whether

republican or unionist,

would overlook its own part in producing present sufferings, caused by a repetition of the exclusionary politics of the past rather than a liberatory politics that would produce a different future. One could restate the meaning of the epigraph from Ghosh’s novel with a comment on history by Ashis Nandy: This century has shown that in every situation of organized oppression the true antonyms are always the exclusive part versus the inclusive whole ... not the past versus the present but the timelessness in which the past is the present and the present is the past, not the oppressor versus the oppressed but both of them versus the rationality which

turns them into co-victims.?

This is not to endorse an ahistorical timelessness, but rather a deeply historical understanding of the implication of the past in the present. Nor is this to diminish the inequality of power or material suffering on the part of the colonizer and colonized, but to say that in psychological and spiritual terms there is suffering all around. With the interconnectedness of all parts of the world in global economic, military, and political conditions, it would be naive to claim that any part of the world is untouched by the consequences of colonialism and postcolonialism. The interpenetrating effects of colonial and postcolonial conditions in Ireland are the subject of the ten essays in this volume. These essays attempt to map out ways of asking and responding to questions fundamental to an understanding of Ireland’s relation to the postcolonial world. What kind of colony was Ireland? Since Ireland was also defined at various stages in its history as a kingdom and as part of the Union of Great Britain, how did these conceptions of Ireland affect its experience of colonialism? How does its economic, political, and cultural history compare to those of other colonized cultures? What are the limits both of certain trends in Irish historiography and postcolonial theory itself with respect to Ireland? What is the relation between tradition and modernity in Irish cultural history? How does modern writing in Irish represent the experience of past colonial and present postcolonial suffering? How does the representation of the Irish as a colonized people relate to that of other colonized peoples in the first period of European colonization of the rest of the world, and in the Enlightenment? What are the effects of colonialism, particularly the

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

3

catastrophe of the Great Famine, upon memory as it impinges upon contemporary Irish culture and politics? How does the severe marginalization if not utter loss of the Irish language, which was one of the consequences of the famine, relate to the emergence of great Irish writing in English? What is the relation between colonial defeat and its overcoming in armed and cultural struggles? What is the relation between the local and the global, the national and the international, the specific and the paradigmatic in postcolonial cultural criticism and theory? These incursions into the field of Ireland and postcolonialism attempt to open the debate about Irish studies and bring forth objections and revisions from those working on postcolonial studies not just in Ireland but in other parts of the world. This volume presents the debate in a comprehensible form so that others can continue the work of redefining the questions and working through the archives to create not only a theoretically aware and informed but a politically engaged criticism on Ireland and the postcolonial world. From the outset, it is important to guard against the trap of answering questions about Irish history in what Joep Leerssen has called ‘either-or terms’, and to entertain instead the possibility of answering them in terms of the complexities for which a ‘both/and’ approach would allow. It is not as though the only options are either that Ireland never was a colony or that it suffered 800 years of continuous colonial oppression. These terms are a vast oversimplification because they overlook important material evidence. The specific conditions of Irish history, including the conditions in which its historians and critics write, explain why Ireland has been viewed both as a transgressive and a founding site for postcolonial theory. Ireland, because part of the West, both geographically and culturally in Europe, is seen by some as a transgressive site for postcolonial theory that has been generated from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. But by the same token

Ireland was the first of England’s colonies, the training ground for the colonists to North America, and the context of the first English discourse

on why and how to conquer and colonize. This discourse represented the Irish, though European and Roman Catholic, as non-European in origin and pagan in custom. Catholicism both allied Ireland with Europe and pitted it against England. The Irish diaspora in Europe kept their religion alive in the seminaries from which they sent missionaries, who risked imprisonment in returning to Ireland. Before Catholic Emancipation, their religion was at worst outlawed, at best a severe liability. The Irish were also

subject to representation as racially ‘other’. The resistance of the Irish to a violently imposed submission to English social, economic, and political structures made them inherently warlike and nomadic in the colonizers’ characterizations of them as ‘natural’ slaves, which were in turn deployed

to describe other colonized peoples. Complicating this representation of the Irish as ‘other’ is their fuller political incorporation into the United Kingdom with the 1801 Act of Union. This official political integration into

4 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

parliamentary union did not, however, result in a change in economic practices, which still continued to operate along colonial lines. The persistence of a long established and deeply entrenched colonial system, combined with the ruthlessness of the free market economy and the blight on the potato crop, resulted in the Great Famine and its devastating consequences. Not only were measures not taken to effectively stop the famine but an even more deeply divided economic system that benefited landlords and strong farmers arose which lead to wide-scale evictions and mass emigration of the poor peasantry. A million and half died and another million were forced to emigrate. A greater challenge to the view of Ireland as postcolonial comes in the participation of the Irish people — the Protestant Ascendancy, Scots Irish, and the Catholic Irish — in the process of colonization around the globe. While some Irish were forcibly taken as indentured servants into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, where they would at times rise up in rebellion with African slaves, still others became settlers and slaveholders

both there and in North America. Beyond this the Irish served in the British army, both as soldiers and officers, in the conquest of India and other parts

of the globe. They also participated in the European colonization of the world as missionaries and teachers, and civil servants. At times this participation in empire had revolutionary consequences, as in the life of Protestant Irish gay revolutionary Roger Casement. His committed criticism, exposing slavery and defending the rights of tribal people in Africa and South America, coupled with his revolutionary republicanism, made him the victim of British Intelligence’s forged frame-up of him as a sexually rapacious and exploitative ‘deviant’.* That so many Irish patriots from Wolfe Tone of the United Irishmen of 1798 to Roger Casement and the revolutionaries of 1916 were Protestant is a tradition difficult to reinvigorate in the present. The recent commemorations of the rebellion of 1798 enjoined all Irish people to reflect on the revolutionary alliances forged in this period. But such past alliances are difficult to envision as the basis for present politics — both for unionists in the North, unable to identify with the inclusive politics of the United Irishmen,

and

for many

members

of mainstream

parties

in the

South,

unsympathetic to revolutionary republicanism. This is just one example of the fragmentation that Irish culture has suffered in the postcolonial split of the country into two states, one of which severely discriminated against a large Catholic minority, the other of which set up a culturally repressive Irish Catholic hegemony. Both states are now being transformed beyond the confines of these pasts. But that does not mean that everything in those pasts was repressive, or that whatever replaces them will be completely liberatory and without its own cultural costs. What David Lloyd has called ‘survival or living on rather than recovery’ in the wake of the memory of the Famine is similarly fraught with respect to other ruptures in Irish history,

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

5

which make a usable past nearly impossible to piece together.> This is not to say that some lost ideal of national wholeness could be recovered, but simply to suggest the difficulty for all those living on the island of Ireland in dealing with a fractured past. The fuller integration of Ireland than other former British colonies into English culture — the complete marginalization of the Irish language, the saturation of Ireland with English language legal, academic, and now mass media institutions — has also meant a particularly daunting process of cultural and intellectual decolonization. Ashis Nandy’s comment that the Indian is both Western and Indian could be translated in the case of Ireland to mean that the Irish person is both Irish and English — and now also American, with the penetration of Ireland by United States global culture and capital. Now more than ever, the newspapers are telling the Irish people that they are European, and yet what this will mean in practical, cultural, economic, and political terms is not entirely clear. Like so many other countries, Ireland is faced with a diminishment in its sovereignty in the increasingly economically and politically globalized world, controlled as it is by the flow of transnational capital, with the largest concentration of wealth and military power in the US. The questions of how the Republic of Ireland will relate to Northern Ireland and how and what it will mean to be Irish in the future are beyond the scope of this volume, but they are questions that need to be addressed in further inquiry and criticism. In the new global world order, what it means to be a nation, not just economically but culturally and politically, will continue to change in unforeseen ways. Postcolonial theories of various sorts have allowed for critical analysis of the nation in Irish history and literature.* Luke Gibbons contests the revisionist challenge to the Romantic nationalist invention of a continuous tradition by excavating an archaeology of a fragmented and discontinuous subaltern nationalism, characterized by popular insurrection, and the unofficial oral culture of popular ballads. Unlike the nationalism of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, this is nationalism against rather than within state formation.” Largely inspired by the work of Edward Said, Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland deploys Frantz Fanon’s theory of the three stages of decolonization to explain the Literary Revival’s attempt to form a national culture that would retrieve a lost history and celebrate liberation from colonialism.® Kiberd’s work, like that of Joep Leerssen, takes as its

theoretical basis the mutually self-constituting character of English colonialism and Irish nationalism.’ In Kiberd’s account of the reactionary phase in which native élites reproduced colonial structures, he sharply criticizes the failure of state nationalism to bring about the political and cultural transformations that decolonizing nationalist radicalism had envisioned. David Lloyd carries out another critique of state nationalism in Anomalous States. Drawing his theoretical foundation from the elaboration of Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern in the historiographical critiques and

6

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

poststructuralist theories of the Indian Subaltern Studies group, Lloyd treats such topics as Beckett's critique of official nationalism, adulteration in Irish narrative, as a form of postcolonial hybridity, and alternatives to state nationalism in agrarian uprisings. Nationalism is also a major preoccupation of Seamus Deane’s Strange Country, where the point of departure is a Foucauldian analysis of the discourse on tradition and modernity in Burke’s writing about the French revolution. Deane explores how Irish writers repeated and revised a modern discourse of national character in order to produce a tradition of Irish culture that both criticized imperialism and constructed a myth of the nation. In a study of Irish literary criticism in the newly independent Republic, mainly of the 1950s, Gerry Smyth demonstrates the intellectual limitations of nationalism in how this criticism — whether state affiliated, academic or international in its aims and focus —

was ‘trapped within terms of traditional decolonization’.’° All this work, as diverse as it is in its theoretical approaches, is premised on the notion that an analysis of the ‘nation’ in all its various forms is crucial to any understanding of how a people emerge from colonialism. It is important to distinguish between nation and nation-state and, in turn, the differences among disparate types of nationalism.” If by nation we mean a self-conscious community with a common sense of history and a literature of its own, as well as claims to political identity and territorial

sovereignty, then Ireland, like many other postcolonial nations, existed for most of its history as a nation without a nation-state.’ Contrary to the dominant view that nationalism precedes the nation and only begins with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, Adrian Hastings has argued that nationalism arose to defend the nation and that this defence began much earlier — in Ireland as early as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Hastings acknowledges that the aspiration to create the nation-state is part of nationalism. He maintains, however, that

it ‘arises chiefly where and when a particular ethnicity or nation feels itself threatened in regard to its own proper character, extent, or importance,

either by external attack or by the state system of which it has hitherto formed a part’. We need to make distinctions among the following concepts in the theory and practice of nationalism: 1) emergent nationalism that takes on the collective project to construct a nation and to protect and defend the people and their national cultural traditions; 2) official state nationalism that is developed once this nation seizes state power and attains ‘national bourgeois hegemony’; 3) imperial nationalism of powerful established nation-states that seek to impose their culture on other peoples and states (as in the case of nineteenth-century English imperialism); and 4) what Lloyd has called ‘nationalisms against the state, which are emancipatory rather than fixed in the repressive apparatuses of state formations [because of] their conjunctural relation to other social movements’5 From the time of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the founding text of colonial

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

7

discourse analysis, postcolonial theory has undergone a series of revisions that see the limitations in the nation as a category of analysis. Globalization theories reject the three-worlds theory of divergent political allegiances and economies that broke down in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The discourse on globalization focuses on ‘decentered subnational and supranational interactions — from capital transfers and population movements to the transmission of information’ in the face of which the nation no longer functions as an economic unit and is engaged in a complex web of cultural transformations.’® While some global theorists would admit that modernizing economic globalization weakens the autonomy of national cultures as well as of national economies, others want to give up a ‘last-ditch resistance’ to cultural globalization, which they see as interactive rather than one-sided.” For example, Stuart Hall warns against globalization in the interests of American consumer culture and capitalism, whereas Fred Buell cautions against describing America’s relation to the rest of the world as a relation of power, for fear of adopting a condescending imperialist view." On the one hand, America’s worldwide control of news media and pene-

tration of markets has been analyzed as a major force in the ‘economization of culture’ in a process that threatens, at least theoretically, to obliterate all regional cultures.’? On the other hand, the model of mutually interactive cultures influencing and transforming each other in a global mix of syncretism and hybridity has been used to explain the postmodern parodic and critical adaptation of American mass media in postcolonial culture.”° The concept of hybridity comes from postcolonialism, as theorized by Homi Bhabha, whose work, like that of Suleri and Young, revised the model of domination, as elaborated in Said’s Orientalism, to one of

interaction.” The revisionary term ‘hybridity’ has the advantage of restoring a more complex sense of the often conflicted subject positions of the colonized both through resistance and collaboration. However, deploying a concept of hybridity in order to rewrite the history of colonialism as a matter of mutual and neutral interactions, as some readings of postcolo-

nialism in globalization theory at times imply, denies the power relationships under imperialism then and now. Critics working within the field of postcolonial studies have engaged in a debate about the limits of postcolonial theory in order to make it more philosophically self-critical and politically responsible to those living in the contexts it seeks to explain. These critiques have ramifications for an analysis of Ireland,

as well.22 Anne

McClintock

has

criticized

the

term

‘postcolonialism’ for the globalizing temporality and premature sense of self-congratulation that it sets up: ‘Ireland may, at a pinch, be “post-colonial”, but for the inhabitants of British-occupied Northern Ireland . . . there may be nothing “post” about colonialism at all.’?? McClintock would apply her definition of colonization as ‘direct territorial appropriation of another geo-political entity’ to the English domination of Ireland not just in the

8

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

past but also in the present. If one wants to take an extreme nominalist position within the terms of diplomatic history and accept the legitimacy of British jurisdiction, then at the very least Ireland has been subject to “internal colonization’ where the ‘dominant part of a country treats a group or region as if it were a foreign colony’.?> McClintock also points out the belatedness that the term ‘postcolonial’ imposes upon colonized cultures. It positions them primarily as an after-effect of colonial rule and, hence, reads these cultures through the linguistic lens of that rule. The lack of attention to indigenous accounts of history is a problem in Irish Studies, as well. One of the most devastating effects of colonization has been the loss of Irish as a lingua franca. As a result, many historians and cultural critics do not read

Irish language sources, and this severely limits their understanding of the perspectives of native élites and peasantry. A disproportionate importance is given to English language documents that often reproduce the cultural assumptions of the colonizers and distort those of the colonized. Like McClintock, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge also take postcolonial theory to task for its failure to distinguish between different kinds of colonialism — between that in settler and non-settler countries, and between what they call the ‘oppositional’ and the ‘complicit’ postcolonial.” Since in the North of Ireland the majority of the population is made up of descendants of settlers, Ireland conforms at least in part to the model of

Canada and Australia. Like the indigenous inhabitants in these settler communities, those in Northern Ireland were subject to segregation and discrimination, but, unlike them, they were

not subject to a wholesale

campaign of extermination. The settlers themselves came from many different economic backgrounds, and occupied varying levels of power: some large landholders, others poor tenants, with many tradesmen and small farmers in between. Many of them suffered under the colonial system, as the working-class Protestant population today still struggles with such problems as raising their level of education and employment. At the same time, if the indigenous Irish participated in and at times benefited from the British Empire, they were also subject to the forces that define oppositional postcolonialism: ‘(a) racism, (b) a second language, and (c) an armed strug-

gle’.” Historical discourse studies have shown how the Irish were portrayed as ape-like in the racialized representations of the nineteenth century; late twentieth-century sociological studies of Northern Ireland have demonstrated the similarities between sectarianism and racism.”* In addition to being racialized, the Irish also had English as a second language imposed on them. After the Famine, the economic, cultural, and psychological pressure to abandon Irish was such that parents often could not even communicate with their children. The loss of the language can be felt even today in what the poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill describes as a ‘missing limb syndrome’. The third feature of oppositional colonialism, the armed struggle, played its role at the start of the last century in bringing about

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

9

Irish independence from Great Britain and more recently as part of the crisis in Northern Ireland that eventually led to negotiations which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement. One of the most trenchant critiques of postcolonialism is that of Ella Shohat, who views its terms of analysis to be at times politically disempowering. She finds that the term ‘hybridity’ lacks the specificity to distinguish between such completely divergent experiences of subjection to colonial power as ‘forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political co-optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence’.” According to Shohat, the postcolonial critique of indigenous cultural movements as essentialist undercuts politically embattled minority movements for whom such cultural self-definition, however invented, is a

crucial strategy for survival. The most challenging questions that Shohat poses to the postcolonial critics of cultural nationalism have to do with the question of location and perspective: ‘who is mobilizing what in the articulation of the past, deploying what identities, identifications and representations, and in the name of what political vision and goals?’ In other words, is the problem really so much voluntary collective identities, which anyone might want to claim in order to exist at all politically and socially rather than purely individually, or the ends to which these identities are striving? Indeed pluralism becomes authoritarian if it does not allow for self-defining, culturally disparate groups which agree to respect each other’s rights and live in peaceful, mutual coexistence. Shohat’s questions draw out the political consequences of unreflective opposition to all forms of nationalism (as opposed to the necessary critique of repressive and authoritarian imperialist and postcolonial nationalisms). The dismissive stance toward nationalism in the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s is something that Aijaz Ahmad sees as a mirror image of the earlier celebration of third world nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. If the earlier celebration of third world nationalism overlooked the political complexities of postcolonial states, themselves divided by class conflict, the later dismissal of nationalism similarly failed to encounter the material historical differences between progressive and retrograde forms of nationalism. For Ahmad, both the idealization and demonization of the national

are dehistoricizing and depoliticizing. He laments that at times poststructuralist postcolonialism produces a world which is ultimately unintelligible — a world in which ‘everything becomes a text’, in which ‘the dismissal of class and nation as so many “essentialisms” logically leads towards an ethic of non-attachment’, and in which the ‘breaking away from collective socialities of that kind inevitably leaves only the “individual”’.** Going beyond Ahmad’s Marxist critique of postcolonialism, Pheng Cheah’s radically materialist critique of anti-national postcolonial cosmopolitanism reinstates the nation in the analysis of politics, and I would argue by extension, in history. Cheah criticizes the postcolonialism

10 = Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

of both James Clifford and Homi Bhabha as based on a concept of culture that is fundamentally idealist. Like the organicist culture of Fichte and Herder, the state culture of Hegel, and the cosmopolitan international culture of Marx, the postmodern culture of postcolonialism is based on freedom from the natural. This perspective radically dematerializes culture. In contrast to the view of the cultural subject as migratory and culture as a form of free floating play within discourse, Cheah argues that people largely dwell in communities and that they inhabit the realm of ‘given culture’ which is bound by sociological and empirically verifiable material constraints. These constraints include the institutions that people inhabit: Over and above identification with a naturalized cultural unity or linguistic interpellation into a national ideal, the formation and deformation of group loyalty also involves political organization and economic factors such as law enforcement, the provision of welfare and other services by the state, and the establishment of a framework for the distribution and regulation of economic resources and capabilities

to satisfy human needs.”

These aspects of what Cheah calls ‘given culture’ are relevant for a historical understanding of the two nationalisms in Northern Ireland: both the resistance of Irish nationalism and the hegemony of unionism. In the twentieth century, when the Labour government in Britain initially introduced welfare and civil rights legislation, Unionists attempted to keep Northern Ireland exempt. Until the breakdown of the industrial economy in Northern Ireland, unionism had been a successful strategy for resource acquisition. The political concept of the struggle over the ‘given culture’ of institutions can be applied to the larger span of Irish history going back to the early modern colonial imposition of English institutions of land tenure and law. However discontinuous the attempts of the native population were to resist, attempt to gain inclusion in, and/or control such institutions, and however ad hoc and disorganized the attempts of the colonizers to maintain hegemony over them, the fact remains that such institutions were controlled by the colonizers. A nationalist politics that defines people’s needs and interests, like a nationalist historiography that defines what those needs and interests have been in the past, is not a matter of mere resentment or a sense of victimization or a fantasy of racial spirit but a struggle against and within institutions. According to Cheah, any kind of practical political change has to be worked through national institutions, and political movements will continue to be organized around national solidarity because it is the nation and not any transnational body that inspires popular appeal. He is also quick to point out that the nation is not necessarily always imposed from above or in thrall to the interests of state élites. Popular nationalism occurs both within and against the state. For Cheah, postcolonial politics have to

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

11

be national politics because it is only through the nation that global capitalism can be resisted, and in resisting global capitalism, postcolonial nationalism exists in a cosmopolitan force field. He points to the work of such postcolonial feminists as Valentine Moghadam and Marie Aimée Hélie-Lucas who explain the contradictions involved in being at once nationalist and feminist — contradictions which in some instances are mirrored in the Irish context. Such feminists work within national institutions for change, which also necessarily involves them in being aligned with larger cosmopolitan movements.** Within postcolonial nationalism, the ideological contradictions for the subject are such that he or she inhabits conflicting identities. Cheah envisions a postcolonial nationalism that need not be narrow but that is cosmopolitan in its support for other struggles around the globe and allows for multiple political positions, crossing over the exclusionary divides of national identities. The ten essays gathered together in this volume draw upon these critical strengths developed in the debates on postcolonial theory to open up areas for further inquiry in developing a comparative framework for the analysis of Irish political economy, literature, historiography, and cultural critique. The first essay in this volume, ‘” Misplaced Ideas”?: Colonialism, Location,

and Dislocation in Irish Studies’ by Joe Cleary, begins by demonstrating the limitations of modernization theory in explaining the fraught social, political, and economic conditions of contemporary Ireland. To enlighten the blind spots of this model of history as progress, he argues for what Irish cultural studies can gain from the perspective of long-term ongoing historical processes and a wider geographical framework, which he sees as the hallmark of postcolonial comparative study. He interrogates how political and economic structures functioned differently in Ireland than in the rest of Europe in terms of contradictory processes: the unprecedented swiftness with which Ireland was forced into capitalist modernization in the seventeenth century, and the persistence of agrarian feudalism and the political and economic power of the settler class well into the nineteenth century. Cleary gauges the applicability and limits of Fieldhouse’s typology of colonies in comparing the economic and social features of colonialism in Ireland with those in other parts of the world. In particular, he revises the explanation of Ireland’s development within a European framework of economic development to consider how Ireland shares certain conditions with Latin American colonial contexts. In the following essay, David Lloyd takes on the revisionist challenge to considering Ireland as a postcolonial culture and economy. In response to the revisionist argument that Ireland is different from other colonies because it produced so many emigrants that it could itself be considered an imperial ‘home country’, he explains how this view evades dealing with

how the Irish, though white, were constructed as racially ‘other’. The most direct and sustained rebuttal of revisionism in this volume, Lloyd’s essay

12

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

dismantles the empiricist objections of historians to the consideration of Ireland as colonial and postcolonial. He argues against treating ‘facts’ in isolation, and advocates that we place those facts within the context of a fuller sense of the economic, political, and social structures and the subject and object positions that the Irish inhabited. In adopting a postcolonial comparative approach, Lloyd is at pains not to force parallels but to make distinctions. He maintains that postcolonial studies call for a ‘differential analysis, marking the ways in which quite specific cultural forms emerge in relation to a universalizing process’.** In an effort to perform such a differential analysis, for example, my essay on ‘Translating Civility’ compares early modern English writing on the Irish with contemporary European writing on the Amerindians in order to understand the divergent political conflicts motivating different representations of barbarism within and outside Europe. I examine what enabled the Spanish Catholic Bartolomé de Las Casas and the French Calvinist Jean de Léry to defend the geographically and culturally distant Amerindians as civil against the prevailing discourse that constructed them as ‘barbarous’, similar to English representations of the more proximate Irish as ‘natural slaves’. These continental writers’ accounts of cultural others within Europe as more barbarous than the Amerindians help explain the multiple ways in which the Irish were religiously and politically alien for the English. I also show how the philosophical basis of Las Casas’s defence of Amerindian culture was in turn adapted by seventeenth-century Irish writers defending their own culture in what could be seen as the first wave of decolonizing Irish writing. I argue that the violence that accompanied the early modern discourse of civility versus barbarity, used to rationalize the colonization of Ireland, needs to be seen in terms of what Enrique Dussel has called the ‘myth of modernity’, in which the promise of emancipation justifies genocide.* If such postcolonial theories as Dussel’s have often targeted the Enlightenment as the philosophical highpoint of this ‘myth of modernity’, Luke Gibbons presents an alternative Enlightenment. His essay on the United Irishmen’s culturally inclusive nationalism pre-empts the postcolonial critique of it as denigrating cultural difference. He describes the United Irishmen’s cross-colony sympathy for the Amerindians — including Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s induction as a chief of the Iroquois nation. Gibbons shows how in some sense the United Irishmen can be placed both inside the European Enlightenment and yet outside it as part of a larger context of the history of the colonized. This postcolonial analysis demonstrates how the United Irishmen’s promotion of universal emancipation and cultural and religious tolerance was rooted both in cosmopolitan Enlightenment thought and nationalist affirmation of traditional indigenous culture. Kevin Whelan interprets the inability of Irish historians to give a socially meaningful account of the Famine as caused in large part by their rigid separation of history, which they deem enlightened and modern, from

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

13

memory, which they discount as benighted and traditional. This separation arose in Irish intellectual culture from the 1930s to the 1970s in response to the reactionary nationalism imposed by the official Irish state, cutting off the political and social revolution of 1916 and censoring dissent. Whelan sees the dismantling of this divide between history and memory as crucial for integrating an understanding of the Famine into contemporary Irish consciousness. This essay itself demonstrates ways of writing cultural history in order to reconstruct memories that official history has stamped out or dismissed. Whelan reads Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in terms of how oral and literary traditions of the Famine haunt its language. Among other traces of the Famine in Irish culture, he also discusses contemporary Irish women poets’ and visual artists’ representations of the catastrophe’s effect upon the Irish landscape and psyche, particularly the installation and performance pieces of Alannah O’Kelly. For Whelan, postcolonial intellectuals, whether artists or historians, need to be committed to the movement

of

freedom, in constantly negotiating the relation between memories of the past and visions of the future. Echoing Whelan’s observation that the fractured consciousness of the colonized, cut off from memory, is like that of the alienated modern subject,

Seamus Deane focuses on the loss of the Irish language as at once allied with the tragedy of the Famine and the arrival of modernity. Deane identifies the relationship between the loss of the Irish language and the achievement of Irish writing in English as a dialectic of ‘Dumbness and Eloquence’. The movement from inarticulateness to verbal mastery is central to such great works of the Irish Literary Revival as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. While this movement can be read in relation to a hoped-for political movement from enslavement to freedom, it can also be read in relation to a more problematic psychological and social movement from the paralysis of trauma to the possibility of lying. Irish emerges as the language of silence and past trauma and English as the language of eloquence and new possibility. Mindful that translation is itself a form of betrayal, Deane reads Brian Friel’s play Translations as confronting the problem of the loss and acquisition of language in terms of a dual critique of modernity and tradition. The untranslatability of the traditional in Ireland has to do with its linguistic and hence cultural dislocation.” Amitav Ghosh’s speculations about how Indian soldiers in the British army experienced defeat in complicity with empire and defiance in mutiny draw out some of the wider political implications of Deane’s analysis of the relation between cultural defeat in Irish and its overcoming in English. These soldiers’ painful recognition of their subjection to the power of the empire, something Ghosh is quick to point out that many subjects of colonial rule both in India and elsewhere managed either rightly or wrongly to deny, made them aware of their powerlessness in the face of global power.

14 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

They were aware, as the fledging decolonized states also would be, that in the eyes of the larger world powers they would be viewed as ‘forever in step with the globe’s malcontents’. In such an alliance between ‘malcontents’, the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party benefited from their contacts with Irish supporters for revolutionary resistance. Ghosh ends by reflecting on the difficult choice of the Indian National Liberation Army: to fight against imperialism or fascism. Their belief that imperialism was the progenitor of fascism (an insight shared by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire) is not sufficiently heeded today.” Confronting what could be called the post-postcolonialism in the current world order, Ghosh bleakly characterizes the prevailing indifference to the evil of imperialism as ‘a muttered “get over it”’. Joseph Lennon’s essay explains the emergence of Irish representations of Asia as concomitant with a new kind of Irish national cultural definition and response to imperialism. He charts the interactions between Celticism and Orientalism: from the eighteenth-century antiquarian Vallencey’s claim that ‘every Irishman is an Arab’ to W.B. Yeats’s and James Cousins’s association of the Irish with the Asian as a strategy of cultural resistance to British colonialism. Lennon’s view of Irish writers’ liminal position as part of both the First and Third Worlds helps explain Irish writing’s subversion of and complicity with imperialism. Irish Orientalism at times replicates European Orientalism, while at other times is deployed in criticism of empire, sympathetic to resistance to it in other parts of the world. Perhaps the Irish writer most committed to the cause of India was James Cousins, the subject of Gauri Viswanathan’s essay, ‘Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization’. She discusses how this Anglo-Irish émigré’s interpretation of Indian nativism was the basis for his internationalism. Cousins’s identification with Indian nativism enabled him to distance himself from Irish nationalism as he worked towards a critique of British imperialism (for Cousins, itself a form of nationalism) in both Ireland and

India. Cousins’s attempts to get beyond the limits of race through his creation of a universal cultural principle based on this identification with Indian nativism ultimately led his project to founder on the very barrier of race it was seeking to move beyond. Viswanathan

shows, nevertheless, how

this Irish man in India formulated an internationalism that strove toward egalitarianism and political freedom. We are fortunate to have an Afterword by Edward Said whose pathbreaking study of the relation between power and knowledge in the discourse of racial otherness and imperialism, Orientalism, in large part

defined the subject matter and the theoretical basis of postcolonial criticism. Said was also one of the first to write about Ireland in relation to Frantz Fanon’s and Aimé Césaire’s writings on decolonization.** Since all the essays in this volume are either directly or indirectly indebted to the work of Said, he is an ideal respondent. Broadly, these essays share with his work a commitment

to what he has called ‘worldliness’, a notion that

Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory

15

emphasizes the critic’s responsibility to his own and the author’s creation of meaning in texts, and the grounding and consequences of these meanings in historical and material realities in the world.? More particularly, individual essays are grounded on central theoretical principles developed by Said. Kevin Whelan applies Said’s notion of the relation between ‘filiation and affiliation’, between a given or inherited set of cultural determinations and a freely and consciously chosen set of cultural and political commitments, to the relation between memory and politics in Ireland. Joseph Lennon situates what Said would call the ‘strategic locations’ of individual Irish writers within larger ‘analyzable formations’ in the discourse of Orientalism.*° Joe Cleary’s analysis is a self-critical reflection on what he calls ‘beginnings, intention, method’, a persistent concern of Said’s from as early as Beginnings (1975). Luke Gibbons’s recuperation of a postcolonial Enlightenment is a project consonant with Said’s own caution that we not dismiss the politically enabling aspects of the Enlightenment in criticizing its limitations. The principles of inclusive secularity, worldly rationality, and political freedom and justice are all aspects of Enlightenment thought Said would want to bring on board in postcolonial criticism: In responding to these essays, Said draws out their larger meaning for the practice of postcolonial theory and for the impact it has upon how people think of themselves and the cultural and political future they envision living in. He points out how postcolonial theory works to widen the field of inquiry and the interpretive perspective. Comparing the histories of colonial societies around the world and their conflicting interpretations within and among cultures expands our political horizons in the present and helps us chart ways to change. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the fixed boundaries between past and present, First and Third Worlds, memory and history, tradition and modernity, national and international, colonial and postcolonial are more usefully envisioned in

postcolonial theory as an open-ended and ongoing struggle in which these apparently opposite forces interact in the unfolding of the future. Postcolonial theory approaches history, politics and culture not as the ‘clash of civilizations’, a notion which relentlessly replays distorted stereotypes, but as a dialogue among cultures. In this dialogue all sides need the permission to speak and be heard. At stake in all this are the very conditions in which people live and will manage to live on. In postcolonial contexts around the world contests have arisen over inequalities in the distribution of resources and political power, and arbitrary territorial boundaries. As Said points out in his reflections on divided territories around the globe,

one of the strengths of postcolonial theory at its best is that it insists that these struggles need to be reckoned with in terms of their material realities rather than explained away as the result of mere ideology. It is in these liberating, rational, and inclusive terms that postcolonial theory can work to free people’s minds from colonialism in all its various forms.

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

JOE CLEARY

I The emergence of colonial and postcolonial studies within the Irish academy as a distinct mode of critical analysis can probably be dated to roughly the start of the 1980s. In retrospect, the Field Day Theatre Company’s staging of Brian Friel’s Translations in 1980 might be seen as a formative moment since the play raised a cluster of issues about the nature of nineteenth-century social and cultural transformations that would subsequently be taken up in postcolonial studies as well. Later in the decade, Field Day also published a number of pamphlets that implicitly situated modern Irish culture within a colonial framework. The small but growing body of work that shared this critical perspective received considerable stimulus in 1988 when Field Day commissioned pamphlets by Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton, each of which examined some

aspect of modern

Irish culture within the context of colonialism,

imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism.” In the same year, David Cairns and Shaun Richards published their seminal Writing Ireland: Colonialism,

Nationalism and Culture — the first extended historical survey of Irish literature to draw explicitly on the wider international body of postcolonial cultural criticism inspired by Said’s Orientalism.’ The increasing significance which the topic was beginning to assume in Irish cultural studies was indicated at the start of the next decade when essays by Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, and Clair Wills appeared in a special issue of The Oxford Literary Review devoted to the subject of colonialism.* All three explored the anomalous role of Ireland within the constitutive categories of British nineteenth-century colonial discourse. Since then a substantial body of criticism by some of Ireland’s leading cultural critics has appeared, who have drawn extensively on the theoretical resources of postcolonial studies. Some seminal works include: Thomas Boylan and Timothy Foley’s Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (1992), David Lloyd’s Anomalous States: Irish

16

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

17

Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (1993) and Ireland after History (1999),

Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1995), and Seamus Deane’s Strange Country (1997).§ Although sometimes identified exclusively with cultural critics, it would be a mistake to see the emergence of postcolonial studies in Ireland simply as a literary or cultural studies phenomenon. The work that appeared in the 1980s built on earlier scholarship and intersected with other intellectual currents. The development of the historiographic models now usually referred to as the ‘Atlantic archipelago’ and the ‘New British’ history is especially significant in this context.* Both of these models broke to some extent with the tendency in the dominant modes of twentieth-century British historiography to maintain an insular amnesia about Britain’s imperial enterprise. The ‘New British’ history takes as its object the interconnections between English state formation and the extension of English control over the rest of the British Isles, while the ‘Atlantic model’ has opened up to study the wider connections between developments in the British Isles and Britain’s westward expansion into North America and the Caribbean.”

Long before the 1980s, Irish historians working with the

Atlantic model of history, such as David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny, had been busily publishing on the subject of Ireland’s location within the larger narrative of early modern British colonization in the New World. Their works stressed the connections — in terms of personnel, trade, prac-

tices, and mentalities — that linked the early modern English plantations in Ireland with the contemporaneous establishment of British colonies in North America.® This historical research agenda has not been without its critics. These have suggested that early modern Ireland was culturally less alien to the British than the more remote and only recently ‘discovered’ Americas and that its constitutional relationship to the British crown was more ambivalent.2

Hence,

the

critics

contend,

Ireland

must

be

considered ‘a

constitutional anomaly, neither the “kingdom” of England nor a “colony” in north America’.!° Nevertheless, despite the criticism that Canny’s work in particular has provoked, the emergence of postcolonial studies in the 1980s generated more intense controversy for several reasons. First, while the Atlantic and (to a lesser extent) the ‘New British’ histories unsettled the state-centrism of the dominant strains within both Irish and British nationalist historiography, both models are concentrated on the early modern period. In contrast, the works that appeared under the rubric of postcolonial studies in the 1980s asserted that colonialism was not simply a remote historical phenomenon but something that remained critical to the development of Irish society until the twentieth century and the consequences of which continued to shape developments in the post-partition period in both the Northern and the Southern states. To many scholars, such claims represented not only an unwarranted overestimation of the importance of

18

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

colonialism but an unwelcome ‘politicization’ of Irish cultural studies as well.” 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. Since the early 1970s both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic had been subject to sustained crises that threw the legitimacy of the political orders developed in both sections of the island since partition into question. When the nationalist minority in the North launched a mass campaign for civil rights in the late 1960s, the Northern Protestant establishment, obsessed with the spectre of Irish irredentism and unable to respond to the situation except as one of political disorder, tried to crush the movement by draconian police repression. The political convulsions that ensued ultimately led to the emergence of the IRA as a major force in Northern politics, to the reintroduction of the British army, and to the onset of a mili-

tant campaign designed to end British jurisdiction over the region that continued for nearly three decades. Though the Northern ‘Troubles’ coloured the whole political and intellectual climate in the Republic, the crisis that most immediately affected Southern society throughout the same period was more economic than political. Since the early 1960s, when it abandoned the autarkic economic policies adopted after independence, the Republic has pursued a policy of dependent development. This has involved the assiduous courting of multinational, mostly American, investment and the political integration of the country into the European Economic Community in 1975. In the wake of the so-called ‘oil crisis’ of the early 1970s, the strategy of dependent development seemed destined, however, to prove no more successful than its autarkic predecessor. In the 1970s employment in the Irish Republic fell to its lowest level since independence. In the 1980s successive governments responded to the state’s massive international debt — then the highest in the EEC — by imposing an IMF -style fiscal austerity programme characterized by increased taxes on the working and salaried middle classes and by cutbacks to public services and social welfare that hit the poorest sections of Irish society hardest.” By 1987 emigration in the Republic had risen to rates estimated at approximately 30,000 to 40,000 people per annum, something not witnessed since the bleak decade of the 1950s. In 1991 unemployment levels exceeded the 20 per cent mark; one estimate calculated that the rate was then five times

higher than it had been when Ireland first entered the EEC." It was within this depressing economic context that a small but significant body of dissident economic studies, such as Raymond Crotty’s Ireland in Crisis: A Study in Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment (1986) and John Kurt Jacobson’s

Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic: Ideology, Democracy and Development (1994), appeared.** Drawing on various forms of dependency and world systems theory, these works argued that while the history of Irish economic

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

19

development appeared anomalous by Western European standards, there were suggestive parallels between Ireland’s situation and that of other formerly colonized regions in the ‘Third World’. The social climate in Ireland in the 1980s, then, was one conditioned by

a major exodus of the country’s young population in search of work in Britain and the United States, by the social toll of constantly rising unemployment and by political deadlock and military conflict in the North. The dominant intellectual response to these crises developed by the Irish academic and political establishments was essentially shaped by variants of modernization theory and revisionist historiography. Based on a crude dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies, and on the assumption that ‘traditional’ societies can ultimately ‘catch up’ with the more advanced capitalist economies if they adopt the right policies, modernization theories seek to explore the institutional arrangements, cultural values, and other social variables that might allow ‘traditional’ societies to become ‘modern’ as effectively as possible.* From this perspective, the problems that bedevil Irish society — whether political violence or sectarianism in the North or conservative Catholic nationalism or economic inefficiency in the South — are interpreted as evidence that Ireland still has to make the necessary transition from a ‘traditional’ to a properly ‘modern’ social order. The popularity of modernization discourse is explained no doubt by its suppleness — itself a product of the tendency to detach questions of agency from considerations of structure — and by its consequent capacity to lend itself to a wide range of political positions and agendas.” ‘Modernity as such’, as Francis Mulhern comments, ‘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 phenomena of traditionalism and reaction’.’* The dichotomy between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ that subtends modernization discourse has been used effectively by Irish liberals genuinely concerned to secularize the oppressively Catholic state culture established in the Irish Free State after independence. The same sclerotic dichotomy can also be used, however, to advance the rather different interests of neo-conservatives less

concerned with social emancipation than with the emancipation of international capital from all sorts of ‘traditional’ constraints such as state control or trade union regulation. Modernization discourse has also exercised considerable attraction for some sections of the Irish left on both sides of the border. In a country where the electoral record of socialist and labour parties is extremely poor by Western European standards, the explanations for Irish ‘backwardness’ offered in modernization discourse have seemed quite compelling to many on the left. Only when modernization through Europeanization has enabled the country to overcome ‘the idiocy

20

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

of rural life’ in the South and the ‘atavism’ of sectarianism in the North to become like the rest of Western Europe, some liberals and leftists seem to assume, will Irish social democracy be able to make its belated rendezvous with history.” One of the attractions of postcolonial studies in Ireland as it has emerged since the 1980s has been its capacity to destabilize the cultural dominant represented by modernization discourse. Like modernization theory, postcolonial studies is concerned to articulate the systemic connections between the various crises that affect Irish society, North and South, but it does so in a manner that controverts crucial tenets of the reigning orthodoxy. From the perspective of postcolonial studies, modernization discourse is simply another variant on the 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. By focusing overwhelmingly upon variables relating to indigenous aspects of social culture and structure, modernization theories generally display indifference to the entire issue of economic and political imperialism. Even in those cases where they accord significance to external forces, modernization theorists tend to evaluate ‘impact’ in terms of the diffusion of ideas, values and expectations, but rarely attend to the structural mechanisms that constrain such interactions. Where modernization discourse consistently locates modern Ireland within an apparently self-contained Western European context and a foreshortened time-span in which the past is reductively coded as ‘tradition’ that simply acts as a barrier to progress, postcolonial discourse insists on the need to understand Irish historical development in terms both of the longue durée and the wider geographical span of Western colonial capitalism. Where both modernization discourse and Irish revisionist historiography stress the reactionary nature of Irish nationalism, postcolonial discourse has suggested that Irish nationalism can only be understood contextually, as the complex outcome of local interactions with an aggressively expanding imperialist world economy. Where revisionist historiography and modernization studies have both been obsessed with the ‘high’ history of nation and state formation, with the narrative of the political élites that shaped Irish political institutions and state apparatuses, postcolonial discourse has sought to develop a more critical understanding of the various forms of subaltern social struggles largely written out of the dominant debates in Irish history, whether in bourgeois nationalist or revisionist versions.?° That said, Irish modernization discourse, revisionist historiography, or

postcolonial studies ought not be credited with more internal coherence than they deserve. All have been coloured by the extended conjuncture of economic crisis in the South and military stalemate in the North. How these intellectual formations will adapt to the altered conditions of the new century which commences with the South enjoying a dramatic economic

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

21

boom and with the tentative establishment of a new political dispensation in the North still remains to be tested. As I have tried to indicate by way of this rudimentary intellectual sketch, however, the intersecting social and intellectual forces that have shaped the emergence of postcolonial studies in Ireland are heterogeneous. The various intellectual currents — new transnational models of historical research such as the ‘Atlantic’ and ‘New British’ histories; Marxist dependency and world systems theories; the wider international development of postcolonial cultural analysis inspired by the work of Edward Said and others; and the study of colonial social history from ‘below’ associated with the Indian Subaltern Studies project — that inform the scholarship conducted under this rubric are diverse in origin and valence. Given this concatenation of social and intellectual forces, the tendency by its critics to represent Irish postcolonial studies simply as a stalking horse for ‘traditional’ Irish nationalism or as a renovated version of ‘Celtic cringe’ or as the latest exotic intellectual import must be dismissed as reductive." For now at least, postcolonial studies in Ireland represents less an authoritative corpus of work than the name of a still quite novel research agenda. What distinguishes the formation is that it is by far the most outward-looking of the modes of socio-cultural analysis currently shaping Irish Studies. Based on the premise that it is the wider historical and geographical span of modern colonial capitalism that constitutes the proper contextual frame for the study of modern Irish society, the work conducted in the field implicitly sets down a challenge to the narrowly insular AngloIrish framework that has conventionally shaped Irish Studies. Given the extent to which this area studies framework has been naturalized as the constitutive disciplinary horizon for the critical analysis of Irish society, postcolonial studies by its very nature has served to dis-locate Irish Studies in ways that many find counterintuitive and disconcerting. It is this issue of location and dis-location, of misplacement and displacement, that I want to investigate in the subsequent sections of this essay.

I Since its inception, Irish postcolonial studies has been repeatedly confronted by its opponents with a series of sceptical questions. Can Ireland legitimately be considered a colony like Britain’s other overseas possessions? Did colonialism play a significant or only minor role in Irish historical development? If Irish historical experience is to be considered a colonial one, then when did it begin and when cease to be so? Does the situation in Northern Ireland represent the continued salience of a colonial dimension in Irish politics? Such questions boomerang Irish postcolonial studies back to what we might call questions of beginnings, intention, and method.

22

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

For many, the contention that the Irish historical experience resembles that of other colonized countries is simply a species of auto-exoticism with little conceptual merit. Three objections to the conception of Irish history in colonial terms are cited with some consistency. The first is that this experience is much more usefully compared to other Western European societies, especially to other small peripheral societies dominated by more powerful neighbours, than it is to colonized societies in more distant quarters of the globe. In geographic, religious, racial, cultural and economic terms — so this argument runs — Ireland was always an intrinsic part of Western Europe. Hence attempts to consider its historical development in terms of nonEuropean colonized countries tend inevitably to eclipse the intricate network of connections that bind Ireland to its immediate geo-cultural locale. This line of argument has essentially to do with propinquity. Its operative assumption is that countries tend inevitably to be shaped by developments in their immediate environs and that Western Europe, therefore, provides the appropriate framework for any comparative analysis of Irish society.” A second objection is that Irish nationalists seldom conceived of their historical experience in colonial terms and even more rarely identified their own situation with that of other non-European colonized peoples in Asia and Africa or elsewhere. It is argued that the terminology of ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ seldom appears in Irish nationalist or unionist discourse until comparatively recent times, and that those opposed to British rule in Ireland used instead the political languages derived from their immediate European milieux. The language of Irish dissent to British rule, that is, was coded variously in the languages of Jacobitism, of English radicalism and French republicanism, and was even shaped by anti-slavery and abolitionist discourses that dominated European politics at particular historical moments. Only rarely was it coded, however, in a specifically anti-colonial vocabulary. Where Irish nationalists before the twentieth century did locate Ireland within a wider imperial frame, they tended in the main, it is contended, to compare their situation with those of other white settler

peoples in the British Empire but not with those of the indigenous peoples. Thus, for example, Irish nationalists writing in The Nation in the early nineteenth century frequently compare their own situation with that of the French Catholics in British Canada but not with that of the native Canadians. Similarly, at the start of the twentieth century, many Irish nationalists sympathized with the revolt of the Dutch Boers in South Africa against British imperialism but not with the struggles of native African peoples in the region. A third objection is that not only did the Irish not usually identify with the subaltern indigenous peoples of the British Empire, but that they were in effect more or less, like the Scots, enthusiastic co-partners and beneficiaries in the British imperial enterprise. The massive emigration from

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

23

Ireland to colonies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand and the country’s significance as a supplier of manpower to the British imperial military machine, as well as its massive contribution to the Catholic missionary enterprise in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, are usually cited to support this argument. Given the extent of its involvement in such enterprises, ‘then surely Ireland,’ Thomas Bartlett has queried, ‘so far from being a colony, should be considered a mother country in her own right?’ From this perspective, even if not formally an imperial centre like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, or Spain, Ireland nevertheless shares more in common with these adjacent colonizing powers than with the colonized peoples of the European empires. All of these arguments carry some weight and collectively they serve as useful reminders of the dangers of facile identifications between Ireland and Third World colonial situations. None constitutes a decisive objection, however, to the thesis that Ireland was a colony. I will deal with the question of Ireland’s place within Europe here; the other objections will be engaged later in the essay. With regard to the issue of location, it is important to note, too, that the thesis that Ireland was a British colony does not at

all rest on the assumption that the country was somehow, culturally or otherwise, ‘outside’ of Europe and hence part of the Third World.” It is transparently the case that the major intellectual and cultural transformations that have shaped Western European society — the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, French republicanism and German Romanticism, Ultramontane Catholicism, European literary modernism or whatever — have also exercised a decisive role in the development of Irish society. What those who would contend that Ireland was a colony would suggest, however, was that these wider European currents were mediated through a society which was in its structural composition — class and ethnic relations, land tenure systems, relationship with England, and so on — objectively colonial in character. In a classic essay, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, the Brazilian cultural critic Roberto

Schwarz discusses what he describes as the besetting ‘experience of incongruity’ that continually obsesses commentators on Brazilian society.” Schwarz’s attempt to account for this ‘experience of incongruity’ centres on a contrast between the ideological function of liberal ideas in Europe (their location of origin) and Brazil (one of their places of adoption). In Europe, he suggests, liberal ideology was the expression of a triumphant bourgeoisie in its successful struggle against the ancien régime. In Brazil, where the fundamental productive relationship in the nineteenth century continued, however, to be based on slavery, an ideology that proclaimed

the autonomy of the individual, the equality of all men, the universality of the law and the disinterest of culture was patently out of place. For Schwarz, an ideology is ‘in place’ when it constitutes an abstraction of the social processes to which it refers. While in Europe, therefore, liberal

24 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

ideology constituted an abstraction of industrial capitalism, the import of liberal ideas to Brazil created a situation where these ideas were put to work in a social order of a very different kind. The contrast between, on the one hand, the realities of the slave trade, economic dependency, and a political system based on clientalism and favour and, on the other, a liberal discourse which proclaimed universal equality before the law and the virtues of the impersonal state created an effect of ill-assortedness, dissonance, and distortion. This distortion, Schwarz contends, contributed simultaneously to the debasement of Brazilian intellectual life and to an almost reflex scepticism where matters of ideology were concerned since the disjunction between ideology and material reality was so vast. For Schwarz, then, the ‘experience of incongruity’ that obsesses commentators on Brazil ought not to be construed in terms of a clash between European ‘modernity’ and Brazilian ‘backwardness’ nor explained away by a poststructuralist relativism, which assumes that the real problem has to do with the inadequacies of the European sciences and methodologies and not with Brazilian reality itself. Instead, that experience must ultimately be attributed to the constitutive paradox of Brazilian social order: a local slave-owning latifundist economy structurally integrated on a dependent basis into the ‘liberal’ capitalist world economy. From the theoretical perspective that shapes Irish postcolonial studies, Irish history discloses a constitutive paradox of a rather similar kind. The suggestion is not, patently, that nineteenth-century Ireland was like nineteenth-century Brazil. What is suggested, rather, is that although Ireland belonged to the same geo-cultural locale, the same orbit of capital, as the major European imperial powers, it was integrated into that orbit of capital in a very different way than its main European neighbours. 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 spatial location, its socio-economic composition and its culture. Conceived in this way, differences between Ireland and Europe are invariably structured by the conceptual couplet of ‘backwardness’ and ‘advance’. The postcolonialist perspective, in contrast, suspends the notion of homologies, and attempts to investigate the discrepant ways in which Irish political and cultural life, which were obvi-

ously shaped and textured by wider European developments, were at the same time overdetermined by the country’s dependent socio-economic composition. Contrary to what its critics would claim, then, postcolonial studies is not a misplaced or out-of-place idea in Irish circumstances. On the contrary, it might be argued, following Schwarz, that an obsessive ‘experience of incongruity’ — occasioned by the fact that dependent cultures are always interpreting their own realities with intellectual methodologies created somewhere else and whose basis lies in other social processes — is indeed a typical characteristic of postcolonial societies.”

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

25

As Joseph Ruane has demonstrated in his insightful survey on this topic, theoretical haziness about whether or not Ireland should be considered a colony extends across all the major disciplines within the Irish academy. Ruane’s comments on the Irish historiography are especially instructive. According to his survey, colonial themes have been paramount in the writings of historians for the late medieval period in Ireland, covering such topics as the coming of the Anglo-Normans, the displacement of the native Gaelic lordships, the introduction of English concepts of sovereignty and legality, and so forth. When it comes to early modern Ireland colonial themes continue to occupy a central place in the historical literature. The arrival of new classes of British settlers in the Tudor, Cromwellian, and

Williamite conquests, the massive confiscation of lands by the settlers and the displacement of native élites of both Irish and Old English descent, the deliberate destruction of Gaelic society and the opening up of the economy to greater commercialism, as well as the perception of the Gaelic Irish as wild and uncivilized, have encouraged many historians to use the language of colonialism to characterize developments in this period. When it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, Ruane contends, the

analytical model that governs Irish historical writing alters quite dramatically. After the Act of Union in 1801 Ireland’s Protestant parliament in Dublin was dissolved and the country became a sub-state of the United Kingdom ruled directly from Westminster. When historians deal with this post-Union period, a colonial conception of Irish history is commonly displaced, Ruane observes, in favour of a modernization perspective that attributes little if any significance to colonialism. For many historians, Ruane comments, the Union seems to put a remarkably speedy end (apparently by the magic wand of parliamentary statute) to whatever colonial features may have existed in Irish society over previous centuries. 7” In sum, for many, perhaps even most, historians, to deploy a colonial perspective after 1801 is simply to recuperate a ‘seven hundred years of oppression’ nationalist metanarrative that stymies serious scholarship.* Given Ireland’s location within Europe and its integration into the United Kingdom, it is scarcely surprising that some scholars have attempted to settle the controversial issues involved by way of various ‘intermediate’ solutions. These generally work from the assumption that Ireland’s experience was colonial to some degree but that it was always ‘anomalous’ or ‘atypical’ and hence by inference too ‘exceptional’ to be usefully considered alongside the overseas colonies. Alternatively, it has also been proposed that Ireland should be considered an example of ‘internal colonialism’, whereby England came to dominate the Celtic peripheries as distinct from its overseas colonial enterprises. Neither of these intermediate ‘solutions’ seems theoretically compelling. The conception of Ireland as somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘exceptional’ rests on the untenable assumption that there is such a thing as a standard colonial experience, while the

26

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

concept of ‘internal colonialism’ depends on a categorical distinction between geographically contiguous and overseas colonization processes that has never adequately been theorized.” If matters are to be advanced beyond the current controversies it is imperative, I think, to understand that the issue about whether Ireland can be considered a colony can be posed on two analytically discrete levels that require different methods of investigation: one that has to do essentially with matters of consciousness, systems of representation, and discursive regimes; the other with ‘objective’ structural and socio-cultural correspondences — though ultimately the relationship between these two ‘levels’ also needs to be theorized, of course. I want to deal briefly here with both levels individually, setting aside for the present the more complex question of their mediation. In doing so, I will work with the hypothesis that Ireland was indeed a colony and that there are strong arguments to be made to support this case. The objective here, however, is not to ‘prove’ that it was so, but instead to consider some of the theoretical matters that need to be

addressed if the colonial question is to be advanced in some reasonably satisfactory way. As Joseph Ruane has observed, neither those who favour a European nor those who propose a colonial comparative framework have conducted much comparative research to substantiate their cases.*° In the absence of such research, what we are essentially concerned with here is to

elucidate some of the ways in which a comparativist colonial research agenda might be constructed and developed. On the first level, when we ask ‘was Ireland a colony?’ the question that is essentially being posed is: To what extent did those charged with British government in Ireland as well as Irish nationalists and Irish unionists consciously consider the Irish situation a colonial one? Since British rule in Ireland extended over several centuries, during which the British Empire changed dramatically in economic character and geographical composition, and since conceptions of empire also changed from one epoch to another, what is called for here is a very challenging kind of intellectual history: one capable of tracing the shifting ways in which the various British governing classes, Irish political élites, and insurgent social movements conceived of

the Irish situation over an extended period of time. While the value of a history of mentalités and systems of representation of this sort can hardly be questioned, some caveats need to be entered. As mentioned earlier, it is commonly argued that Ireland cannot be considered a colony at some or other stage because the Irish did not deploy the language of colonialism and that opposition to British domination was coded instead in the language of tyranny and denied citizenship or argued on the constitutional grounds that the country was a separate kingdom. The difficulty with this line of argument, as David Lloyd has rightly pointed out, is that it assumes already the historical development of a concept whose full range of meanings emerged only gradually through the nineteenth and into the twentieth

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

27

century.*! The fact that peasants in late medieval England, Spain, or Russia did not consciously think of themselves as oppressed by a feudal social system does nothing to diminish the theoretical value of the term ‘feudalism’. For the same

reason,

the objective theoretical value of the term

‘colonialism’, which historically emerges as a conceptual rationalization of European overseas rule and only later as part of a wider oppositional critique of that enterprise, can never be made to rest solely on the subjective consciousness of the colonized. The argument that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish nationalists looked mostly to the white settler colonies to highlight their own grievances, and less so to the indigenous native peoples of America or Africa or wherever, also needs to be weighed in this context. The fact is that in the period between the eighteenth and the late nineteenth century (perhaps later) the most difficult struggles of the European imperialist metropoles were not for the most part with the native peoples in their colonies but with their own white settlers.*? The major changes brought about in the whole structure of the contemporary capitalist world system as a consequence of Britain’s disputes with her restive white settlers in North America and Spain’s with her Creole populations in South America in the late eighteenth century testify to the significance of such conflicts. In other words, the earliest and most successful anti-colonial nationalisms were

those of the white settlers and Creole populations in the Americas, and given the international significance of such movements, it is not particularly surprising that their influence was most acutely registered in Ireland at the time. The fact that many prominent Irish nationalists — John Mitchel and Arthur Griffith are exemplary cases — considered it outrageous that Ireland should be treated as a colony because to do so was to put an ancient and civilized European people on the same level as non-white colonial subjects in Africa or Asia is well established. Numerous examples of Irish nationalists who did identify the Irish predicament with that of non-white colonized peoples can always be produced to counter those who did not. But to try to determine the ratio of those who did and who did not is only to compound the conceptual confusion inherent in this mode of argument. The extent to which some versions of anti-colonial nationalism duplicate elements of the racist and imperialist mentalities they set out to oppose is a well-developed theme in postcolonial studies, and Irish nationalism, in this and other respects, offers considerable evidence of the limits of nationalism as oppositional discourse. But the fact that some Irish nationalists or some versions of Irish nationalism were capable of only a very limited and conservative critique of British imperialism is not in itself an argument that

Ireland was not a colony. Were the class-consciousness and solidarity of the oppressed not something that has continuously to be struggled for, rather than something that automatically attends the subaltern condition, then oppression would not be the problem it is in the first instance.

28

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

If the concept of colonialism has a theoretical value that cannot be reduced to the subjective consciousness of the colonizer or the colonized, then why does it matter one way or the other whether either the Irish or the British conceived of Ireland in colonial terms? Even if British administrators or some Irish nationalists discerned parallels between the Irish situation and that in various British colonies, this obviously does not establish that the actual conditions were indeed always commensurable. Nevertheless, as Luke Gibbons has argued, it is also the case that ‘[u]nderstanding a community or a culture does not consist solely in establishing “neutral” facts and “objective” details: it means taking seriously their ways of structuring experience, their popular narratives, the distinctive manner in which they frame the social and political realities which affect their lives’.33 Once we allow that culture is the sphere through which conflicts are experienced and evaluated then it is clear that the attempt to trace the shifting ways in which Ireland was conceived in relation to other parts of the colonial world does have its own intrinsic value and interest. Some important book-length studies on the representational systems that shaped British rule in Ireland and Irish responses to that rule lend considerable support to the idea that the Irish situation can usefully be viewed within the wider context of European colonization and imperialism. Nicholas Canny’s work on how Ireland’s colonial experience in the Tudor and Stuart period was of a piece with the greater European westward colonial thrust at the time represents the outstanding example in the early modern period.** In a suggestive work of historical jurisprudence, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, Robert A. Williams, Jr., has also argued that Elizabethan colonial projects in Ireland drew extensively upon Spanish colonial doctrine in the Americas.* There is also a steadily accumulating body of work that attempts to trace the shifting mentalities and ideologies of settlement and resistance in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Ireland. A good deal of this scholarship is centred (no doubt disproportionately) on the writings of Edmund Spenser, but the range of materials covered is constantly expanding.** For the post-Union period, the parallels between British attitudes to Ireland and India in the nineteenth century are discussed in S.B. Cook’s Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland,?’ while Perry Curtis’s and R.N. Lebow’s books on the racialized constructions of the Irish in British and American popular culture in the Victorian period are important contributions to any understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes towards the Irish.** To date at least, the scholarly material on the subject of colonialism

is concentrated overwhelmingly on English language sources. The historical response of the subaltern Gaelic community to British rule in Ireland is consequently still seriously underresearched, though Joep Leerssen’s Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael and especially Breandan O Buachalla’s Aisling Ghedr represent pioneering attempts to excavate this material.*® The kinds of

“Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

29

scholarship referred to here clearly suggest that connections between Ireland and other colonial sites were a reasonably consistent feature of both British administrative and Irish oppositional discourses. What is still much less well established, though, is the extent to which discursive identifica-

tions between the Irish and other colonial situations remained scattered, opportunistic and unsystematic, or to what degree, or at what moments especially, they acquired systematic force. The shifting trajectories and mutations of such discourses as they are transformed over the longer term from one historical epoch to another also remain unmapped.

Ul While I have stressed the importance of discourses that construe Ireland in colonial terms because they help us to understand how political agents and communities structured their own experience, no historical materialist could be content to pose the question ‘Was Ireland a colony?’ simply at the level of systems of representation. To do so would be to allow a one-sided concern with semiotics and matters of political consciousness to dispose with the question of deciding whether or not the avowed correspondences between Ireland and other colonies are compelling as an explanatory historical framework. For this reason, the question must also be posed at a level that tries to determine whether there are compelling or illuminating socio-cultural correspondences or similarities between Ireland and other colonial situations. But this immediately leads to the question: With which colonies and with what kinds of colonial processes elsewhere might the Irish situation productively be compared? Naive 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-fits-all colonial experience against which Ireland’s claims might be weighed and measured. The real difficulty, on the contrary, is that colonial practices, structures, and conditions around the globe have been of the most varied and heterogeneous kind. The sheer diversity of lands that comprised the British Empire alone has caused scholars to question

whether any substantive similarities between colonial polities can be deduced, and some have even queried whether the term ‘colonialism’ itself has any analytical value.*° To avoid surrender to such positivism, which reduces everything to a catalogue of isolated singularities, Irish Studies might do well to devote more attention to the task of generating a serviceable historicized typology of colonies. The conservative historian of empire D.K. Fieldhouse and, building on his work, George Fredrickson, an American comparative sociologist of race relations, have divided overseas colonies into four categories: administrative, plantation, mixed settlement, and pure settlement.*’ Though often the most prized imperial possessions, administrative colonies aimed at military,

30

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

economic and administrative control of a politically strategic region and were never settled by Europeans on a mass scale. What usually destined a particular region to be an administrative colony rather than one of the settler types, Fredrickson suggests, was the presence of a dense, settled, agricultural population with a complex social and economic system, considerable military capacity, and relative immunity to the diseases of European origin of the kind that wreaked demographic havoc on the native peoples of the New World. Where these factors obtained, European conquest would normally be difficult and costly and little land was readily available for white settlement. Hence, once they had attained dominance in the region, the European powers could economically benefit most by extracting economic surplus or valuable mineral resources from these lands without systematically destroying their traditional societies. Colonial control in such instances could best be applied by means of indirect rule exercised by co-opting indigenous élites or by newly constructed colonial bureaucracies staffed by European administrators and civil servants or by way of some combination of the two. This category includes the colonies of South Asia, as well as most of Africa and the Middle East.

In contrast to the administration colonies, where power was exercised through a relatively small, sojourning group of primarily male European administrators, settlement colonies were characterized by a much larger settler European population of both sexes whose intentions were for permanent settlement. These fall into three general types. Plantation colonies usually attracted relatively small numbers of white settlers, but these acquired large tracts of land, found that the indigenous population did not meet their labour needs, and imported a slave or indentured and

usually non-European labour force to work the monocultural plantations. In the plantation colonies, the mode of economic production rested essentially on the forced labour of imported workers to produce specialized staples for the world market. The exemplary instances in this case are the monocultural plantations in the West Indies and in the southern region of the United States.” In the mixed settlement colonies, of which the clearest examples are the highland societies of Latin America, the indigenous peoples were not annihilated, but the Iberian settler culture and social structures nonetheless

became the dominant ones. When Europeans first intruded, these regions already had large populations and complex sedentary societies. But the drastic losses suffered by the native population as a result of epidemics, warfare and brutal exploitation allowed the European settlers, Fredrickson suggests, to monopolize control of the land and to replace native political and cultural institutions with their own. Though the racial and class strata that emerged in such situations were typically very complex, miscegenation normally occurred and gave rise to racially mixed groups that served as buffers between those of settler and indigenous descent. Labour was

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

31

exploited in such situations usually by way of coercive landlord—peasant relationships — with the indigenous peasantry left in place but required to pay tribute to European landlords or political authorities in the form of labour or commodities. In the pure settlement colonies, of which the United States, Canada and

Australia are the exemplary instances, the native peoples were either exterminated altogether or their remnants pushed onto reservations in remote or unproductive regions. European exploitation in these regions did not take the form of the coercion of native labour. Instead, an expanding settler frontier was constantly pushed back as the indigenous peoples were displaced to make way for new waves of settlers. The North American and Australian colonial economies of this kind depended in their initial phases on indentured or bonded labour and even at later stages cheap coolie labour from Asia especially continued to play a major role in their development. But because land in such instances was usually relatively cheap by contemporary European standards, and labour consequently comparatively expensive, the pure settlement economies were not structured in

terms of the ‘feudal’ tenurial systems that characterized mixed settlement and plantation colonies where a small landed oligarchy dominated peasant masses. Instead, farmer-settlement and free white labour became the social dominant. Because of the rigid social separation between settler and displaced native and comparatively low levels of miscegenation, these societies usually became homogeneously European in cultural character. Nevertheless,

since land was

cheap and white

labour expensive,

and

because there were fewer inherited institutional restraints than in Europe, these societies were also often less rigidly socially differentiated and considerably more egalitarian — at least for white settlers — than their European counterparts. Used crudely, typologies such as these can obviously freeze into Weberian ideal types. But they can also be used productively to highlight dominant settlement patterns, economic systems and state structures that emerged in particular colonial situations, and they can be adapted to account for historical transformations within a given colonial situation in response to the larger global mutations of the world capitalist system. Moreover, it is also clear that many colonial situations must be construed

as composites or hybrids of the basic types rather than simply as varieties of them. The case of the United

States, which

can be described as a

composite of a pure settlement colony in the North and a plantation type in the South, is a case in point — though several other major examples such as South Africa or Palestine might also be mentioned.* The chief value of such typologies, I would suggest, is that they can help to distinguish the new and varied compositions of land, labour, capital (and the attendant class, racial, and cultural relations) that typically emerged and predominated in different colonial situations. As such, they may have at least the

32.

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

potential to take us beyond the ungrounded theoretical abstractions for which postcolonial theory is sometimes rightly criticized. Viewed in this frame, some elements essential to any evaluation of Ireland in comparative colonial context become evident. First, Ireland was

systematically colonized on a modern proto-capitalist basis in the early modern period, roughly contemporaneous with the establishment of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America and the English ones in North America. None of the expanding European colonial powers in that period was a stranger to conquest and colonization when it reached the New World. Portugal had already occupied the islands of the Azores and Madeira, and was establishing trading colonies on the coast of West Africa,

while Castile had taken the Moorish kingdom of Granada and was completing its conquest of the Canary archipelago. Both Iberian kingdoms had also been engaged for centuries in the struggle to expel the Moors from the Iberian peninsula. Many of the techniques developed to settle and defend great tracts of underpopulated territory, as well as the spirit of religious crusade that inspired this Reconquest, were to be carried over in due course to the New World.* Similarly, England had been engaged for centuries in various attempts to subjugate Ireland when it established its first colonies in North America. In the sixteenth century attempts to establish comprehensive schemes of plantation by Englishmen in the Gaelic areas of the country were already under way, and Ireland was gradually redefined in this period as a crucial strategic site in the European struggle to control the Atlantic and the New World. In the same period, the island

also became what William J. Smyth describes as one of the epic battlegrounds in the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe.” For this reason, it has been suggested, neither ethnic descent nor culture but religion became the major index that distinguished between colonizer and colonized in early modern Ireland, with the Old English settler-descended communities from the pre-Reformation period ultimately relegated by the New English Protestant arrivals in the early modern period to the same inferior social status as the Gaelic Irish.® Because colonial processes change over time, however, it may also be the case that the indices that distinguished between colonizer and colonized changed also, and that the ways in which religion, culture and ethnicity were articulated with each other to demarcate the divide varied from one conjuncture to the next. The dominant economic system that shaped the early modern colonial system was state-regulated merchant capitalism (or mercantilism). Like the West Indies and the American colonies, Ireland in this period under-

went an exceptionally violent and accelerated process of colonial modernization in which every aspect of the indigenous society was almost wholly transformed in a very short period. All of these colonial sites were commercially orientated towards the emerging Atlantic economy, but

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

33

imperial mercantilist policy was designed to prevent the colonies from developing independent trading links with each other. Instead, trade had to be channelled through the British and Spanish imperial centres, inhibiting independent economic development and diversification within the colonies over the longer term and thereby establishing the structures that would condition future economic dependence. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the colonial outposts of this emergent Atlantic economy is the velocity of their transition from various forms of pre-capitalist society to mercantile capitalist modernity, without experiencing what Kevin Whelan has called the long conditioning of other medieval European societies.* Thus at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Whelan remarks, Ireland was a very lightly settled, overwhelmingly pastoral, heavily wooded country, with a poorly integrated, quasi-autarchic, and technologically backward economy. By the end of the century, however, all that had changed. As it was commercially reoriented to service the expanding English mercantilist state and concurrently integrated into the world of North Atlantic trade, Ireland, Whelan argues, underwent ‘the most rapid

transformation in any European seventeenth-century economy, society,

and culture’.*? In all the colonial sites that constituted this new Atlantic world this precociously accelerated modernization process was accompanied by what would ultimately appear from the perspective of a more fully developed industrial capitalism, with its ‘liberal’ emphasis on free labour and free trade, to be apparent economic and legal-juridical ‘archaisms’. These include the slave plantations in the West Indies, the southern United States, and Brazil; the encomienda and hacienda system in South America;

and the oligarchic landed estates system in Ireland — by the nineteenth century the latter would be regarded by political economists of all shades as the single greatest impediment to ‘proper’ capitalist development in the country. In nearly all these situations, moreover, the native populations were subjected for extended periods to legal and political constraints — though these varied in kind enormously — designed to exclude them from civil and political society and to secure the privileges of the immigrant settler communities. To schematize, then, colonialism in these areas, based

on the monopoly of land maintained by state structures controlled by classes mostly of settler origin, was the product of commercial capitalism and hence all of these economies were deeply integrated into the emergent world capitalist system. But basic productive relationships in all these situations continued to depend on overwhelmingly rural labour forces which were subjected to various modalities of coerced labour. The discrepancy between the precocious modernity of these colonial societies and the extent of their integration into the emergent capitalist world system, on the one hand, and some of their more ‘archaic’ ancien régime characteristics has generated considerable theoretical controversy

34

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

among Marxists. One position, associated with the work of Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, holds that capitalism as a mode of production can be equated with the penetration of capitalist market relations. From this perspective, as capitalism comes into contact with other modes of production through trade, all economic activity is increasingly subordinated to the profit maximizing imperatives of the market. Hence all essential distinction between the capitalist mode and modes initially outside the capitalist sphere is rapidly eroded and the problem that then poses itself is that of analyzing the relationships of unequal exchange that subsequently emerge between capitalist core and periphery. An alternative position, associated with Ernesto Laclau and Robert Brenner, holds that while capitalist expansion is often accompanied by the extension of capitalist class relations it may also result in the combination of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production in ways that contribute to underdevelopment. Brenner, for example, contends that capitalist expansion may result in ‘merely the interconnection of capitalist with pre-capitalist class forms, and indeed the strengthening of the latter’. Alternatively, it may also lead to ‘the transformation of pre-capitalist class relations, but without their substitution by fully capitalist social-productive relations of free wage labour, in which labour power is a commodity’. For Brenner, accounts such as Wallerstein’s that equate capitalism with the extension of the capitalist market will ‘fail to take into account either the way in which class structures, once established, will in fact determine the course of economic development or underdevelopment over an entire epoch, or the way in which these class structures themselves emerge: as the outcome of class struggles whose outcomes are incomprehensible in terms merely of market forces’. These different theoretical methodologies point to strikingly different conceptualizations of Irish history. From the first perspective, a hallmark of the Irish economy as it developed in the seventeenth century is the accelerated velocity of its enforced capitalist modernization through conquest and colonization and the extent to which the country is incorporated as a producer of agricultural exports into an emergent Atlantic economy. The sweeping aside of existing feudal custom and moral economy during the successive conquests that displaced the old Gaelic systems is viewed in this context as leading to an unfettered capitalist exploitation of peasant labour in Ireland. Unrestrained by the hereditary rights and moral economy that conditioned landlord-tenant relationships in Britain, the Irish situation in this view constitutes not a more retarded but rather a less regulated form of capitalism that lacked the customary checks and balances that made its British counterpart more politically stable. Ireland’s specialized and dependent economy oriented towards international export, moreover, made it more vulnerable to the cyclical vagaries of international markets and this in turn aggravated the political volatility of a region already fissured by colonially structured ethno-religious cleavages.

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

35

From the alternative perspective, which has been argued by Eamonn Slater and Terrence McDonough, the British conquest of Ireland allowed for the creation of a landlord class that controlled the Irish legal and political system to a degree unparalleled in England. In this account, conquest led to the emergence of a kind of bastardized feudalism that allowed the landlords to extract rental payments from tenants by means of extraeconomic coercion. Notwithstanding the fact that it was constitutionally integrated into the most advanced industrial capitalist economy of the time, Irish society remained essentially feudal or quasi-feudal in character in this view until the very end of the nineteenth century. It was not primarily the dynamics of the capitalist market, but the development of class struggle within what remained an essentially feudal mode of production, it is argued, that eventually led to the demise of this system. After the late nineteenth-century collapse of landlordism, peasant proprietorship replaced it with a small farmer regime, and only then was the stage set, and even then only unevenly, for actual capitalist production in agriculture.® Depending on the theoretical model applied, it is argued then that Ireland either underwent an extremely rapid enforced transition to a form of dependent capitalism constrained within a colonial relationship mediated through London or, alternatively, that it evolved by way of a bastardized variety of colonial feudalism that allowed only for a very late development of capitalism by Western European standards. The differences here do not simply reduce to matters of different chronologies of capitalist development; different conceptions of the character and role of the Irish state are also at issue. Despite such divergence, both models suggest that Irish historical and economic development poses theoretical questions for Marxism that cannot be grasped within the feudalism-absolutism-capitalism sequence usually applied to the core centres of Western European imperialism. Though modern Ireland emerges in the same orbit of capital as the Western European imperial states, its social development and functional role within that orbit seems in crucial respects very different. What both theoretical models suggest, therefore, is that the assumption that Western Europe constitutes the natural frame of comparative analysis within which Ireland should be located is open to question. The importance of Europe as the source of many of the economic, political, cultural, and

intellectual stimuli that shaped Irish society is not in doubt here — though these stimuli were also felt, to varying degrees, in all the major colonies of European settlement in the Atlantic world. What a postcolonialist methodology would suggest, however, is that it is the disjunctive way in which these metropolitan influences are articulated in a socio-economic context different to those in which they originally emerged that constitutes the real interest of the Irish situation. If Ireland is included in the category of settlement colonies as outlined above, then it evidently belongs to a quite limited set of situations where

36

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the settler population did not over time become a demographic majority. South Africa (partially settled in the same historical epoch as Ireland was), Algeria, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Palestine (all settled in a much later epoch

when industrial capitalism had already developed in Europe) are other major examples. As in the South American colonies, in Ireland the native

population was not expelled but was retained as a peasant labour force within a land system now almost totally monopolized by the settler élite. But in contrast to South America, where the indigenous Indian population suffered a drastic decline, in Ireland the native population actually increased in the early modern colonial period and remained a demographic majority in most parts of the island except in the north-east. The fact that Ireland was a settlement rather than an administration colony is of some significance. Within the administrative colonies, concentrated mostly in Asia and Africa, colonialism did not create new societies by destroying the native élites and installing European ones in their place — instead it intervened to restructure existing ‘traditional’ societies. Within the system of domination maintained by the colonial state in such cases, two distinct social communities came into contact with each other, but the social distance between the metropolitan rulers who remained a tiny demographic minority and the majority indigenous society was clearly marked. In such instances, the metropolitan society was a mere bridgehead of the metropolis and had no local ‘Creole’ identity. The settler colonies, in contrast, were characterized by a much larger and more socially mixed metropolitan-affiliated population and in such cases the colonist and indigenous societies were more closely intermeshed. In such instances, the settlers became an independent third factor that intervened between the imperial mother-country and the colonized native peoples. These settler communities were typically engaged throughout their history in a struggle on at least two fronts. On the one side, they were determined to maintain their control over the natives of the occupied territories who constituted the most immediate threat to their privileged position within the colony; on the other, they also struggled, sometimes violently, against the metropolitan mother-state as well whenever the latter's trade monopolies threatened their interests or whenever metropolitan policies seemed to favour the natives in ways perceived to jeopardize settler control. On the political plane, the relative weight of the settlers and their capacity to act independently differed widely from one situation to the next, but their structural positions are nonetheless often very similar.%4 Because their relationship and manner of integration into the colonial society was different, settlers defended their position, which was based on

immobile property, much more aggressively than administrators did. For this reason, the emancipation of settlement colonies was generally a much more violent and protracted affair than that of their administrative counterparts. For the imperial metropole, the democratization and political

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

37

independence of a colony did not always threaten its economic control over the region. From the point of view of minority settler communities, however, the same processes would inevitably have much more immediate and drastic consequences since they spelled an end to their monopoly of power within the colonial state. In Irish nationalist discourse it is regularly asserted that Ireland was the first British colony to win independence, thus paving the way that India and the other colonies would later follow. The claim has some validity: in his theoretical survey of colonialism, Jiirgen Osterhammel states, for example, that the ‘endorsement of “home rule” in Ireland in 1922 may be regarded as the first major act of colonial liberation of the twentieth century’.® Nevertheless, this emphasis on Irish precedence in the twentieth century seems in some ways to occlude or to misconstrue the real interest of the Irish situation in comparative colonial terms. After all, the twentieth-

century decolonizations were only the third phase in the wider territorial dismantling of the European overseas empires. The first wave of decolonization saw the national emancipation of most of the European possessions in the New World between 1776 and 1825.°* The second wave began in Canada in 1839 and inaugurated the slow transformation of the pure settlement colonies in places such as Australia and New Zealand into de facto autonomous states, generally known as ‘dominions’ within the British Empire after 1907.°’ Since Ireland was colonized during the first phase of European expansion, it might be argued that the real question that calls for explanation is why the development of colonial-settler nationalism in Ireland did not follow the same trajectory as it did in the American colonies that had their genesis in the same historical epoch. Had this occurred, then Ireland might have been expected to win its independence in the first wave of decolonization when the American colonies all the way from the United States to Argentina, as well as Saint Dominigue in the West Indies, won theirs. The Creole nationalisms pioneered in the American colonies constitute, as Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities, the first successful anti-colonial independence movements.® As is well known, an Irish Protestant nationalism did indeed emerge

precisely in this period, more or less ‘on cue’ therefore with that in the other settler colonies that had their genesis in the same historical moment. Nevertheless, unlike the movements in the Americas, Irish colonial-settler

nationalism did not succeed in winning independence and, after the 1798 rebellion, Ireland’s semi-autonomous colonial parliament was abolished and the country integrated into the British state.” Why did Irish Protestant nationalism falter when its American colonial counterparts prospered? This is not the place to tackle this issue in any depth but some speculative comments might be entertained. One major difference between Ireland and the South American colonies at this time was that Spain was overrun by Napoleon’s armies and cut off

38 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

from naval access to its colonies by British blockade. While Spain could thus offer little support to its colonial loyalists, Britain suffered no such fate and emerged after the Napoleonic Wars as the supreme European power.” Spain’s weakness in this period must be seen, however, as part of a much longer process of economic decline, whereby it ceded its place as a centre of colonial trade to more successful capitalist imperial rivals. Nevertheless, despite Spanish metropolitan weakness, some of the Hispanic American Creole struggles for independence were constrained by a fear of what would happen if the masses revolted, and in some instances the memory of recent insurrections from below acted as a considerable deterrent to the drive for autonomy. Creole attitudes were often indecisive and even after they had seized control from the royal governors in several South American capitals after Spain was occupied by Napoleon in 1808 many of the local élites continued to proclaim their loyalty to the Spanish throne. It was only when the restored Spanish monarchy in 1814 attempted to return to the status quo ante after a period in which the colonies had already enjoyed de facto autonomy that many Creoles finally opted for complete independence.* The mixture of Creole anxiety concerning the dangers of mass insurrection from below, on the one hand, and increasing self-assertiveness in the face of imperial crisis, on the other, has some suggestive parallels with Irish Protestant nationalism in the same period. The long eighteenth century between 1690 and 1829 is often considered the era of the Protestant nation in Ireland. During this period the Protestants of Ireland became a politically confident class that completely monopolized state power. Throughout the period between 1650 and 1778, however, the Protestant parliament in Dublin had fewer powers than most of the avowedly colonial assemblies in Britain’s North American colonies. The American struggle for independence, and its attendant rhetoric of ‘democracy’ and ‘representation’, exerted an enormous impact on Irish Protestant nationalism. Britain’s losses in the American war, moreover, made it uniquely vulnerable to Irish pressures at that moment. When the American colonies declared themselves independent, ‘patriot’ members of the Irish parliament, backed up by paramilitary militias, managed to have the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England adjusted and, as Thomas Bartlett observes, ‘succeeded in giving Ireland for the first time something that looked like an independent parliament’. The experiment, however, was short-lived. Mounting popular unrest culminated in the 1798 rebellion, which saw the emergence of a new and much more radical republican nationalism determined to sever the link with Britain and committed to establishing an Irish

republic that would extend civil and religious liberties to Irish Catholics. The threat posed by this rebellion and the dangers of French invasion induced Britain to reassert its control over Ireland. It also persuaded the Protestant nation to surrender the parliamentary independence it had long

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

39

defended rather than risk the loss of its political control over the country that full independence might entail. It might be argued, therefore, that if the intellectual stimulus to Irish Protestant nationalism in the late eighteenth century came from the independence struggles of the North American colonies, that nationalism was actually played out in social conditions that more closely resembled those in the South American colonies with their narrow ruling oligarchies and culturally distinct peasant masses. Like contemporary South American Creole nationalism, Irish Protestant nationalism was as its most assertive when domestic conditions were most tractable and the imperial centre weakest. But in both instances the demands for independence had to be weighed against the danger of mass insurrection from below. Given the decline of Spanish imperial power, South American Creole nationalisms ultimately opted, but not without vacillation, for political independence. Confronted by an economically and militarily stronger imperial centre closer to hand, as well as by the dangers posed by the threats of a Catholic majority and the new French-inspired republican creed, Irish Protestant nationalism took a different route and opted instead, but not without resis-

tance and vacillation either, for political integration into Britain. It is perhaps a telling sign of the times that it was Daniel O’Connell, the hero of the struggle for Catholic Emancipation in the early nineteenth century, who would come to wear the title ‘The Liberator’ originally invented for Simon Bolivar, the great architect of South American independence.™ As mentioned earlier, the fact that Ireland became part of the British

state after 1801 is the main reason why many Irish historians find it difficult to accept that Ireland can be regarded as a colony from this time onwards. It is true that its integration into the United Kingdom granted Ireland privileges enjoyed by no other colony. Ireland sent MPs to Westminster, something that neither the British white settler colonies nor the Asian and African colonies did. Irish migrants to the outposts of empire, or to former British colonies such as the United States, could also profit from what David Roediger has called in a ground-breaking study ‘the wages of whiteness’. They could, in other words, be integrated into the settler society labour forces or into the colonial bureaucracies in ways rarely open to nonEuropean peoples. But whereas the scale of Irish immigration into the US and several British colonies is regularly cited nowadays as evidence that Ireland effectively ‘behaved’ culturally as another European imperial centre even if it was not formally one, the whole impetus of Roediger’s work is actually quite different. For Roediger, Irish immigrants in America serve as a paradigmatic case for understanding ‘whiteness’ not as an always-already given biological or epidermal ‘reality’ or as automatic cultural kinship but as a socially constructed project. In The Wages of Whiteness, therefore, the ‘whitening’ of Irish immigrants is conceived as a compensatory ‘wage’ that worked to disrupt possible black Irish or Irish Chinese identifications in the

40

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

context of industrial exploitation, thereby pitting race against class alliances in ways that have haunted American working-class struggles ever since. From this perspective, the fact that the Irish in America would so often play an extremely reactionary role in that country’s race wars is adduced not as evidence that the Irish were culturally conditioned to behave the same as other imperialist Europeans from the same part of the world. Instead, the story of the Irish immigrants is adduced as key to the demonstration of the historically constructed nature of ‘whiteness’, as racialized Irish subjects of British colonial rule set out actively to pursue ‘whiteness’ as means to negotiate their way out of their subaltern structural position into mainstream American society. Though the historical upshot is the same — the Irish identified with white supremacy rather than with the non-European oppressed and exploited — there is a substantive distinction between an analytic which stresses an enthusiastic embrace of either ‘whiteness’ or imperialism on the basis of a pre-given European identity and one which stresses that it was precisely because they could not automatically assume such ‘whiteness’ in the US or in the empire that the Irish were so anxious to disclaim identifications with non-Europeans who also occupied subaltern positions in the social hierarchy.” Whatever the situation of the Irish abroad, the assumption that Ireland simply ceased to be a colony as a consequence of its constitutional integration into the United Kingdom runs up against some considerable difficulties — not least the catastrophic dimension to Irish historical development in the century subsequent to the Act of Union. While Irish economic historians seem largely to agree that there was an extended period of modest economic development and prosperity between 1660 and 1815, that economic advance seems to stall in the nineteenth century. It has been argued that in 1700 Ireland seemed set for a brighter economic future than Scotland, the other country within the United Kingdom that stood in roughly the same historical relationship to England.*” Yet by the 1840s, when Scotland was well on the way to becoming an advanced industrial economy, Ireland was still overwhelmingly agricultural and locked in the grip of an extended economic crisis which would culminate in the Great Famine, the last great subsistence crisis in Western Europe. The consequences of that Famine were both immediate and long-term. In the short-term, somewhere in the region of a million people died and a million and a half emigrated. In the course of a single decade between 1841 and 1851 the country’s population was reduced by 20 per cent. Over the longer term, a sustained stream of emigration saw more than 4 million people

emigrate permanently between the Famine and the First World War. Many European countries experienced high emigration rates in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but its size and duration distinguished the Irish outflow. So great was the volume that Ireland in this period can reasonably be described, in Jim Mac Laughlin’s words, as a ‘global emigrant

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

41

nursery’ which supplied several of the core industrial centres of the world economy, especially Great Britain and North America, with cheap labour.” The volume of emigration served ultimately to reorganize the whole structure of Irish class relations: it decimated the rural labouring class and impeded the growth of an urban working class. For the most part, with the exception of Belfast, the Irish industrial proletariat in this period was concentrated in urban centres outside rather than within Ireland — in places such as England, Scotland, the US, and Australia. In these countries Irish

workers were to become key constituencies in the emergent labour parties, but in nineteenth-century Ireland itself it was the rural peasantry that remained the revolutionary motor of social change. The consequences of the Famine, however, were not simply economic. Demographic disaster was compounded by cultural trauma as English quickly displaced Gaelic as the spoken language of the mass of the population. This in turn lent impetus to a cultural nationalism determined to salvage what it could from the shipwreck of the old civilization and to reverse what was conceived, no

doubt often simplistically, to be a deliberate state-supported policy of Anglicization and cultural assimilation. One does not have to interpret the period in apocalyptic terms to conclude that many of the long-term social patterns conditioned in one way or another by the Famine would continue to reverberate across most of the twentieth century in Ireland. It was this catastrophic dimension to nineteenth-century Irish history that persuaded many Irish nationalists, at home and abroad, that whatever

its constitutional position, Ireland’s relationship to England continued to be a colonial one. Economic stagnation, famine and flight, industrial under-

development, the superimposition of English on Gaelic culture, the spread of new pseudo-scientific racialist doctrines to legitimate empire, and notions of British superiority all lent force to that conception. So, too, did the fact that despite the constitutional merger, a whole series of Irish institutions — the police and legal systems, Dublin Castle and the Lord Lieutenancy, systems of education and local government — either had no counterpart in the rest of the United Kingdom or operated in ways quite different to their British counterparts. Irish nationalists were not alone in drawing conclusions about the colonial nature of the relationship. On return from a visit to Ireland, Friedrich Engels observed in a letter to Karl

Marx in 1856 that: ‘Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony and as one which because of its proximity is still governed exactly in the old way, and here one can already observe that the so-called liberty of English citizens is based on the oppression of the colonies.’ Ireland and India would become the two key sites for Marx’s speculations on the nature of colonial capitalist development, and it was his conception of conditions in Ireland that prompted his strongest comments about the regressive (rather than progressive) consequences of colonial rule.” By the second half of the century, moreover, the Indian nationalist movement was taking a keen

42 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

interest in Irish struggles, and in 1886 complaints were made to Lord Kimberley, the Secretary of State for India, that ‘all the arts of Irish agitation had come to India’.” It is interesting to note that the thesis that Ireland’s geographical proximity to or constitutional merger with the United Kingdom means that its condition was thereby of a completely different order to that of Britain’s distant overseas colonies runs directly contrary to Engels’s comments of 1856 cited above. For Engels, we recall, ‘Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony and as one which because of its proximity is still governed exactly in the old way’. Following this lead, it is at least arguable that the Union far from ending Ireland’s colonial status served actually to make the Irish situation, politically at least, considerably more difficult than that of other colonies. The constitutional merger did not undo either the deep ethno-religious cleavages or the Protestant colonial nationalism that matured over the centuries that preceded the Union. Instead, the latter

might be argued to have mutated in different directions. In one line of development an erstwhile colonial-settler nationalism with tentative separatist inclinations was now transmuted into a rearguard imperialist nationalism whose central dogma was that any concession to Irish demands for autonomy (however modest) was bad for Ireland, Britain and the empire. There was another line of Whiggish liberal unionism which collapsed as a political force only when the extension of mass suffrage and the rise of Irish nationalism undermined the paternalist structures of social control on which it depended. A third line would see many Irish Protestants from Thomas Davis to John Mitchel to Isaac Butt to Charles Stewart

Parnell to Douglas Hyde and W.B. Yeats assume decisive roles as political leaders and cultural intellectuals in the development of several different modalities of Irish nationalism. As the nineteenth century proceeded, however, Irish nationalism was now opposed by powerful forces in Westminster because concessions might create a domino effect throughout the empire, especially in India, and because they might stimulate the break-up of Britain itself. Nevertheless, as time progressed, the British position in Ireland became increasingly untenable. Because it was formally part of the British state, Ireland could not consistently be denied British liberal and democratic rights, despite the fact that these undermined the privileged position of the Protestant AngloIrish élite on whose support the Union largely depended. In the north-east of Ulster, the capacity to maintain the Union was strongest since this was the only region where the Protestant population was a demographic majority and where there was a broad-based Protestant working class. In this region alone Protestant-Unionist power had a wide populist base and did not simply rest on the monopoly of landed estates or control of command positions within the state apparatus. The uneven development of capitalism had also opened up economic cleavages between the more

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

43

industrialized north-east and the rest of the island in ways that had generated compelling economic incentives there to maintain the link with Britain. The intricate clash of domestic and metropolitan interests ultimately created a triangular conflict — one which simply cannot be accommodated within a reading of history as a bilateral conflict between English imperialism and Irish nationalism still sponsored by some Irish postcolonial critics — that catapulted the whole of Ireland into military conflict. Only in the later case of Algeria perhaps — where questions of the integrity of the French Republic and settler resistance to both anti-colonial nationalism and metropolitan betrayal were intertwined in an analogous concatenation — did another colonial independence movement stimulate such severe political convulsion in the domestic politics of a metropolitan European imperial state.” India was undoubtedly a more important imperial possession than Ireland and its loss had more far-reaching consequences for Britain’s place in the world. Yet when India was finally ‘released’ by Britain in 1948 there were no army revolts such as the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland and no internal splits within any of the major British political parties such as the one that sundered the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule. The fact that Irish independence generated such sharp crisis within the British state might be construed as evidence that the relationship between the two countries was simply more intimate than that between Britain and its more distant colonies. But the emphasis on ‘intimacy’ serves only to displace the more crucial structural point. For those committed to empire, to the territorial centralization of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and to the class interests vested in the House of Lords which twice exercised its veto over Home Rule, the democratization of Irish society was consistently conceived as a threat. That the democratization of Irish society and the preservation of empire, Union and the interests of Irish Ascendancy and British aristocracy were construed to be so at odds is ultimately the strongest evidence that the structural relationship between the two countries was indeed a colonial one.

IV The development of postcolonial studies in Ireland potentially represents a considerable challenge to Irish Studies as currently constituted. Too often reduced on all sides to a drama between nationalism and its critics, its real

novelty, I have tried to suggest, may well lie elsewhere. To determine how Irish social and cultural development was mediated by colonial capitalism is the goal of postcolonial studies. From its inception, the colonial process was never simply a matter of the subjugation of this or that territory. It was, rather, an international process through which different parts of the globe were differentially integrated into an emergent world capitalist system. Once this premise is accepted, then it follows that the determination of a

44

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

specific national configuration must be conceived as a product of the global: to borrow Neil Larsen’s phrase, the part must be thought through the whole and not vice versa.” In contrast to a nationalist conception of Irish Studies, obsessed with the discovery of chimerical ‘national’ identi-

ties, 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 conjunctural global analysis. From such perspective, the national arena still remains a crucial site for social struggle, but a true understanding of those struggles can only be grasped contextually within a wider global frame. For the most part, debates about whether Ireland was or was

not a

colony have rarely got beyond questions of geo-cultural location and constitutional statute. These are important, but not the decisive issues. If colonialism is conceived as a historical process in which societies of various kinds and locations are differentially integrated into a world capitalist system, then it is on the basis of the comparative conjunctural analysis of such processes that debate must ultimately be developed. Cultural analysis has an important role here since this is the decisive area where social conflicts are experienced and evaluated, but it is the contradictions of the

wider capitalist system that shape those conflicts, whether cultural, political or economic. While I have suggested that typologies of colonialism can serve as a useful heuristic device for the analysis of colonial situations, any taxonomy that loses sight of the fact that colonialism is a historically changing process will also be reductive. As Francis Mulhern has remarked, Ireland’s colonial history, by virtue of its sheer duration, can read like a history of colonialism itself.”* In the late medieval period the country was, like Scotland and Wales, one of the ragged frontiers of English state expansion and contraction; in the early modern period, a commercial settlement plantation was developed in the same westward thrust as European expansion into the New World. At the moment of the southern state’s independence it was constitutionally configured as a white ‘dominion’ like Canada,

South Africa, or New

Zealand.

But this status was

conferred

against the backdrop of a triangulated military conflict between nationalist, unionist and metropolitan British forces — in some ways redolent of the situation involving a similar tangle of forces that later emerged in Algeria — that split the island into two states. The situation in contemporary Northern Ireland is sometimes compared to that of the Basque region in Spain or to ethnic conflicts in Central Europe. But Northern republicans have also construed and evaluated their situation in terms of African-American civil rights campaigns and late anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and Palestine.”* The recent ‘peace process’ is also repeatedly compared to roughly concurrent processes in the Middle East and South Africa. Even the term ‘the Celtic Tiger’, adopted to describe the current economic boom in the Irish Republic, implicitly associates that phenomenon with the small

“Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies

45

handful of East Asian ‘tiger’ economies that have emerged from a colonial history to attain levels of economic development comparable to those in ‘the West’. While the term infers, on the one hand, that Ireland has now

attained levels of economic development comparable to those in the rest of Western Europe, it also infers, on the other hand, that the historical

trajectory of that development finds its closest parallels with other nonEuropean histories. 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 that are not simply random but part of the internally contradictory structure of the modern capitalist world system.

After History Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies

DAVID LLOYD

‘The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.’ Walter Benjamin

Reflecting on Irish culture and history, I find myself returning again and again to the insights Walter Benjamin gathered in his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.1 As with so much in the theses, the reflection quoted above is for us absolutely contemporary: it is as relevant to our own shock at the ‘recurrence of tribalism’ or at the persistence of apparently outmoded cultural formations as it was to the disdain of Benjamin’s ‘historicist’ prophets of progress for the foregone movements of the past. This essay is concerned with the self-evidence of such amazement and with the forms of historical narrative that make that amazement seem so commonsensical. Current historicism continues to adhere to the notion of progress or development and of civility at the expense of the alternative histories and cultures of which the story might be told. Indeed, it is precisely what Benjamin defines as historicism that not only relegates alternatives, past and present, to the condition of irrationality and backwardness, but produces them as such. Atavism is to civility as backwardness to modernity, the necessary antithesis that defines by negation the proper forms and formations of civilized society. Historicism reduces the cultural forms and practices of past and subordinated people to mere reaction, folklore, or mythology, and yet depends on them for its own articulation and for its own myth of a finally triumphant progress. Within its frames, pasts that envisaged different futures are detached from any life to come, are fixed in their extinction, furnishing only debris — remnants, whose excavation proves only the inevitability of their passing, their fundamental incapacity to blend into the onward flow of history. On occasion, though, they trouble history’s stream with interference, eddies, and counterflows.

46

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

47

The ‘non-modern’ is the name that I would use for such a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but nonetheless in a dynamic relation to it. It is not the traditional nor even, strictly speaking, the subaltern. But it is a space where the alternative survives, in the fullest sense of that word, not as a preserve, or an outside, but as an incommensurable set of cultural formations historically occluded from, yet never actually disengaged with, modernity.” The lines of thought that I am following here emerge in large part from a longstanding concern with colonialism and in particular with its effects on colonized cultures. Such work inevitably demands a comparative approach drawing from the immense body of work — economic, historical and sociological as well as cultural — that is and continually becomes available. Colonialism is an integrated phenomenon that operates across all the fields that in the West would constitute the public and the private, civil society and the state. No single event that occurs or institutional practice that is implemented is without effects across all the domains of colonized societies, not least because the aim of colonialism is the utter transformation of the colonized culture: the eradication of its structures of feeling, the subjection of the population to the colonizers’ notions of legality and citizenship, and the displacement of indigenous forms of religion, labour, patriarchy, and rule by those of colonial modernity. Again, colonialism is also a rationalizing endeavour that leads to the frequent replication of similar institutions and practices across the widely spread and diverse colonies of each imperial power. Not least, colonialism produces powerful and fantastic ideologies that are no less fantastic for being woven and sustained through its quasi-scientific studies in racial typology, history, and the economics of development. Nowhere more than under colonialism is the deep unreason of reason more compellingly in evidence. Yet this representation of colonialism is merely a schematization of the norms and ends of a global process. Comparative work on colonialism’s processes and effects draws out not only the ubiquity and replication of forms of colonial rule but also the remarkably diverse ways its rationalizing drive is deflected by the particularities of each colonized culture. 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. That relational moment within differential analysis is crucial, for the actual formation of colonial societies takes place precisely within the uneven encounter between a globalizing project founded in and still legitimated by Europe’s delusion of universality and the multiple and different social imaginaries at work in colonized cultures. Without such a differential approach, the analysis of colonialism tends toward either bad abstraction or a positivistic catalogue of singularities and leads to a conceptual inanity within which the import of the singularity is permanently evanescent.

48

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Differential analysis, however, 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. Ireland’s cultural and historical status as a colony continues to be contested, and not surprisingly, given the political stakes involved. To assert that Ireland is and has been a colony is certainly to deny the legitimacy of British government in Northern Ireland and no less to question the state and governmental structures that have been institutionalized in the postcolonial Free State and Republic of Ireland. It is to demand that each state’s claim to the monopoly of violence within their territories be rigorously thought through in light of their own very arbitrary and violent foundations. Such questioning does not, as many will be quick to charge, confer automatic legitimacy on any armed insurrectionary movement, movements all too simplistically and tendentiously termed ‘terrorist’. What it does demand, however, is that the phenomenon of violence must be understood

as constitutive of social relations within the colonial capitalist state, whose practices institutionalize a violence which, though cumulative, daily, and generally unspectacular, is normalized precisely by its long duration and chronic nature. Unlike insurgency, which is usually represented as sporadic and of the nature of a temporary ‘crisis’, the violence of the state operates through its institutions continuously, producing the material effects of poverty, unemployment, sickness, depopulation, and emigration. That these phenomena are generally not seen as state-mediated effects of capitalist and colonial violence forces us to recognize that the violence of the state belongs in its capacity to control representation, both political and cultural, thus regulating to a remarkable

extent the ‘common

sense’, in

Antonio Gramsci’s usage, of any given society. The struggle over representation in every field of social practice accordingly becomes a crucial terrain. In the essays collected here, the problem of representation and occlusion is a constant preoccupation. The question of the past in Ireland informs the emergence of future possibilities, possibilities that are continually narrowed and occluded by a historical consciousness that seeks to write the complexities of Irish history into a narrative of modernization and the emergence of a well-regulated civil society. That narrative, which has been so amplified in recent years by an uncritical and literally state-censored media, celebrates the passage from Ireland’s domination by British colonial capital to its domination by and participation in the neo-colonial circuits of global capitalism. Those who have raised fundamental questions about the continuing consequences of

Ireland’s colonial past have largely been marginalized in public debate, just as those who have raised legitimate questions as to the repression of fundamental issues in the recent peace process have not only been marginalized and abused but in some cases, like that of the family of Bernadette

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

49

Devlin McAliskey, directly subjected to harassment and inhumane treatment by the state. The insistent disavowal of critical questions as to the alternative possibilities has enforced the occlusion not only of a vast historical repertoire of social imaginaries but also of critical analysis of the present. What would it mean not to commit Ireland’s future to continuing capitalist colonialism, to the status of construction zone for the electronics

industry with its so far concealed but no less disastrous effects on the environment and its labour force? What would it mean not to disdain but to take seriously the still-persistent recalcitrance of Irish cultural practices to the rhythms and social practices of capitalist modernity? What will it cost to resist not just British occupation and domination, but absorption into the immense injustice of transnational capital and the destructive logic of international military alliances? What does it in practice mean to project what Gerry Adams has called a non-sexist, non-sectarian, and democratic

Republic? Hegemonic resistance to addressing these questions is itself a symptom of the unfinished project of decolonization in Ireland and entirely fulfils Frantz Fanon’s angry prognosis in The Wretched of the Earth that the future of the bourgeois post-colony was to become the conduit of neocolonial capital. The questions raised by Ireland’s colonial status are pressing and intellectually profound. It is, therefore, unfortunate that so much of the objection to that claim has been intellectually vacuous, deploying ad

hominem vitriol and caricature rather than reasoned argument. The irrationality of such polemic bespeaks its embeddedness in anxiety and disavowal rather than rationally articulable positions, and more often than not it betrays its own astounding ignorance of the postcolonial work it reviles in its cartoons. There are, however, a number of effective arguments in circulation that seek to problematize or refute the claim that Ireland has undergone the historical experience of colonialism and may therefore be considered, at least in part, as a postcolonial nation. These essays in general insist that Ireland has never in fact had the status of a colony, or that comparison with other countries considered postcolonial reveals only Ireland’s vastly more developed social and economic condition. The force of these arguments obliges postcolonial critics to consider more thoroughly the legitimacy of our own claim that Ireland has been and continues to be colonized in distinct and materially significant ways. I want to address two essays that have had relatively wide circulation and succinctly address the issues involved, but not in order to attempt a global refutation of these and related arguments, which would only extend a potentially endless round of empirical claims and counter-claims. It seems more valuable to focus and clarify the methodological or theoretical differences that underlie our differ-

ent interpretations of Irish history. The first of these is Thomas Bartlett's useful historical essay, ‘”“What Ish My Nation?”: Themes in Irish History, 1550-1850’;? the second Liam Kennedy’s more recent economically based

50 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

essay, ‘Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions’.* I choose these two essays not because they are the only arguments of their kind, but because each, historical and economic respectively, efficiently condenses the principal arguments made everywhere to refute Ireland’s colonial history. Though they do overlap at times in their concerns, I will engage each in turn to draw out distinctly a theoretical critique of their disciplinary terms and deployment of concepts, a critique directed foremost at the limitations of empirical method. The historical arguments against considering Ireland as a colony have yet to be better summarized than by Bartlett in his essay. Though it must be said from the outset that he is not solely concerned with the colonial question and that his brief does not include the post-Famine era in which the dissemination of nationalism is most extensive, his essay well exemplifies the kind of historical arguments that need to be adduced in order to call colonialist claims into question. Bartlett’s arguments are several. In the first place, though he acknowledges that during the late seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries ‘Ireland bears most,

if not all, of the hallmarks

of a

colony’,® he notes the fact that ‘few Irishmen — Protestant or Catholic — accepted that Ireland was a colony with the attendant attributes of inferiority and subordination’.® The arguments made were generally for its rightful status as a separate kingdom. Second, ‘Unlike other colonies, Ireland was not located in some distant continent, nor did she supply the mother country with otherwise unobtainable raw materials or exotic products.” Third, given the massive emigration and transportation of Irish people to other colonies, such as Australia, Canada, Britain [sic] or the USA [sic],

‘then surely Ireland, so far from being a colony, should be considered a mother country in her own right?’.8 These arguments are striking and embed a number of assumptions that are worth questioning. Of the third question, it would be enough to say that in some sense, then, South Asian communities in Britain, Singapore, and the United States, reconstitute India and Pakistan as ‘mother’ coun-

tries for their new states of citizenship — or that Korean immigrants make Korea an American mother-country. In other words, it is well known that the effects of foreign military and commercial interventions, from imperial commercial and territorial wars to extensive colonization, displace large segments of indigenous populations who are forced to migrate in order merely to survive. Most often, and especially when coerced, that emigration must be to locations either in the imperial nation or within its territories. More is obscured here, however, than aspects of comparative global history, the ignoring of which leads to an inaccurate ‘Irish exceptionalism’. The comment could not have been made without the apparent whiteness of the Irish emigrants, which seems to naturalize their later and complex identification with Ireland as a white European point of origin, and to obscure the massive differences in the meaning of emigration by

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

51

positing destination rather than point of origin as the significant factor. That some Irish were in their turn to become colonists elsewhere, or to be instruments of colonial rule, like the Senegalese troops or the Ghurkas, for example, says nothing as to the condition of the Ireland they were mostly obliged to leave. There, to a very large degree, they were not in fact considered to be racially identical with ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or other Europeans. On the contrary, their capacity to become colonizers involved, as many have now shown, a considerable labour of redefinition and of racist self-differentiation from the non-white populations of their new nations. The apparent whiteness of the Irish is accordingly a frequent casual objection to the idea of Ireland being a ‘Third World’ or postcolonial nation. In fact, the doubt usually reveals to a considerable degree the anxiety ‘white’ subjects tend to feel in being identified with peoples of colour. What slips in here at the foundation of the argument is both the problematic history of racialization and a prior assumption, masked by the racial issue, as to the incomparability of the Irish experience to non-European ones. We will return to emigration more extensively in the context of Kennedy’s essay, pausing here for some more general reflections on the concept of colonialism that Bartlett’s work suggests. What occurs in his essay is a common enough confusion of the distinct categories of colonization and of the subject positions within which colonialism is apprehended and, over time, conceptualized. There are distinct differences between ‘colonization’ as exemplified in the colonial US or Australia and ‘colonization’ as a term used to describe the effects of French or British imperialism and governance in North and West Africa. The ‘colonial’ period in US history refers in the first place not to the colonization of the land and the subordination, displacement, and extermination of its indigenous peoples, but to the relations between a white settler population and England as the dominant and regulative power. ‘Independence’ then refers not to the process of decolonization, as understood by indigenous populations, but to the establishment of an autonomous but no less European and imperial state form by the settlers. What inaugurates for the settlers, in anachronistic terms, a postcolonial era, inaugurates for the

indigenous and slave populations a period of intensified and increasingly extended colonization. This example embodies two theoretical points: one is that the designations ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ involve not mere empirical judgement but the consideration of historical human subjects and their social relations as subjects and objects; the other is that the collapsing of the term ‘colony’ into a single set of characteristics ignores the gradual shifts and accumulations of meaning that mark it as a crucially temporal rather than an ideal concept. Colonialism is, if |may put it so, always a forged concept, one whose significance is subject to iterations and reiterations that are predicated on materially embedded political and cultural struggles. It is accordingly more

52

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

or less immaterial whether the ‘Irish lawyers and politicians’ of the eighteenth century argued for the status of a separate kingdom for Ireland or conceived of the country as a colony in the American sense. That is a historiographical move which at once privileges the perspective of élite classes and assumes already the historical development of a concept whose full range of meanings emerged gradually through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. I would propose, instead, that we understand the designation ‘colonial’ to be, in Marx’s sense, a ‘rational abstraction’ rather than a

transhistorical concept.? That is, it is a concept that can only function, like ‘labour’ and ‘exchange’, a posteriori, at the point when the phenomena it designates and unifies have emerged in their full material actuality. Thus, just as we can call barter a form of exchange only when the abstraction of ‘exchange’ as a distinct economic process has been made possible, so, for example, we can refer to India as a British colony only at the point where British governmental administration rather than East India Company mercantile practices dominate and the process of administrative rationalization occurs by way of metropolitan decisions and concerns: retrospectively, we can see the work of the East India Company as a phase of colonialism, though the word itself may not have been used. But the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of the British state as governing power is definitive. Indeed, the function of the modern state is virtually everywhere critical to the definition of colonialism. This is not, however, to invoke the ‘revisionist’ logic for which British

rule involved the gradual extension of modern institutions into a backward society, but rather to borrow Ian Lustick’s valuable term, the ‘failure of

state-building’.1” Like Algeria, which Lustick also discusses, Ireland becomes a ‘colony’ rather than a region of the state exactly where the extension of the British state finds its limit in the deep recalcitrance of Irish economic and cultural practices to ‘modern’ institutions and subject formation. Through the nineteenth century, this recalcitrance is increasingly understood as embedded in the Irish ‘national character’ or in racial difference, thus influencing the emergence of state policies that combine deliberate depopulation of the country with projects that entail the radical transformation of Irish subjectivities economically and culturally." In turn, the emergence of nationalism in Ireland is no less shaped by racialized distinctions that come to underlie the cultural and social projects of many nationalists. The intrinsic resistance of Irish ways to modernization thus inflects both the state’s incorporative projects and nationalisms alternative conceptions of Ireland’s future. An extended interface between modern and non-modern social formations arises that can best be understood in relation to other colonial sites. What I imply here about the texture of Irish and, by extension, colonial histories is that within them the characteristically distinct spheres of modernity — economic, political, legal, cultural, et cetera — prove impossible

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

53

to maintain. Furnishing in some cases an opportunity for nationalist mobilization, this lability of social space presents a profound problem for the colonial as for the postcolonial state. It is no less a problem for intellectual disciplines which define their distinct objects in relation to modern institutions and spheres of practice - economics, political science, sociology, art, et cetera. As we shall see further in this book, the disciplines depend on the stable location of a modern subject and develop their assumptions, whether political, economic, social, or aesthetic, entirely within the terms

of modernizing rationalities. The final aim of this rationality is the formation of a modern civil society alongside a developed economy; further entailed in it is the generally implicit assumption of an ethical, disinterested subject, disinterested by virtue of a prior formation and objective or truthful through submission to disciplinary norms. Hence the all-too-often unbalanced character of attacks on postcolonialism and cultural studies, or

on the even more nebulous spectre of ‘postmodernism’. In each case, though in quite different ways, these inter- or post-disciplinary intellectual tendencies challenge at once the integrity of the disciplines and the selfevidence of civil society, and in doing so necessarily displace their ethical assumptions. The moral criticism of postcolonial work clearly precedes any intellectual engagement with it, since the ethical status of the disciplinary subject is a priori at stake. Hence it is possible for an economist like Liam Kennedy to infer ‘postcolonial pretensions’ with scarcely a single citation of any scholar or work and without extended engagement with any argument. The positivistic method that substantiates his own position is entirely in keeping with this a priori ethical judgement: Kennedy cannot attend to modes of argument that would question the objective validity of facts in abstraction.” For the sake of brevity, I will focus on one exemplary set of statistics that Kennedy offers. The function of such tables is to demonstrate the irrefutability of facts and the validity of empirical comparative method: you cannot disagree with facts. The structuring of the data in a table simultaneously demands, as an unexamined methodological procedure, a remarkable degree of isolation and abstraction. Elements of a given social economy are excised from their differential relationship to historical processes and related formations and placed in comparison with equally isolated elements in a table that seeks to display a set of significant comparisons. What it actually displays is a set of partial relations organized according to a hierarchical axis that embodies unexamined values. Facts become entirely abstracted from the human agencies and acts that have constituted them in relation to a larger matrix of interdeterminant conditions. Kennedy’s Table I is a

notable instance of the effects of such abstraction:

54 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Economic structure: share of the labour force (%) in agriculture and industry around the time of independence COUNTRY

AGRICULTURE

INDUSTRY

India (1950)

72

10

Ghana (1960)

68

10

Algeria (1954)

88

S

Ireland (1911)

43

Do

I cite a few of the statistics from a somewhat longer table, but this is suffi-

cient for the argument I wish to make here, since the point is to examine the effects of a method rather than the accumulation of statistics. Kennedy’s point is quite clear: statistics on the economic structures of ‘self-evidently’ Third World countries when compared to Ireland demonstrate that ‘there is a marked discontinuity between the Irish and these other experiences’. The proper measure for Ireland is rather ‘the contemporary continental European countries’. Ireland cannot therefore be usefully regarded as a postcolonial nation. Comparisons with other European countries were, indeed, frequently made around the time from which these Irish statistics date and throughout the nationalist tradition from Davis through Pearse and Connolly. Primarily, though, the references were made in order to show the discrepancy between Ireland and similarly sized European countries, among which Belgium was most frequently cited. The point was the anomaly of Ireland’s underdevelopment in relation to other small European nations and this fact was attributed usually to British rule. Ireland had, indeed, been systemically underdeveloped as a subordinate entity under British imperial capitalism, in much the sense that Andre Gunder Frank and other Latin American theorists have developed. That underdevelopment took place not so much by laissez-faire or mercantile policies of extraction but by way of deep state-driven policies of social and cultural transformation that had drastic consequences for the population. The formation of modern Ireland occurred through the exercise of constant coercion and violence that nonetheless never achieved the integration and homogenization of Ireland that would have extinguished nationalist aspirations. The conditions of (under)development themselves produced Ireland’s colonial relation to Britain. The economic underdevelopment of Ireland took place through its role as supplier of agricultural products, processed and unprocessed, to a largely industrialized and militaristic Britain. The cycles of crisis in Irish agriculture and agriculture-based industries are closely linked throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the ebb and flow of British industrialization and military ventures throughout the empire, the postNapoleonic crisis after 1815 being an early and spectacular instance. Only

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

55

the north-east escaped this pattern to some extent, being notably the only part of Ireland to undergo vigorous industrialization. Pace Kennedy, who thinks it ‘an irrelevance’® that location is extremely significant to the terms of any colonial analysis: this was the region of Ireland in which the impact of settler colonialism had been most intense and which later maintained, as

James Connolly and others frequently observed, its capitalist social relations through the discriminatory and quasi-racialized deployment of settler—native antagonism. The specific development of an industrial proletariat in northeast Ireland was largely predicated on colonial social relations and the systematic exclusion and underdevelopment of the recalcitrant native population on grounds of culture, ethnicity, and religion. In other regions,

industry relied principally on agricultural production, which was steadily subjected to capitalist rationalization throughout the nineteenth century with an ever-increasing emphasis on grazing and on cash-crops, such as barley and hops for the brewing and distilling industries. The registration of many of these industries — as, for instance, Guinness — in England is consistent with a long-lasting pattern of net capital outflow from Ireland, where relatively low levels of investment are returned with an inversely proportionate measure of capital extraction. This pattern has continued up to the present and shows no immediate prospect of amelioration.” The point then is not that Ireland is or is not directly comparable to other ‘third world countries’ on merely empirical/statistical bases, such positivist assumptions are neither required nor predicted by postcolonial methods. What is at stake is the process by which facts are related and the geographic, economic and political conditions and the social contradictions

out of which they emerged. Structurally the relations between Ghana, India, and Ireland within the British Empire are not entirely different despite the apparent variation in relative labour statistics. Each colony emerged in relation to the extraction of resources and shows marked differentiation between urban and rural locations: the urban and usually coastal centres become entrepéts for colonial trade and processing industries, while the ruralized hinterlands become locations of raw materials or of artisanal goods whose specific value depends on their differentiation from mass-produced commodities. Each colony in turn becomes the market for finished goods that are imported from Britain. Beyond these general structural correspondences, however, the use of comparison gives way to the detailed and differential analysis that grounds the moment of abstraction once more in the complex and specific relations of geography, demography, history, racialization, culture, et cetera. One might say that this is precisely what differentiates the study of colonialism from the study of imperialism, which tended to emphasize the macro-economic flows of trade and industrial and financial capital rather than the specificities and dynamics of

particular colonies.’* In order to grasp the particularity of Ireland’s or of any other country’s experience within the larger economies of colonialism,

56

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

economic or other data need to be posed in relation to the specific forms of rule or modes of cultural differentiation and so forth that have determined the actual texture of the society. One major demographic, cultural, and economic phenomenon that Kennedy’s selection of statistics throughout omits to include is emigration, a phenomenon that, where reincorporated into Irish figures, profoundly alters the interpretation of empirical evidence. Large scale emigration has been a constant of Irish culture since at least the time of the Famine to the extent that the population of Ireland has remained virtually stable for 150 years. Emigration has had a disproportionate effect on the rural labouring classes, their decimation having become a matter of policy in British administrative circles and among the landlords from the Famine on. But it has also held back the growth of an Irish working class and the formation of specifically Irish forms of class political struggle; it has contributed to the official conservatism of Irish culture and religion by permitting the continuing hegemony of large farmers and petty capitalists through to the late 1960s; it acts as a kind of numbed-out

cultural trauma and emblem

of

economic hopelessness. At the same time, it has performed great service to the state as a social safety valve and as a means to mask the otherwise potentially devastating consequences of our neo-colonial status within the international and transnational moments of the capitalist world system. We can re-examine Kennedy’s statistics in the light shed upon them by the invocation of emigration as a major and anomalous feature of Ireland’s colonial experience. Unlike most other colonial and postcolonial locations, emigration has been for us a programmatic instrument of colonial rule and policing, and remained the enabling condition of postcolonial economic development for both de Valera’s isolationist Free State and the later, modernizing states, North and South of the border. To have achieved proportional effects in India, something like 400 million people would have had to have’emigrated from the subcontinent since, say, the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The internal and global displacement of populations, like periodic genocide, has been a common experience of virtually all colonized peoples, but probably the only proportional analogue to the impact of emigration on Ireland would be the effects of the slave trade on West Africa at an earlier moment in capitalist modernity. This is not to assert direct comparison, but to mark emigration as the distinctive form of disciplining that differentiates the Irish colonial experience from most others. The degree to which, even, if not especially, within colonial studies, this

factor has been passed over and disconnected from other aspects of Ireland’s internal history is a striking index of how much we take emigration for granted. If, for example, we consider the rates of emigration in the decades preceding 1911, the year from which Kennedy’s statistics are drawn, we grasp a quite different set of relations than his analysis would suggest.”

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

57

Emigration from Ireland, 1871-1910 DECADE 1871-1880

NUMBER OF RECORDED EMIGRANTS 542,703

1881-1890

734,475

1891-1900

461,282

1901-1910

485,461

In the four decades preceding the eve of independence, then, close on two and a quarter million Irish people had emigrated, skewing irrevocably the proportion of agricultural to industrial workers on which Kennedy relies for his sanguine view of the degree of economic development in Ireland at the time. For the most part, they did not leave for mere adventure and the promise of new life; they left in order to survive the economic and cultural devastation that colonialism had inflicted; they left because there was no obvious alternative. Their leaving has left a wake that works continually in Irish culture. It can neither be softened into the contours of a cultural diaspora nor ignored for the sake of exaggerating Ireland’s twentieth-century prosperity: both remain predicated on the as yet unceasing patterns of emigration that for some cushions the neo-colonial history of our present. The political and cultural meaning of emigration survives its official erasure and economic use value, returning as the basis for active forms of global solidarity rather than for the empirical disciplining of such ‘imagined communities’. Without emigration, the Irish economy in the twentieth century, in terms of large scale immiseration, disparities of wealth, and social unrest, would probably compare more to the situation of Central American nations or the Philippines in the circuits of US capital and domination than to Spain or Greece on the edges of Europe. In their undialectical abstraction, Kennedy’s figures ultimately conceal more than they reveal — not on account of any attempt to deceive, but as an index of the intrinsic inadequacy of empirical method deployed in abstraction from social relations as a whole. As an alternative, postcolonial method is, nonetheless, not situated to

offer a more complex but still empirical proof of Ireland’s definitively colonial or postcolonial status. That it cannot do so is neither an index of intellectual or scholarly ineptitude nor evidence of some unethical indifference to reality. It is rather a consequence of the critique of empirical representation and the recovery of alternative conceptions that is at the core of most postcolonial and related work. In fact, arguments based on the acceptance of Ireland’s colonial history have indeed shown a greater explanatory power and offered a more inclusive depiction of the dynamics of Irish society than have other approaches. They have not only shown the validity and value of the study of other colonial locations for understanding

58 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the general contours of Irish history, but have shown the ways in which administrators and their ideas circulated throughout the colonial network; they have demonstrated similar patterns of cultural and psychic formation across colonial settings; they have shown how methods and approaches developed in other locations prove effective in the analysis of Irish social and cultural phenomena. They will certainly continue to do so. There is, then, no lack of empirical data or methodological acumen here: the reasons for the intensity of the theoretical and interpretive debates lie elsewhere. Of course, as I have already suggested, part of that intensity stems from the inevitably political implications of the claim that Ireland has been and continues to be a colonized nation. The counter-claims are no less politically interested. Both claims also exceed their immediately apparent object, the status of Northern Ireland and the legitimacy of republican, British, or loyalist military and political agendas. They deeply affect how the future history of Ireland will be determined, in terms of political arrangements, economic self-determination, gender relations, environmental issues, and beyond. In that sense, each set of claims is distinctly performative, in that they at once repeat or reiterate apparently foundational statements and in doing so constitute institutionally effective realities.7* The performative nature of scholarship cannot, however, be acknowledged within the framework of traditional disciplinary structures: their commitment to objects of knowledge abstracted into distinctive conceptual sets as the a priori of empirical method prevents reflection on the constitution of structures of knowing. This is the case not only for the social sciences but across literature and history as disciplines also. The methods of postcolonial projects, on the contrary, trace their genealogies from works that intervened deliberately in the structures of colonialist knowledge and critiqued the relations of domination embedded in apparently empirical utterances: the critique of empirical method has always been at one with the political nature of the intervention, acknowledging that the apparent self-evidence of empiricism is itself an effect of domination.” Along with the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of postcolonial projects, this theoretical self-consciousness as to the production of knowledge has made their arguments often unrecognizable, in both senses of that word, within traditional disciplinary frameworks. Hence the attempt to resolve interpretive differences on empirical bases becomes merely contradictory. Work on colonialism derives its methods in some senses from the dialectics of colonialism itself, grasped as a historical project that is at once global in its aims and effects and absolutely specific in its practice. That specificity is determined by the largely unpredictable repercussions of local conditions and resistances on the reductive procedures of the state. The differential method, which I have already suggested to be the distinctive practice of postcolonial analysis, is in the first place required if one is to elaborate the dynamics of colonialism in its contrary tendencies

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

59

towards homogenization and differentiation. But, as Stuart Hall has argued concerning the deployment of Gramsci’s Marxist concepts on the rather different terrain of racial formation, it is no less the case that the differential method itself is dynamic: 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. Ireland proves to be a location in which the relationship between concepts and material history is productively vexed, leading to a high degree of non-reductive conceptual differentiation. Both abstraction and differentiation operate as effects of capitalist colonialism at every level of the world system. Abstraction, as is well known, is

itself a material requirement of capitalist exchange — it is not a merely theoretical algebra. But materially, in order to realize equivalence at the level of the global market, capitalism has always demanded the regulation and production of difference through state intervention. This process can be articulated through many instances and through various state polities. There are, to begin with, intricate variations in the practice of different

imperial systems that depend in large part on the historical moment at which given nations gain imperial power and on the extent to which they reiterate or define themselves against the practices of other powers. The Spanish Empire, forged in a virtually pre-capitalist moment, failed to be the engine for primitive accumulation and capitalist development that it was for less powerful rivals like England and Holland. Its colonial social structures were correspondingly less affected by the exigencies of industrial capital and may have collapsed precisely because they proved unable to produce and reproduce a capitalist dynamic. The structures of the British Empire, bound up with the need for materials and markets in the nineteenth century, proved in turn less flexible than the neo-colonial structures adopted by the US after 1898 in the Philippines and Latin America. Each represents, nonetheless, one moment within a larger, evolving system of colonial domination. Within individual imperial systems, differentiations are no less manifest. Although administrative needs led throughout the British Empire to the formation of a native intermediary class, the depth of the penetration of British culture varies widely from Ireland or the Caribbean through India to the virtual apartheid regimes of British Africa. The British system itself differs markedly in intent and institutional practice from the French extension of cultural citizenship through education throughout its empire, or from US attempts to control its colonies through education supplemented by media and commodity fetishism. The transfer of practices from one imperial site to the other takes place equally at more discrete levels, in the circulation of officials and institutions from one sector to another of the imperial system. Charles Trevelyan is one such instance: after having had a shaping influence on the formation of British education in India in the late 1830s, he transferred the logic of

60

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

subject transformation from Indian schools to the administration of the Famine in Ireland.“ Brigadier Frank Kitson is a more contemporary example: as an officer in all of Britain’s postwar attempts to contain anticolonial insurgency in Malaya, Aden, Kenya and Cyprus, he developed the methods of low intensity warfare and counter-insurgency that have been deployed in turn in Northern Ireland.” In doing so he employed policing structures that in many cases had been modelled after the formation of the Royal Irish Constabulary in colonial Ireland in the early nineteenth century and replicated with local modification throughout the empire. Each imperial system, within the larger global structures of colonialism, furnishes a complex space of incorporation and differentiation, of generalization and localization, of circulation and focalization, all of which require of the analyst an attentive differential practice. But if the emphasis falls on the differential practices of post-colonial projects, what remains for the function of the moment of comparison? Comparative work across the field of colonial studies operates in several ways: it can identify the transfer of administrative techniques, such as education or policing, from one colony to another; it can observe ways in

which the structures of state rule produce similar modes of resistance in quite disparate cultural formations; it can aid in defining the ways in which the characteristics of the colonized are coded and addressed as a conceptual/metaphorical unity across colonial discourses and regions.” It can, of course, also be used to shed suspicion on the validity of claiming the specificity to colonialism of certain practices or phenomena, as both Bartlett and Kennedy use it. Another instructive example of this is Kevin Barry’s essay, ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, which claims that the organizational structures of Jacobite and agrarian movements in England strongly resemble those of agrarian movements in Ireland in the same period.”’ This is precisely the kind of instance in which the question of similarity has to be posed alongside the recognition of differentiation: though similarities certainly exist between movements that resist the extension of capital at the same historical moment, their signification may yet differ in their distinct contexts. The English movements, and their later mutation into the Luddites, certainly shared some tactical and symbolical forms with their Irish counterparts. But such forms of action in England were put down within the purview of longstanding legal interventions, ranging from arrest and trial to the reading of the Riot Act by local militia. No unprecedented legal means were impelled into being and the disturbances remained within the traditional purview of the law. In Ireland, on the contrary, actions were generally aimed at preserving rates of pay for agricultural labourers, controlling landlord improvements, and the expansion of grazing: they took place almost entirely in relation to the ongoing rationalizing of agriculture. At the same time, they invoked a range of Celtic personae, often identified with actual persons, which marked the distinction between a -

After History: Historicism and Postcolonial Studies

61

native economic and aesthetic mode and a foreign one. Perhaps more significantly still, the British administration’s response was to introduce an unprecedented national and armed constabulary to replace the older magistracy — a response that was otherwise and later introduced only in the colonies. For the administration and in hindsight, it was clear that Irish agrarian disturbances signified quite differently than did Jacobism or Luddism and required the methods of coercion that signalled the status of the British as occupiers rather than as mere enforcers of customary law. The distinction between the specific significance of similar social movements in different contexts is clear and crucial to the structure of analysis. The dialectical relation of comparison and differentiation proposed here is not one that ends in either theoretical or social resolution. The product of comparative work between analyses of the processes of colonialism in various sites is, generally speaking, formal in nature. The study of historians of, for example, Indian, Philippine, or Irish social relations leads to the

observation of common processes of cultural formation whose ends are non-identical but share a similar ‘negative dialectic’, a staggering movement of swerve and differentiation that I think of as characteristic of the non-modern social formation. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and Partha Chatterjee’s work on modernization, Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s volume on the ‘reconstitution of patriarchy’ in India, or Reynaldo Ileto’s work on banditry and religious movements in the Philippines, all resonate interestingly with the implications of work in Irish labour history from James Connolly and William Ryan to Emmet O’Connor, or of T.P. Foley and Thomas Boylan on economics. Each shows how colonial social formations emerge in relation to modernity but always skewed in unpredictable ways that I have already suggested constitute the field of non-modernity.”* This perpetual clinamen of the non-modern issues is the unclosable dialectic between a constantly reiterated form and the particular content that it can neither predict nor incorporate. This dialectic is in the first instance a problem of incommensurable temporalities: the time of development, which folds all human histories into the same scale as advanced or belated modalities of progress, is always awry to the alternative rhythms of the non-modern. Modern historiography, across a broad spectrum from conservative to Marxist, is embedded in

the rationalities of modernity, in the notion of progress or development as emancipation. With differing degrees of self-reflection, historians narrate history as the history of its own end, in the reconciliation and resolution of contradiction, finding closure predominantly in an orderly civil society and reformed state or occasionally in post-revolutionary socialism. In either case, 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

62 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

containment by the state of the crises constantly produced by the power of these differentiations. The outside of the state and the outside of history are the same, determined as irrational: beyond the pale of each lies not only the unknown but what is strictly unknowable to them. 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 of social relations that account for their virtual 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 for future survival. For if the forms of social practice that lie athwart modernity’s spate are the casualties of its deep unreason, they are no less the ongoing record of its inability to engorge everything. In this subaltern refusal to be incorporated, and this determination to imagine alternative ways of being, a different future finds its means.

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals Translating Civility in Early Modern Ireland

CLARE CARROLL

If, as Denis Donoghue has claimed, ‘the post-colonial vocabularies of Bhabha, Said, and Achebe were designed to deal with historical and political conditions in Africa, India, Algeria, and the Middle East rather than in

Ireland’, these concepts travel well in Irish history.! Even the first text on the

English

conquest

of Ireland,

Gerald

of Wales’s

twelfth-century

Topographia Hiberniae (Topography of Ireland) provides an example of what Homi Bhabha calls hybridity or ‘the repetition of discriminatory identity . . . in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power’.? Bhabha’s ‘sly civility’? lurks in the Archbishop of Cashel’s response to Gerald’s denigration of the Irish for their lack of martyrs: ‘although our people are barbarous, uncivilized, and savage, they have always paid great honour and reverence to churchmen... But now a people has come to the kingdom which knows how, and is accustomed to make martyrs. From now on, Ireland will have its martyrs.” Objections to considering contemporary Ireland as postcolonial follow from a denial of early modern Ireland as colonial. So, the sixteenth-century

English conquest of Ireland, which set in motion the complete transformation of the culture that the twelfth-century Normans largely assimilated to, is an important place to start a genealogy of postcolonialism. Current historiography that views Ireland as primarily part of British history often denies early modern Ireland’s status as a colony. Since Henry VIII was proclaimed King of Ireland in 1542, and since James I claimed dominium over the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1603, Ireland was at least in theory a kingdom from the perspective of English law. But the Irish were subject to English armed conquest, expropriation of land, and political disenfranchisement, conditions downplayed by current British historiography, according to which the history of Ireland becomes predom-

inantly a part of British state formation. In the wake of the Elizabethan conquest, Ireland became subject to capitalist colonialism through which the agricultural society was ‘squeezed .. . to provide labour, or commodities

63

64 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

or tribute’. Two of the most palpable forms of this colonization were the Plantation of Ulster, where land expropriated from the indigenous inhabitants was ‘operated by settlers, who in some cases employed as labourers the Irish who had previously farmed the land’; and the early seventeenthcentury development of an export trade in cattle that produced profits for English owners from Irish land.‘ In a review of recent historiography on early modern Ireland by Jane Ohlmeyer, a dozen pages are on Ireland as kingdom, only two on Ireland as colony.” This marks a dramatic shift from the work of D.B. Quinn and Nicholas Canny from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which they compared Elizabethan and Jacobean descriptions of the Irish with descriptions of the Amerindians and construed the colonizing activities of Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Francis Drake in Ireland as a rehearsal for their activities in the Americas.® In an essay in The Irish Review of 1991, Hiram Morgan asserted that Canny and Quinn founded their analysis on faulty premises. Explaining that the intentions and responses of both colonizers and colonized in Ireland differed from those in the Americas, Morgan argued that the ‘Tudors set out to reform Ireland not to conquer it’, and that ‘native aristocrats’ unlike ‘Amerindian chiefs . . . sought out alliances with other European powers’.’ Reform itself, however, was a strategy of conquest. Many of the policies thought of as ‘reform’ by the early modern English in effect destroyed indigenous cultural, economic, and political institutions. Such policies as surrender and regrant, which abolished Gaelic titles and entailed the surrender of ownership and use of land to the English sovereign; composition, which imposed only one tax to the English crown but in so doing abolished the customary support of local Gaelic lords; the new colonies of Munster and Ulster, which sought to make more profitable use of land and in the process displaced native inhabitants; and martial law itself, which imposed capital punishment without trial — all were thought of as ‘reform’ by the early modern English in Ireland. And if the Catholic Irish had greater access to European powers, as witnessed by their negotiations with and aid from Spain, Amerindian chiefs did at times form alliances

with European powers.’ Morgan also noted that the ‘constitutional status of Irishmen . . . treated as full subjects, religious disabilities notwithstand-

ing’ makes the colonial approach ‘untenable’. Under this constitutional status, however, members of early seventeenth-century Irish juries were

regularly fined and imprisoned and even physically punished for failing to indict recusants. The example of a jury whose members each had an ear cut off for not returning a verdict favourable to the crown suffices to question whether inclusion of the Irish under common law was a legal right or a form of colonial subjugation." Morgan further argued that the position papers and political tracts that Canny and Quinn studied were divorced from such events as ‘litigation, bribery of officials, billeting of troops, holding of parliament’ about which there was ‘nothing colonial’. Morgan

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

65

maintained that the English would have had to have known that they were lying when they represented the Irish as nomads and pagans. In 1992, Andrew Hadfield responded to Morgan by pointing out that intentions and events are mediated through language and rhetorical strategies — through representations.” I would add that textual representations are events, or as Walter Mignolo would say, enactments. Colonialist representations — including historical chronicles, political tracts, epic poems, and maps — enact the colonizers’ appropriation of the memory, language, and space of the colonized, at once recording and destroying what they describe. These representations translate what they describe in the sense of the Italian saying ‘traduttore, traditore’ (‘translator, traitor’), which draws on the Latin verb tradere, meaning to entrust and to betray, to pass down and to give up. Interpretation of these representations is a matter of who is speaking to whom and in the context of what activities, what Mignolo calls the ‘locus of enunciation’. And this applies both to the texts that we are interpreting and to our own writing about them. From an epistemological perspective, writing does not mirror the world but creates a relationship to it. From a political perspective, writing is an activity implicated in other actions in the world. So, for example, Sir John Davies’s promotion of the common

law in

Ireland in his A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (London, 1612) needs to be related to his own execution of the law

as Attorney General of Ireland from 1603 to 1619. How does his praise for the successful extension of the common law in Ireland — ‘that the streams of public justice are derived into every part of the kingdom’ — relate to his orders for the threatening, starving, and mutilation of juries, whose members did not return verdicts favourable to the English crown?” In this instance, ‘public justice’ was determined by allegiance to the state and to the interests of the king rather than to the extension of common law in Ireland. Beyond this, Davies’s basic belief in the superiority of common law over Brehon law was rooted in his view of the cultural and moral superiority of colonists on the Ulster plantation over the native inhabitants, as this passage from his official state correspondence indicates: ‘if the civil persons who are to be planted do not exceed the number of natives, [they] will quickly overgrow them as weeds overgrow the good corn’. The colonists on the Ulster plantation are defined as ‘civil’ whereas native inhabitants are denied such status. The limitations of Davies’s legal theory, and the disparity between English legal theory and practice in Ireland, generally did not go unnoticed by early modern Irish historians. Séathran Céitinn, or Geoffrey Keating, found that Davies’s attacks on native Irish Brehon law showed his ignorance of the way Gaelic laws functioned in cultural practice, and Philip O’Sullivan Beare criticized the inconsistency and even what he referred to as the ‘fiction’ of the English law in Ireland.’* The interpretation of the relation between text and context is clearly a matter of whose political interests are

66

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

at stake, and not just for seventeenth-century readers but for readers today attempting to interpret early modern English and Irish political thought and history. When John McCavitt pointed out these disparities of theory and practice in Davies’s text and context to a late twentieth-century Englishspeaking academic audience attending a Folger seminar on early modern Ireland, controversy ensued. Those interested in maintaining that the extension of the common law was progress, regardless of how violently it was enforced, wanted to separate writing from events. This is a distinction that keeps us from seeing the darker side of the Renaissance in Ireland, as well as the darker side of progress heralded as the New World Order today. What the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, in writing about the Spanish colonization of the Americas, has called ‘the myth of modernity’, the ‘justification for genocidal violence’ which accompanies the ‘“rational” concept of “emancipation”’, could well be applied to an analysis of the early modern English ‘reform’ of Ireland.” The connection between sixteenth-century Ireland and contemporary colonial contexts in the Americas is implicitly denied by John Gillingham, who has asserted that ‘an imperialist English culture emerged in the twelfth century’.4® He assumes an unchanging continuity between the view of the Celts as barbarians in the twelfth-century writing of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales and the view of the Irish in sixteenthcentury New English tracts. To focus on this perpetuation of an exclusively textual tradition is to overlook the influence of new practices of economic and governmental control and new discourses upon early modern writing about Ireland. In other words, the sixteenth-century

accounts

of Irish

barbarism are related to the English justification of and Irish reaction to the enactment of new policies for the establishment of English rule in Ireland. Furthermore, the work of D.B. Quinn has shown that English colonists in Ireland self-consciously modelled their plans for conquest and plantation upon the Spanish example in the Americas.’’ The identity of medieval and early modern writing that Gillingham asserts also overlooks the colonization of the Americas and the Reformation as events that generated new discourses inflecting the inherited discourse of barbarism. In what follows, I want to examine some evidence that would further challenge and complicate these arguments — that early modern writing on Ireland is nothing more than the repetition of a medieval discourse on Celtic barbarism, and that early modern writing on Ireland cannot be connected with other colonial texts and contexts because Ireland was a kingdom and not a colony. First, |want to compare the discourse of barbarism in Gerald of Wales's Topographia with later adaptations of it to see how these are bound up with new discourses and practices. I will then compare early modern

writing on barbarism versus civility in the Irish context with such writing on the Amerindians by the Spanish Catholic Bartolomé de Las Casas and the French Protestant Jean de Léry. In the course

of this comparison, the

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

67

question emerges: why do English writers on many occasions represent the Irish as even more alien than these two continental European writers represent the Amerindians? Finally, I will also look briefly at the response of Irish writers to the English discourse on barbarism, to see not so much how they contradict it, as Joep Leerssen has already shown in his magisterial Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael, but also how they criticize it through strategies adapted from continental European political theory.” Gerald of Wales’s Topography is what Foucault would call a foundational text of the discourse that constructs the Irish as barbarians.”! Imitated and responded to from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the Topography initiates a discourse that extends and criticizes the portrayal of the Irish as barbarians. Supporting the papal bull Laudabiliter (1155) that granted the English king the right to invade Ireland in order to pursue its moral, cultural, and ecclesiastical reform, Gerald’s three-part speech, which he

delivered on three successive days at Oxford in 1188, justifies the conquest of Ireland that began with Henry Il’s military intervention there in 1171-72.” In his opening address, Gerald dedicates the text to Henry II, and describes Irish history as appropriated to the king’s memory: ‘I have, therefore, collected everything . . . thought worthy of being remembered . . . for your attention which scarcely any part of history escapes.” Having discoursed upon the position, wonders, and inhabitants of Ireland, Gerald

closes his text with the promise to narrate, as he does in the Expugnatio Hibernica, Henry’s victories in Ireland: ‘I shall attempt to describe the manner in which the Irish world has been added to your titles and triumphs; with what great and laudable valour you have penetrated the secrets of the ocean and the hidden things of nature. There is a running analogy between Henry’s penetration of space and Gerald’s penetration of knowledge. Gerald incorporates the history of ancient Ireland from the Leabhar gabhdala, or Book of Invasions, into chapters 85-90 of the Third Book of his text, but then supplants this Irish narrative of origins with one from the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who claimed that Ireland was uninhabited before the British king Gurguntius gave it to the Basclenses to settle. Gerald’s description is a conquest over memory and space. The very title of the text, Topographia, writing about place, indicates the spatialization of time, a feature of ethnography, which portrays other cultures in archaic and timeless space, rather than present and changing time, a strategy that the anthropologist Johannes Fabian has termed ‘the denial of coevalness’.?° In comparing Ireland in the West to the ‘countries of the East’, Gerald

places both cultures not only outside European culture but also in an exotic place of the bizarre and unknown, in what could be seen as an early example of English orientalist discourse.” These places are unnatural and fantastic, ‘remote parts where [nature] indulges herself in these secret and

distant freaks’.2” Both cultures only come into history at the point where

68 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

they are conquered. At the end of the text Gerald indicates that the East is the site of the Christian European conquest and colonization of the Muslim world, and thus invites comparison between that crusade and the conquest of Ireland, which he has represented as another crusade, with the twin imperatives of proselytization and economic exploitation. Citing Laudabiliter, Gerald bemoans the ignorance of the people in matters of faith, and the negligence of the prelates who do not reprimand them. Both Ireland and the East are also seen as places from which wealth can be extracted. For Gerald, Ireland is an uncultivated place of plenty, which like the East, needs colonization, in its root sense in the Latin verb colere — ‘to

be put to use, to be made of value’. The Irish are both unfamiliar and familiar, pagan and Christian, treacherous and yet capable of fealty to Henry, uncultivated and yet cultivated. On the one hand, they are said to be ‘so barbarous as they cannot be said to have any culture’, and on the other hand, they are called ‘the fountain of the art of music’.?* Although the clergy are praised for their ‘reading and praying’, and ‘abstinence and asceticism’, they are taken to task for their ‘negligence in the correction of the people’.”® Gerald’s fascination with ‘enormities’ such as a bearded hermaphrodite woman with a mane down her back, a man that was half an ox, aman who had intercourse with a cow, and a goat who had intercourse with a woman, all construct the Irish as

‘freaks’ of nature.*° And yet they are not evil by nature but by custom. Their customs are so barbarous that it is ‘as if they were in another world altogether and cut off from law-abiding people, they know only the barbarous habits in which they were born and brought up, and which they embrace as another nature’.*! Like Homer’s Cyclopes, the Irish before the Norman conquest inhabit a world that is naturally wondrous and plentiful and yet ‘outside the law’. Gerald’s allegory of Henry II’s subjection of the Irish lords as Jupiter’s striking the earth with his thunderbolt repeats Ovid’s mythographic history. Just as in the golden age before Jupiter, so in Ireland before the conquest of Henry II, there was no law. Gerald concludes with great optimism for reform; Henry’s victory begins a new era of peace and law through the ‘protestation of fealty and spontaneous surrender of the Irish chiefsas4 John Derricke in his 1581 Image of Ireland imitates the mythographic discourse of Gerald’s Topography and its narrative of conquest to praise the victories over Irish rebels by the army of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland. Like Gerald, Derricke and his Elizabethan contemporaries represent the Irish as barbarous. Instead of showing a transformation from culturally primitive barbarism to law through the submission of the Irish, as Gerald’s narrative does, however, Derricke’s allegory figures a descent into culturally degenerate barbarism brought about by ‘rebellious woodkern’ from whom the land must be rid. Unlike Gerald’s primitive Irish, who are capable of being reformed by the law and religious reform, Derricke’s

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

69

woodkern cannot be reformed by religion, civility, the laws, or even God’s

grace. Rather than merely repeating the view of the Irish as culturally barbaric in Gerald’s Topography, Derricke’s depiction of the Irish woodkerns as ‘this graceless cursed race’ is formed by new ideologies implicated in new practices. The Elizabethan conquest was enacted through the new discourse of civility, carried out through enforcement of laws, colonial settlement, and warfare. Although the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 attempted to forestall the Gaelicization of the twelfth-century Norman invaders by forbidding them to adopt Irish language and dress, and to marry with the Irish, such laws went largely ignored outside the Pale. Anglo-Normans, or Old English, intermarried with the Irish and adopted their customs and language. A new hybrid culture arose in which Norman feudalism coexisted with and was sometimes merged with Gaelic political and economic structures.*? In the mid-sixteenth century, during the lord deputyships of Sussex and Sidney, the English attempted a much more thoroughgoing and systematic policy of Anglicization: to enforce English law and use of the land through colonial settlement in Laois and Offaly, to the north in Ards and Clandeboye, and to the south in Cork. In these early failed colonial ventures, the Elizabethan

governors set out to reorganize the land as shire ground, to enforce inheritance of land through primogeniture, to abolish Gaelic law and language, and to transplant the Irish inhabitants. Such chieftains as Rory Og O’More (the central rebel protagonist of Derricke’s Image of Ireland) went into armed rebellion in response to the loss of their lands and the destruction of Gaelic culture that English colonization entailed. The recent archival work of David Edwards shows that for most of the Elizabethan period, the official policy to deal with resistance to English rule was martial law; execution without trial was more the rule than the exception in Elizabethan Ireland.* The English failure to make these plantations work also resulted in massacres. Officially state-sanctioned atrocities against civilians included Essex’s slaughter of 600 men,

women,

and

children

on

Rathlin

Island

in 1574;

Sir William

Fitzwilliam’s order first to offer protection to and then put to the sword hundreds of the Clandeboye O’Neills in Belfast in 1574-75; and Francis

Cosby’s summoning of the people of Offaly and Laois to Mullaghmast, where English soldiers surrounded them and shot them to death in 1578.*° Such violence against both Irish warriors and civilians, presided over by Sir Henry Sidney during his term as lord deputy (1566-71; 1575-78), is celebrated in the woodcuts and doggerel verse of Derricke’s Image of Ireland. In the final part of the text, the defeated rebel Rory Og O’More praises the execution of his wife and friends as liberation from slavery by Lord Deputy Sidney: In fine, ‘twas he which made of bondmen free,

And put to sword for my unstable truth My spoused wife, the garland of my youth.

70

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

With many more my dear and special friends,

Whose breathless corpses were given to flames of fire.*®

In a marginal note, Derricke explains: ‘Rory’s friends to the number of sixteen, are slain in a cabin, ... and afterwards the cabin being set on fire, all their bodies are burned also.’ The necessity for this violence is justified in the first two parts of the text, where the woodkern are described as evil both by nature and by religious practice. Ireland is no longer a place of miracles, as it was for Gerald, but ‘the devil’s arse, a peak where rebels most embrace’.*” The Irish are no longer in need of religious reform but incapable of it. Commenting on the failure of St Patrick to reform the Irish, Derricke represents them as a people cursed by God: ‘No strength may prevail whom God does withstand, no physic can cure whom God in his ire striketh, showing that God hath given up Woodkern to a reprobate sense, infecting them with an incurable botch.’ The Irish are no longer outside the law, as they were for Gerald

before

the Norman

conquest,

but rebels

to the law. Derricke

comments: ‘instead of civility, Woodkerne use villainy’. That villainy is rebellion, which is a sign of irrecoverable damnation, ‘O ingratitude most intolerable, and blindness irrecuperable!’ Called ‘Satan’s imps’, ‘sons of the devil’, and ‘pernicious members of Satan’, the Irish are below the state of

‘brute beasts’. Calvinist divine election and the concomitant damnation of the Catholic Irish justify Sidney’s conquest. Whereas for Gerald the Irish were capable of artistic cultivation and ecclesiastical reform, for Derricke

their clergy and their bards have made these institutions damned and diseased. Derricke blames the rebellion on the instigation of both Irish prelates (‘The friar persuades the rebels that it is an high work of charity to kill loyal subjects ... Behold the plaguey counsel of a poxy friar, the very fruit of papistry’) and poets (‘The policy of the bard is to incense the rebels to do mischief, by repeating of their forefathers’ acts’).°* The new sixteenth-century Calvinist discourse of predestined damnation is mingled with what could be called a proto-racialist discourse. By protoracialist discourse I mean the intersection of the early modern notion of race as family lineage or genealogy and as an inherited disposition imposed on a whole group of people. Comparing the Irish to ‘graceless grafts / sprung from a wicked tree’, Derricke represents Irish evil as inherited through the blood: ‘knave father, knave son to the twentieth generation’. All levels of Irish society from chieftain to horse boy are typed as an innately inferior people: ‘a pestiferous generation’, ‘an untoward generation’, ‘a graceless cursed race’. Likened to ‘grasshoppers and caterpillars’, ‘hogs’ and ‘dogs’, the Irish are subhuman — a ‘pestilent brood’ for whom even ‘hanging and drawing . . were too good’.*° The Irish not only have no status in their native land but are enemies from which the land must be rid: ‘so bare of heavenly grace, / more foes to country’s soil’.“‘ This notion of the Irish as inherently and innately evil and so fit for extermination marks a real

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

71

departure from the medieval discourse of barbarism, in which the Irish are evil not by nature but by custom, and so capable of improvement. This distinctly early modern discourse of civility as Protestant election and conformity to English law versus barbarism as damnation and rebellion has had, as Seamus Deane has shown in ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, an

afterlife in the representation of politics in late twentieth-century Ireland.” Late sixteenth-century responses to this discourse foreshadow recent historiographical debates. Even more widely disseminated than Derricke’s popular Image of Ireland, the Old English Richard Stanihurst’s ‘Description of Ireland’ locates Ireland within the historiography of the three kingdoms, as signalled by its publication in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577). Stanihurst describes the Old English of the Pale in rela-

tion to English customs, institutions, and history but relegates the Gaelic Irish to an ethnographic description of an alien people. Born in Dublin, educated at Oxford, and employed as tutor to the Earl of Kildare, Stanihurst accepts the New English view of the Gaelic Irish as characterized by ‘savageness’ and ‘rebellion’. Like many other early modern writers on Ireland, he lifts whole passages directly out of the Topography to portray Irish barbarism. The development of Old English culture in the four centuries since the Norman conquest serves in a new way to further marginalize the Gaelic Irish. The author is at pains to distinguish the Old English from the wild Irish and so warns the reader: not to impute anie barbarous custome that shall be here laied down, to

the citizens, townsmen, differ little or nothing their progenitors, the mortally behated of the

and inhabitants of the English pale, in that they from the ancient customs and dispositions of English and Welsh men, therefore being as

Irish as those that are born in England.

Over half the text treats the civility of the Old English as civil founders of cities and schools, scholars, responsible holders of ecclesiastical and public

offices, and loyal subjects.# Stanihurst defines the civility of the Old English in their speaking English rather than Irish: ‘The inhabitants of the English pale have been in old time so much addicted to their civilitie, and

so far sequestered from barbarous savageness, as their onlie mother toong was English.’*° This focus on the English language, absent from Gerald’s Latin text, unites the discourse on civility versus barbarity with the Renais-

sance humanist discourse on the vernacular, one of the most important unifying principles in the emerging concept of nation. Stanihurst’s use of ‘savageness’ as the opposite of ‘civility’ indicates the pressure that New World exploration and colonization has brought to bear upon the discourse of barbarousness. As with Shakespeare’s ‘rude and savage man of Inde’ (Love’s Labour's Lost) and Ralegh’s ‘Heathen savage’ (History of the World) in the late sixteenth century, ‘savage’ tends to be applied more and more to peoples outside Europe, whereas, in a later day repetition of this discourse

72

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

from the OED, barbarous ‘tends to be applied to peoples somewhat less remote from civilization’.4* Stanihurst treats the Gaelic Irish not only as culturally alien but also as politically alien; he frequently refers to ‘the Irish enemie’.4® And this is not simply textual practice — the repetition of a common term in colonial discourse. Stanihurst also treated the Gaelic Irish as political enemies in his 1593 argument before the Escorial to dissuade the Spanish from aiding O’Neill’s revolt against the English in the Nine Years War. Written in the midst of the Nine Years War by a New English settler on the Munster plantation, Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland extends Stanihurst’s ethnography of Gaelic savagery to include the Old English and draws on the Calvinist and proto-racialist discourses of Derricke.** For Spenser, both Old English and Gaelic Irish ‘are all Papists by their profession, but in the same so blindly and brutishly informed for the most part that you would rather think them atheists or infidels’.*? In a rewriting of Irish history reminiscent of Derricke’s, Spenser claims that St Patrick’s conversion of the Irish had little or no effect because ‘religion was generally corrupted with their Popish trumpery’. In Spenser’s standard Reformation rhetoric, the entire Christian past of Ireland is transformed

into a history of corruption in its very origins and further disease in its subsequent effects: ‘What other could they learn than such trash as was taught them, and drink of that cup of fornication, with which the purple harlot had then made all nations drunken . . . the dregs thereof have brought great contagion in their souls.’ There is no room here for Stanihurst’s defence of the civility of the Old English ecclesiastical and scholarly cultural tradition. Spenser also refutes Stanihurst’s separation of Old English from Gaelic culture with the notion that the Old English are even ‘more lawless and licentious than the very wild Irish’.° For Spenser, the source of Irish barbarism is in Old English degeneracy, their adoption of Irish customs and intermarriage and fosterage with Irish people, ‘the two most dangerous infections’. He describes language and ethos as inextricably bound and physically communicated by the child sucking at the mother’s breast: ‘They moreover draw into themselves together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses, for the mind follows much the temperature of the body.’ Beyond this, Spenser warns against ‘marrying with the Irish’; miscegenation is called ‘dangerous . . . so perilous as it is not to be adventured’. The result of intermarriage is naturally inherited corruption: ‘how can such matching but bring forth an evil race’. As with Derricke, race, in the sense of a genetically inherited disposition, is mapped onto ethnos, or nation, in the early modern sense of a people sharing common customs and language. Whereas Stanihurst makes Irish culture more familiar to his English readers by separating the Old English from the Gaelic Irish, Spenser

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

73

defamiliarizes Irish culture by describing Old English and Gaelic Irish as part of an ethnography derived from both ancient European and nonEuropean barbarousness. Spenser distances the Irish from the English both in cultural time and in moral geography. When he discusses ethnography in terms of genealogy, he argues against the Irish claim of Spanish descent in the Leabhar gabhdla by characterizing Irish keening for the dead as nonChristian and non-European: ‘not proper Spanish but altogether heathenish brought in either by the Scythians or by the Moors, which were Africans . . . for it is the manner of all pagans and infidels to be intemperate in their wailings of their dead’. As two of Spenser’s classical sources Strabo and Diodorus Siculus both note, the Scythians were ‘man-eating’. Spenser identifies Irish barbarousness with what since Columbus’s Diario had been the ultimate mark of the inhuman in European representations of the Amerindians: cannibalism. Spenser's veteran of Irish service Irenaeus testifies that the Irish exceed even the savagery of ‘the Gauls [who] used to drink their enemies’ blood’: ‘... so I have seen the Irish do but not [drink] their enemies’ but friends’

blood’. Later, in the final section of the dialogue where the proposal of destruction by warfare followed by famine is put forward, cannibalism emerges as the desired result of these policies for colonial reformation: ‘The end I assure me will be very short and much sooner than can be . . . hoped for ... being kept from manurance, and their cattle from running abroad by this hard restraint, they would quickly consume themselves and devour one another.’ Cannibalism had been the result of the ‘late wars in Munster’: ‘the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves’. In Book VI of The Faerie Queene, the Irish are mythopoetically represented as the ‘salvage nation’, marauding nomads who ‘eat the flesh of men’.® This allegorical representation echoes such passages from political tracts in which, for example, Henry Sidney refers to Shane O'Neill as ‘that canyball’, and John Davies describes the Irish as ‘little better than the Cannibals who do

hunt one another’.*” Most but not all early modern European views of cannibalism and of Amerindians equated them unequivocally with barbarism; Montaigne’s sceptical ‘De cannibales’ is probably the most famous example of this dissent from the dominant discourse. Two sixteenth-century authors who did not attempt to justify European violence against the Amerindians but even criticized it were Bartolomé de Las Casas and Jean de Léry. Their radical departure from previous views of cannibalism needs to be gauged against a genealogy of the word ‘cannibal’ that can be traced to its first use in the Columbus Diario.**

In this text, native

Caribbean

informants’

accounts of the tribe of ‘Caribs who eat men’ merge with the medieval European myth of men ‘with snouts of dogs, who ate men’ and a fantasy of the Oriental, ‘Caniba [which] is nothing but the people of the Grand Khan’.?

Pietro Martire,

an Italian humanist

who

celebrated

Spanish

74 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

exploration and colonization in his De Orbe Novo Decades (1530), translated into English in 1555, compared the diet of the cannibals to that of Europeans: ‘they eat their own children as we do chickens and pigs’. In Andre Thevet’s 1577 Cosmographie Universelle ‘cannibal’ becomes a term applied globally to non-Europeans as savages — not only to Amerindians but also to Africans and Asians.” In comparing Las Casas’s and de Léry’s defence of Amerindian cannibalism and civility to English accounts of Irish barbarism, I have asked the following questions: what enabled Las Casas and de Léry to represent Amerindian cultural others, however alien in their customs, as civil and moral, while English writers represented Irish cultural others as uncivil and immoral? What allowed for this critique of the subjugation of the other in these Spanish and French texts but prohibited it in English texts? Are there any representations of otherness in Las Casas and de Léry at all comparable to the English representations of the Irish? In the 1550 debate at Valladolid, Las Casas refuted his opponent Sepulveda’s view that the innate savagery of cannibalism justified war against and enslavement of the Amerindians. In his Argumentum apologiae, or Defense of the Indians (1552-53), which records and adds to his argument in the debate, Las Casas distinguished between the sense of barbarians as

people without written language, as opposed to people outside the polis, described in Aristotle’s Politics as fiercely warlike and irrational, without

their own settled social life and functioning legal institutions.*t As Walter Mignolo has observed, the European humanist denial of Aztec pictographic records and oral tradition as history because of their not conforming to the Renaissance codification of knowledge in the form of alphabetic literacy is one of the most powerful acts of the Spanish conquest of the Americas — the colonization of memory.™ If Christian conversion, like the spread of alphabetic literacy, was a strategy of colonization, for Las Casas, his belief that the Amerindians had souls to convert was accompanied by his political view of them as a civil people who should not be subject to conquest. In his Argumentum, he represents the Amerindians through what he sees as universal human categories of social and political life: ‘They are not ignorant, inhuman, or bestial. Rather, long before they had heard the word

Spaniard they had properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion and custom.’ Arguing again from Aristotle, Las Casas considers human sacrifice and the eating of human flesh as ‘probable’ rather than actual error. Human sacrifice to the gods is ‘fully agreed upon by the known Indian nations’ and ‘established by the decrees of their laws’. He also considers cannibalism as a universal part of culture by noting that the ‘ancient history of pagans and Catholics alike testifies that almost all peoples used to do the same thing’.® The representation of the Amerindian present as equivalent to the European past could be considered yet another example of the denial of coevalness. But Las Casas brings

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

75

his comparison of Amerindians and Europeans into the same time frame. He cites contemporary accounts of Spanish cannibalism. He also brings the Amerindians and Spaniards into the same context in time, by stressing their common and equal ignorance of each other. The Amerindians ‘are as ignorant of our language as we are of their language and their religion’. Most importantly, Las Casas finds the morality of the Amerindians, ‘strengthened by the example of so many of their prudent men’, to be superior to that of ‘Christian soldiers, who exceed the barbarous peoples in their wicked deeds’. Whereas Las Casas defends the geographically distant Amerindian other as civil and moral, he castigates the more proximate ‘other’ in Spain — the Moors ~ as ‘the truly barbaric scum of the nations’.* His acceptance of the difference of Amerindian religious traditions contrasts with his attitude towards Jews and Muslims, which hinges upon a distinction between religious and civil jurisdiction. Although he asserts that ‘Jews, Mohammedans, or idolaters . .. are in no way subject to the Church .. . when they celebrate and observe their rites’,* he never defends their right of defence against Spanish conquest. In arguing that ‘every nation no matter how barbaric has the right to defend itself against a more civilized one that wants to conquer it and take away its freedom’, Las Casas identifies the Amerindians’ right of

defence with that of the Spanish: If war against the Indians were lawful, one nation might rise up against another .. . On this basis the Turks, the Moors — the truly barbaric scum of the nations — with complete right and in accord with the law of nature could carry on war .. . If we admit this, will not everything high

and low, divine and human, be thrown into confusion?”

The uses of Las Casas’s text are fraught with contradictions. As a defence of a nation’s right to self-jurisdiction, his argument against the Spanish conquest of the Amerindians could be extended not just to argue against aggressive warfare by the Moors but also to argue for their expulsion from Spain. Las Casas’s shorter and more popular Spanish text Brevissima relacién, which he wrote to protest and to try to stop the Spanish torture, enslavement, and mass slaughter of the Amerindians, influenced the English Black Legend of Spain. This same text and Las Casas’s argument generally for the right of indigenous peoples to resist conquest later influenced the indigenous political Latin American movements of liberation from colonial rule. Enrique Dussel, who has analyzed the Eurocentric myth of modernity as a rationalization for the violence of early modern colonization, discusses Las Casas’s critique as a precursor to his own: ‘Las Casas attained the maximal critical consciousness by siding with the oppressed Other and by examining critically the premises of modern civilizing violence.’ Las Casas’s own writing, as we have seen, however, participates in the

76 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

discourse of the Islamic ‘other’ as barbaric. If we compare his representation of Amerindians as familiar and Moors as alien with English representations of the Irish, it would appear that the Irish assume a cultural space closer to the Moors than the Amerindians, but ultimately inferior to both. Whereas Las Casas could view the cultural difference of the Amerindians as capable of either assimilation or conversion through Christianity, he viewed the cultural difference of the Moors as totally alien and barbaric. Similarly the English rejected Irish cultural difference as an impediment to English civilization. And whereas Las Casas viewed the Amerindians as having an indigenous right to political jurisdiction, he saw the Moors as an aggressive threat to Spanish civil jurisdiction much as the New English viewed the Gaelic Irish assertion of political autonomy as a rebellion against English civil jurisdiction over the land which they claimed by right of the Norman conquest. Whereas Las Casas rejected Sepulveda’s view of the Amerindians as barbarians, incapable of rationality, peace and justice and so, like Aristotle’s natural slaves, subject to conquest and slavery, the New English produced a view of the Irish close to this type of barbarian as natural slave. Derricke’s woodkern and Spenser’s pastoral nomads resemble the barbarian as ‘slave by nature’, described in Las Casas’s interpretation of Aristotle as ‘liv[ing] spread out and scattered, dwelling in the forest and in the mountains’.” Irish armed resistance to English rule was constituted as an innate character of the Irish, who like the natural slave were ‘eager for war,

and inclined to every kind of savagery’.”* David Lloyd’s analysis of dominant history’s representation of the subaltern applies to both the Moors under Spanish rule and the Irish under English rule: ‘the history of the state requires a substrate which is.counter to its laws of civility and which it represents as outrageous and violent, in order that the history of domination and criminalization appear as a legitimate process of civilization and the triumph of law’.”4 Another significant critique of the European subjugation of colonized people comes from the French Calvinist Jean de Léry, whose Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578) is a sympathetic and thickly contextual portrayal of Tupinamba culture. As Las Casas had done, de Léry represented Amerindian cannibalism as a socially sanctioned ritual, less barbarous than many contemporary European practices. De Léry protested that European ‘big usurers . . . sucking blood and marrow, and eating everyone alive ... are even more cruel than the savages I speak of’.’5 For de Léry, the modern European practice of capitalism causes ‘misery’. In the 1585 and 1611 editions of the text, de Léry added even more examples of European cruelty, including passages from Las Casas’s accounts of the Spaniards’ torture of the Amerindians.”° So, the slavery that was part of

European colonial conquest is also a mark of early modern European brutality. The particularly brutal religio-political warfare of sixteenthcentury Europe is yet another form of bloodthirst that de Léry finds worse

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

77

than Amerindian cannibalism. In de Léry’s account of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, Catholics butchered Protestants ‘in ways more barbarous than those of the savages . . . The livers, hearts, and other parts of these bodies — were they not eaten by the furious murderers, of whom Hell itself stands in horror?’”” French Catholic savagery is ‘even worse and more detestable’ than that of the anthropophagous because while the maneating Amerindians ‘attack only enemy nations ... the ones over here have plunged into the blood of the kinsmen, neighbors, and compatriots’.”8 Cannibalism for de Léry also figures as the Catholic savage desire ‘not only to eat the flesh of Jesus Christ grossly rather than spiritually, but what was worse, like the savages named Ouetaca . . . they wanted to chew and swallow it raw’.”? The Ouetaca, because they ate their victims raw and did

not speak the language of their enemies, represented the extremity of savagery for de Léry. He saw the Catholics, like the Oueteca, as more savage than the Tupinamba. An ethnography of the Amerindians becomes a way of characterizing the culturally alien as familiar and the culturally familiar enemy as more alien. To summarize the comparison thus far: if for Las Casas the Amerindians,

though culturally alien, could be viewed as familiar because of their civil institutions, the Moors, though culturally closer, had to be viewed as more

alien than the Amerindians because of the Moorish resistance to Spanish political hegemony within Spain. Similarly, if for de Léry the Tupinamba, though culturally alien, could be viewed as familiar because they constituted a society with coherent rituals, French Catholics, indeed because culturally,

politically, and physically closer, had to be viewed as more alien than the Tupinamba because Catholics represented a more proximate violence and scandal of religious ritual within France. When we compare English views of the Irish to these triangulated representations in Las Casas and de Léry, we find that the Irish occupy the space of the culturally alien Amerindians and the space of the politically resistant Moors and the religiously scandalous French Catholics —- and so have to be made even more alien than the Amerindians. To the English the Irish were political enemies for their rebellion against colonization, religious enemies for their non-conformity to Protestantism. Even though the Irish may be in theory the subjects of a kingdom they are constructed as enemies in their native land. When Irish writers criticize English conquest and colonization they employ strategies that resemble these European critiques of colonialism. One of the first Irish texts to narrate the Elizabethan conquest and the aftermath of the Nine Years War in the reign of James I from the Irish Catholic point of view, Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium protests colonial persecution in terms at times reminiscent of Las Casas.*° For example, O’Sullivan Beare’s argument

against the English conquest of Ireland repeats the legal basis of Las Casas’s defence of the Amerindians against Spanish conquest. By interpreting the

78

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

twelfth-century papal bull Laudabiliter as granting the English ecclesiastical but not temporal power in Ireland, O’Sullivan Beare follows Las Casas’s

argument that Alexander VI’s Bull to the Kings of Castile only exhorted them to convert the Amerindians and not to wage war against and impose political jurisdiction upon them.*! Furthermore, according to O’Sullivan Beare, since the English had rejected Catholicism under Henry VIII and Elizabeth, the Laudabiliter and all English jurisdiction over Ireland had been made completely invalid.** Another example of the trace of Las Casas surfaces in O'Sullivan Beare’s accounts of English attacks on the civilian population. O'Sullivan Beare represents the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland on the model of Las Casas’s harrowing narrative of the Spanish persecution of the Amerindians. As Las Casas had shown the Spaniards sadistically ‘roaring with laughter’ as they drowned and stabbed to death both mothers and their infants, O’Sullivan Beare portrays the English governor who led the massacre at Mullaghmast ‘tak[ing] an incredible pleasure in at the same time hanging by the mother’s long hair their infant children’.§8 As Las Casas maintained that the Amerindians had a natural right to defend themselves, so O’Sullivan Beare argues that the Irish have the right to defend themselves not only from such brutal conquest but also from their debarment from citizenship, persecution of their religion, and confiscation of their land. Such accounts of English injustice and brutality were addressed to a Spanish audience, as indicated by the text’s publication in Lisbon, its dedication to Philip IV, and its connection with Irish

diplomatic strategies to gain Spanish aid for military intervention in Ireland. Striving to forge an alliance for the exiled Irish with the Spanish Empire, O'Sullivan Beare is enmeshed in the ideological contradiction of protesting the injustices of English colonization in Ireland, while praising the Spanish sovereign who ruled over an empire perpetrating similar and even worse injustices. Another Irish writer who criticizes the early modern conquest of Ireland, but who, unlike O’Sullivan Beare, accepts the view of Ireland as one of the three kingdoms, is Seathrun Céitinn, author of Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (1624),

literally the ‘Foundation of knowledge about Ireland’. Céitinn’s insistence upon Ireland as a kingdom was based on the notion of translatio imperii from the ancient Irish kingship to fealty to the English monarch at the time of the Norman conquest, a view of history that unites him with many of his Old English compatriots. Unlike that other Old English apologist Stanihurst, however, Céitinn wrote in the Irish language, in fact was the first author to create modern Irish prose as a literary language. The archaeology of Céitinn’s text emphasizes the importance of the language in defining the nation and its history. Céitinn criticizes Stanihurst on historiographic grounds that might well be applied to some historians of Ireland today. He also criticizes Stanihurst for his ignorance of the ancient Irish sources (he was ‘blindly ignorant in the language of the country in which were the

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals

79

ancient records and transactions of the territory, and of every people who inhabited it’) and for his opportunism (he ‘had expectation of gaining advantage from those by whom he was incited to write evil concerning Ireland’).™ In so far as Stanihurst promotes an English language version of Irish history and directs his text towards the colonizer, he collaborates in

what Mignolo would call the ‘colonization of memory’. For Céitinn, language is the most important part of culture; so, what distinguishes the Norman conquest as Christian from the Elizabethan conquest as pagan is that the Normans did not suppress the language of the people and expel them from their land, as the early modern colonists did.* This distinction

can be compared to Las Casas’s distinction between the actual forced and violent coercion of the Amerindians to submit to Spanish rule and religion, and his utopian proposal for religious teaching and freely chosen conversion in a framework that would recognize the civility of the Amerindians’ culture and their indigenous right to jurisdiction of their land. By the seventeenth century, one can find even more explicit and sometimes more pointed comparisons of the effects of colonization in Ireland to those in other parts of the world from the point of view of historical memory, economic resources, and political rights. A royalist and sympathizer with Ormond, the Irish historian Peter Walsh sees a parallel between the authority of Irish sources for ancient Irish history and the validity of ancient sources from the Middle East and Asia for their histories as opposed to the ‘ignorance’ of Greek sources.* Rather than Gerald of Wales and his early modern imitators, Céitinn, whose work Walsh had read in

Irish, was his source for Irish history before the English conquest.*’ Like Walsh, John Lynch in his Cambrensis Eversus (1662) refutes Gerald of

Wales’s depiction of Irish barbarism. But historiography is not the only issue here. Although Lynch defends the Irish as loyal subjects to the King of England, he points out that the Irish, unlike the subjects of other kings, are not rewarded with offices in the government, from which they are debarred by their religion. The administrative offices, the wealth, and the land are all

‘monopolized by the same foreigners’.* Lynch quotes Donchadh O'Brian, Earl of Thomond, who compares the colonial economic exploitation of Ireland to that of the West Indies: ‘Ireland is another India for the English, a more profitable India for them than ever the Indies were to the Spaniards.’ The limits of cross-colony identification here are indicated in Lynch’s confusion of ‘India’ with the ‘Indies’ and his emphasis on the disenfranchisement of the Irish élite rather than the majority of the colonized in either Ireland or the Caribbean: ‘Ireland supplied the English not only with immense

treasures

of ready money, but also with extensive

estates and high titles.’ Roger Boyle, in explaining the cause of the 1641 rebellion, and in particular the Catholic massacre of Protestants, also compares Ireland to the colonies in the Caribbean. Like Las Casas, he

defends violent resistance to the oppression of conquest: ‘this implacable

80

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

enmity of the Irish to the English springs from the same root with that of all other subjected people to their Conquerors . . . That consequently the late unparalleled Massacres .. . had no newer cause or occasion ... than... the frequent ones of European colonies in the Indies’.*? Whereas Céitinn had referred to Ireland as a kingdom and to the English within it as colonists, in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest the

division between the Irish nation and the English colony became even wider. In a tract written by one of the Plunketts of Fingall, colonization is described as a form of slavery. The Irish ‘are treated by the ruling powers, not as subjects but in the quality of slaves . . .That an antient noble nation is thus enslaved for to support a mean colony, therin planted by the regicide sword of Cromwell . . . Tis a burning shame to an antient, illustrious

nation to see themselves like worms trod upon by a mean and regicide colony.’ Paradoxically, it was because Ireland was by English law not a colony but a kingdom subject to the monarch of England that the rebels of 1641 could maintain that they fought pro deo, pro rege, pro patria unanimis. By the same token the English belief in their cultural superiority, divine election, and political jurisdiction over these rebellious Irish subjects legitimized their colonial subjugation under both republic and monarchy.

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment The United Irishmen, Cultural Diversity and the Public Sphere LUKE GIBBONS

‘We will not buy or borrow liberty from America or France, but manufac-

ture it ourselves, and work it up with those materials which the hearts of Irishmen furnish them with at home... ’ Address of the United Irishmen to the Scottish Convention, 1793

The bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland afforded an opportunity to reflect not only on the ideals of the United Irishmen who launched the insurrection, but also on the theoretical legacy of the European and American Enlightenments which exerted such a formative influence on the ill-fated rebellion. Central to that legacy is the role of critical reflection itself, the idea that a culture has not found its own voice until it has expressed itself in a body of intellectual as well as creative work. ‘It is one thing for a race to produce artistic material,’ wrote the great African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘it is quite another thing for it to produce the ability to interpret and criticize this material.” This is a lesson that cultures with an eloquent creative heritage but strong anti-intellectual traditions such as Ireland can ill afford to ignore. So far from being secondary to the work of art, the centrality of theory and criticism is such that while a creative voice may readily be granted, as a kind of poetic licence, to dispossessed or marginal cultures, the critical mediation of the resultant artworks is less easily devolved onto the cultures that produce them. Art can assume vernacular forms, or speak in a regional accent, but criticism, and intellectual enquiry in general, remain firmly located in the metropolitan centre. Ireland has produced leading literary figures of the stature of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, but where are the equivalents of Adorno, Barthes or de Beauvoir, or, for that matter, Marx, Wollstonecraft, or Weber? The reason for this, according to Edmund Husserl in his famous Vienna lecture of 1935, is that while all cultures were free to express themselves

mythically, religiously, or creatively, only the advanced metropolitan countries of Europe had the capacity to produce theory, or modes of thought

81

82

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

consistent with the ordinances of universal reason. Much of what passes for contemporary critiques of the Enlightenment in recent postmodern theory and criticism is levelled at such universal pretensions on the part of Western thought, but by construing the Enlightenment almost exclusively in European terms, postmodern critics such as Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard may themselves be guilty of the very Eurocentrism they deplore in others. Many reasons have been adduced for the discrediting of key Enlightenment concepts such as a belief in linear historical progress and in universal schemes for human emancipation, but pre-eminent among them is their association with Westernization and colonialism in their different manifestations. Hence their lack of relevance for one of the most significant shifts in international politics, the process of decolonization which has given rise to an upsurge in nationalism, and the growth of over 100 new nation-states in the post-Second World War era. As a result, many anti-colonial struggles felt impelled to renounce Enlightenment ideals, thereby retreating into the cul-de-sacs of Romanticism and nationalist nostalgia at best or, at worst, fundamentalism, sectarianism and

ethnic cleansing. The fatal dissociation between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, progress and primitivism, failed to provide for narratives of native or indigenous cultures which were part of the Enlightenment, and were thus in a position to add greater diversity and innovation to Western principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. By inscribing one such ‘alien’ or ‘obsolete’ culture, that of Gaelic Ireland, at the heart of their political

project, the United Irishmen sought to reverse this trend, thereby opening up the Enlightenment itself to its ‘others’, and to a prospect of genuine multiculturalism in an age of cosmopolitan ideals. In his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has developed his acute observation that for some black cultures ‘the enthusiasm of 1789’ may relate more to the slave rebellion in Port au Prince in Haiti than it does to revolutionary Paris.” It is this possibility of alternative Enlightenments, on the periphery, rather than in the imperial heartlands or the metropolitan centre, which is of interest in relation to Irish culture. One powerful intellectual tradition which lends itself to this project, and which influenced the United Irishmen in ways yet to be fully explored, is the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, with its overt attacks on the sovereignty of reason and its replacement by the ‘man of feeling’. The cult of sensibility and its attendant ethics of sympathy and ‘fellow-feeling’ advocated by David Hume and Adam Smith may have contributed as much to the abolition of slavery, for instance, as the more abstract Rights of Man espoused by American and French republicanism — though, in the last instance, Smith’s

and John Millar’s arguments about the economic inefficiency of slavery may have carried more weight. However, while helping to abolish slavery, the Scottish Enlightenment did not hold out much hope for African or any other oppressed cultures, wishing to throw off the shackles of colonialism.

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment

83

Instead, by espousing a philosophy of progress which established a clear hierarchy among cultures, and identifying that progress in turn with the advancement of political economy and British civilization, Scottish versions of liberty offered as little to the people of Port au Prince as the erstwhile French revolutionaries who suppressed the slaves’ rebellion in Haiti. As we shall see, 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 realized, however, is that in opposing progress to primitivism, and 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. That the United Irishmen, by contrast, 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’, represents their major contribution — however unrealized — to undoing the limits of the Enlightenment.? 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.

The Enemy Within: Adam Smith and Gaelic Culture In a rather dubious compliment paid to the Irish diaspora in one of its earlier incarnations, Adam Smith extolled the nutrition-value of the potato

as compared to the diet of oatmeal and wheaten bread which sustained the working classes in England and Scotland: The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortu-

nate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the

greater part of them from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution.’

Whatever about the connection between the potato and prostitution, which may give a new dimension to the ‘lazy beds’ associated with the crop, the most striking aspect of this passage is the definition of Irish people entirely in terms of their carnality. This, as we shall see, is sufficient to relegate them to the lowest rank of colonial subject in a world where invisible hands were considered more beneficial than corporeal ones. Central to Smith’s conception of a new commercial order was the reconstitution not only of the material practices of a society but the inner life of the

84

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

subject, to bring it into line with the psychic economy required by civil society. To this end, the Scottish Enlightenment elaborated a stages theory of history, charting the development of society along a linear path of progress from humanity in a primitive state of nature to the pinnacle of commercial and market relations. Primitivism provided an alibi for colonization; to the extent that societies were shown to be in the earlier stages of humanity — at the hunter/nomadic or pastoral phase — they were eligible for invasion or plantation to place them on the fast-track to the future. In Hobbesian or Lockean terms, the threat presented by ‘rude’ or primitive societies to the civilizing process lay mainly in their anarchic individualism: their approximation to the law of the jungle in which, according to Hobbes’s grim actuarial forecast, life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The introduction of a ‘social contract’, mythic or historical, was deemed neces-

sary to protect people from themselves in this asocial condition, with the state acting as both umpire and enforcer in the event of disputes. In Locke, however, we encounter a reluctant recognition of an alternative version of a primitive state of nature, which was to receive its most

memorable expression in Rousseau, portraying it as a golden age of simplicity and contentment before the fall brought about by modernity and social decay. The important aspect of this myth of the ‘noble savage’ was not so much its Arcadian and pastoral illusions, but the acknowledgement that ‘primitive’ societies may have been relatively content with their lot, and hence saw no need to be delivered from their noble (or ignoble) condition to avail of the benefits of progress, Western style. Under the influence of Montesquieu, this acquired additional urgency in the eighteenth century as Western powers were forced to acknowledge that the colonial encounter was not solely with a pre-social wilderness, but often with alternative civilizations, some of them — such as those of India or China — as advanced,

or even superior in many respects, to their Western counterparts. The

problem, then, was how to justify uprooting such civilizations in the name of improvement and social advancement, and it was to this task that many leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment directed their intellectual energies. From Adam Smith’s point of view, the difficulty with such cultures was not that they were asocial but that they were too social for the abstract relations of a market economy, and the impersonal protocols of civil society. Smith did not have to venture far to confirm his worst fears or prejudices in this regard, for such excessive sociability was already too close for comfort in the Gaelic outposts of the Highlands, and in the underground culture of Ireland during the Penal Laws. It was in this context that the potato again entered Smith’s field of vision. As C.R. Fay describes it: The Macs in the picture are few. I do not know that he [i.e. Smith] ever

visited the Highlands. But the Highland problem occupied his thoughts; for it presented the classic example of a sharp transition from

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment

85

a natural to money economy, and before his death the potato was a factor of social significance both in Ireland and in the Western Isles.5

In laying down the cultural conditions for the transition from previous stages to the highest phase of social development, that of civility and commerce, Smith had noted that the obstinacy of familial and communal attachments constitute a formidable barrier to the economic rationality of the market, particularly with regard to excessive displays of hospitality or compassion. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he recalls:

It is not many years ago that, the Highlands of Scotland, the chieftain used to consider the poorest man of his clan, his cousin and relation. The same extensive regard to kindred is said to take place . . . I believe among all other nations who are merely in the same state of society in which the Scots Highlanders were about the turn of the present

century.®

The anxiety induced by the dense layers of filiation in Highlands society is nowhere more evident than in Smith’s agitated response to the Jacobite uprising of 1745, in which the army of invading Highlanders are stripped in his imagination of the raiments of society and reduced to a primal horde of savages. Decrying the lack of ‘courage’ and ‘martial spirit’ in an advanced, commercial age, he observed ruefully: This is confirmed by universal experience. In the year 1745 four or 5 thousand naked unarmed Highlanders took possession of the improved parts of this country without any opposition from the unwarlike inhabitants. They penetrated into England and alarmed the whole nation, and had they not been opposed by a standing army they would have seized

the throne with little difficulty.’ The problem presented by what Smith considered selfless displays of valour or concern for others is carried over into the realm of language, where Gaelic eloquence is considered not exactly conducive to rational economic calculation. In marked contrast to the man who spoke prose without realizing it, Gaels and other primitive peoples were in the habit of conducting their business in poetry, which militated somewhat against their espousal of a work ethic: The Erse poetry as appears from the translations recently published have very great merit but we never heard of any Erse prose. This may indeed appear very unnatural that what is most difficult[y] should be that in which the barbarous least civilized nations most excell in; but it

will not be very difficult to account for it . .. The savage nations on the coast of Africa, after they have sheltered themselves thro the whole day in caves and grottos from the scorching heat of the Sun come out in the evening and dance and sing together. Poetry is a necessary attendant on musick, especially on vocall musick the most naturall and simple of

86 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory any. They naturally express some thoughts along with their music and these must of consequence be formed into verse to suit with the music.®

Hence, Smith explains, prose only makes its appearance with the introduction of commerce, for as he puts it: ‘No one ever made a bargain in verse’ —

or, he might have added, in Erse. Prose brings with it the virtues of self-command and refinement of the passions which integrate the public and the private self, thus leading to the kind of social transparency without which civil or economic transactions cannot take place: A polished people being accustomed to give way, in some measure, to the movements of nature, become frank, open and sincere. Barbarians,

on the contrary, being obliged to smother and conceal the appearance of every passion, necessarily acquire the habits of falsehood and dissimulation. It is observed by all those who have been conversant with savage nations, whether in Asia, Africa or America, that they are all

equally impenetrable, and that when they have a mind to conceal the truth, no examination is capable of drawing it from them.?

For this reason, it is clear that the refinement of the passions — the exercise

of sympathy and sensibility - which permit morality to take place is solely the prerogative of a ‘polished people’, those in possession of a stable and coherent self devoid of undue attachments to others. This involves a conquest of physical appetite and a purging of the body from the public sphere, a form of psychic discipline which is impossible in primitive societies. Hence the paradox that for all their sociability and ‘clannishness’, primitive societies are incapable of sympathy, as defined in Smith’s moral lexicon, on account of their constant struggle for survival. In the case of the native American Indian, Smith asserts that ‘circumstances not only habitu-

ate him to every sort of distress, but teach him to give way to none of the passions which that distress is apt to excite. He can expect from his countrymen no sympathy or indulgence for such weakness.’? This lays the basis for the argument that adversity forces us to look after ourselves: ‘Before we feel for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour; and all savages are too much preoccupied with their own wants and necessities to give much attention to those of the other person.’

Postcolonial Solidarity: The United Irishmen and the Native ‘Other’ It is against this backdrop, excising the vestiges of the native from the public sphere, that we must view the strange ceremony which took place in June 1789 at Detroit, in the heartlands of the Iroquois nation, admitting a new chief to the famous Indian confederacy:

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment

87

I, David Hill, Chief of the Six Nations, give the name of Eghnidal to my friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald, for which I hope he will remember me

as long as he lives. The name belongs to the Bear Tribe.! The distinction conferred on Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the future leader of

the 1798 rebellion, came towards the end of an extended visit to America in 1788-89, which brought him into contact with the rigours of life in the wilderness. In the grip of a Canadian winter, he charted a new route, ‘never before attempted, even by Indians’, which halved the distance between New Brunswick and Quebec, before proceeding south through the woods to Niagara and the United States. Though arduous in the extreme, the whole undertaking proved exhilarating to the young, uneasy aristocrat: There is something in a wild country very enticing; taking its inhabitants, too, and their manner into the bargain. I know Ogilvie [i.e. his foster-father] says I ought to have been a savage, and if it were not that the people I love and wish to live with are civilized people, and like houses, &c., &c., Ireally would join the savages; and, leaving all our fictitious, ridiculous wants, be what nature intended we should be. Savages

have all the real happiness of life, without any of those inconveniences, or real obstacles to it, which custom has introduced among us.¥

Lord Edward’s encounter with the American Indians came at a time when the political ideals of the Western Enlightenment were moving into a triumphant phase following the American and French revolutions. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ wrote Wordsworth, but not everyone basked in the radiance of that new dawn. As the principles of the new democratic order evolved in practice, it gradually became apparent that universal declarations of human rights extended to individuals but not to cultures: while all human beings were equal, some cultures were less equal than others, and their destruction was justified in the name of progress. Thus the benefits of the Enlightenment, as we have seen, did not extend

to indigenous or dispossessed cultures, or what were, from the standpoint of progress, considered ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ societies. In America, to do otherwise would have meant acknowledging the rich cultural heritage of Native Americans, but their only mention in the Declaration of Indepen-

dence is as ‘merciless Indian savages’. Or as Thomas Jefferson himself ruefully expressed it in 1812: This unfortunate race whom we have been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination, and now await our decision on their fate.14

By the same token in France, the ruthless suppression of counter-revolutionary peasant culture in the Vendée was echoed in the discussions of the Convention in year 11 of the Revolution which proposed that minority

88 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

languages such as Breton and Basque should be ‘smashed’ or ‘obliterated’. Following the precedent of their Scottish counterparts, the aim in both cases was to transform natives into citizens of the world, removing all traces of cultural difference or diversity from political or economic life. If natives proved unreceptive to this higher self, the only alternative, as Jefferson remarked, was to consign them to oblivion, as members of cultures

doomed to extinction. That racism and cultural intolerance were not incidental but major components of the Enlightenment is clear from its narrow conceptions of ‘progress’ and ‘universality’. Not only were ‘primitive’ cultures excluded from the remit of civilization, but the whole rationale of progress was built on their exclusion. The very idea of ‘primitivism’, of profound time-lags between cultures with associated notions of ‘anachronism’ and ‘obsolescence’, was itself a product of new ‘stages theories’ popularized by the Scottish

social theorists such as Smith, Adam

Ferguson,

and William

Robertson. What is remarkable about the United Irishmen is that though firmly wedded to Enlightenment principles, they refused to buy into such hierarchical concepts of culture. During his protracted stay in the US, Archibald Hamilton Rowan expressed the same romantic longings for life in the wilderness as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, but also shared with him the determination to include oppressed minorities within his pastoral vision. Responding to conflicting advice to settle down in Philadelphia, or to buy a small farm, he writes: I will do neither; I will go to the woods; but I will not kill Indians, nor

keep slaves. Good God! if you heard some of the Georgians, or the Kentucky people, talk of killing the natives! Cortes, and all that followed him, were not more sanguinary in the South, than they would

be in North America.’® Crucially, moreover, the United Irishmen’s concern for the plight of dispossessed peoples derived not just from the abstract universalism of the Rights of Man, but from their own sense of time and place, their regard for the beleaguered native culture of their own country. While the ‘noble savage’ for the most part was transferred to distant lands, or to remote antiquity, ‘the Celt’, and particularly Gaelic culture in Britain, was considered

to be the last outpost of the doomed

races of

Western Europe: ‘Nobody can suppose,’ wrote the great apostle of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, ‘that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque

to be assimilated into advanced French forms of civilization than to sulk on his own rocks, the half savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.” Friedrich Engels, speaking in the name of the ‘internationalism’ of Marxism, was even more explicit.

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment

89

Dismissing the ‘ethnic trash’ left behind by the march of history as inherently reactionary, he said that they would remain so ‘until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character ... Such in Scotland are the Gaels ... Such in France are the Bretons.’!” Set against this backdrop, the spectacle of ten infirm harpers — seven of them blind, one over a hundred years of age — assembled in Belfast by friends of the United Irishmen during the Bastille Day celebrations in 1792, must have seemed an affront to the Enlightenment. Yet in many ways, the Harper's Festival, organized by Henry Joy McCracken and others, prefigured one of the most important trends in contemporary multicultural debates, the return of the native to the centre of the political stage. Instead of cutting themselves off from ‘participation or interest in the general movement of the world’, as Mill thought, it was precisely a greater sensitivity towards the ‘ethnic trash’ of one’s own culture that opened up wider vistas of tolerance and diversity among the United Irishmen. For this reason, they had no compunction about classifying other cultures as civilizations, in marked

contrast

to the tendency to dehumanize

them

as

inferior or primitive peoples languishing in the wake of progress. Writing from exile in the US, William Sampson ridiculed English imputations of barbarism to the Irish language and Gaelic culture, since, he argued, the

clotted language of British legal system, as eulogized by Sir William Blackstone and Sir Edward Coke, would itself put the Irish language to shame: Indeed, [he wrote] some of the very acts of parliament, enacting penalties against those that spake Irish, or dwelt among the Irishry, are such a queer compound of Danish, Norman, hog-latin and I know not what, as to be the most biting satires upon the Englishry, and those that spake

English.'®

And as for those who, like Coke, saw in the stability and longevity of the British Constitution the proof of its superiority to others, Sampson remarks: All I can say of it is this, that the same panegyric will apply totidem verbis to the institutions of our red brethren, the Iroquois. The league of the five nations is similar to that of the heptarchy [into which ancient Britain was divided] . . . The five nations think themselves, by nature,

superior to the rest of mankind, and call themselves Onque honwee . . ONQUE HONWEE, then say I away with your old barons, kings, monks, and druids . . . If we look to antiquity the red men have it. If we

regard duration, they have it still more, for the Picts and the Britons have long ceased to dye themselves sky-blue. The Indian paints himself

for war, even to this day.”

In this conscious inversion of Enlightenment categories of progress and primitivism, Sampson makes it clear that his mockery of British law is not aimed at the Constitution as such, but at its claims to superiority over others: all he intends to show, he says, is that ‘there are other systems as

90 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

good’.2” Among these are the legal codes of Scotland and Ireland. Even when the Scots were defeated and brought to heel by English military might, they still would not accept the superiority of English law, for all its divine wisdom: If, then, so important a portion of the British island can do so well without any part of the common law, can it be necessary for us to adopt superstitiously every part of it? The Irish had the common law forced on them .. . [They] had an ancient code which they revered. It was called the law of the judges, or the Brehon law. What it was, it is difficult

to say; for with the other interesting monuments of the nation’s antiq-

uity, it was trodden under the hoof of the satyr that invaded her.”

He then argues that so far from disappearing in the mists of time, like the legacy of the mythical Ossian in the Scottish Highlands, the Brehon laws kept resurfacing in the Irish political landscape until the policies of extirpation in the early modern period: No wonder that the ‘wild natives,’ even in the days of Elizabeth, still kept and preserved their Brehon law, of which [even] its enemies are constrained to say, ‘that it was a rule of right,’ unwritten, but declared by tradition from one to another, (like the common law,) in which

oftentimes there appeared great equity, though it was repugnant both

to God’s laws and man’s.”

One of the most powerful rhetorical strategies of the Enlightenment was to generate its own accommodating ‘other’ in the form of Romanticism, and new aestheticized notions of culture. Hence Adam Smith’s observation that while Gaelic facilitated poetry and things of the spirit, it was useless in the humdrum

world of the marketplace. Culture, in a sense, became

a

consolation for injustice, for all those areas of experience — nature, community, the past, even physical pleasure itself — excluded from the march of progress. It was left to Romanticism, then, to pick up where the Enlightenment left off, offering the imaginary realms of myth, nostalgia, and artistic creativity for those deprived of equality, liberty, and fraternity in the political and economic spheres. Perhaps the most distinctive and lasting contribution of the United Irishmen was to resist this fatal dissociation between aesthetics and politics, between culture and the public sphere. Hence, for example, the Irish language was conceived not just as an exotic or archaic mode of expression, something to be relegated to the archive or the drawing room, but as indispensible equipment for living. This is the logic of Sampson’s determination to consider Gaelic as a source of an alternative legal discourse — the Brehon laws — with different concepts of property and social justice rather than the possessive individualism of plantations and conquest. By the same token, the United Irishmen also saw Gaelic as central to any democratic vision of Irish society as it was then

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment

91

constituted, and particularly for the kind of access to communications that is the basis of the public sphere. As their newspaper The Northern Star put it in 1795, emphasizing its importance for economics as well as art: It is particularly interesting to all who wish for the improvement and Union of this neglected and divided Kingdom. By our understanding and speaking it we could more easily and effectually communicate our sentiment and instructions to our countrymen; and thus mutually improve and conciliate each other's affections. The merchant and artist would reap great benefit from it. They would then be qualified for carrying on Trade and Manufactures in every part of their native country.”

Participation in public affairs should not entail the loss but the strengthening of one’s culture — that is, if culture is itself brought within the domain of rights and justice rather than relegated to the margins of society. For the United Irishmen, Gaelic culture was a living presence, a force to be reckoned with. ‘It is new strung, and shall be heard’, ran the motto of

the new movement, under the politically charged emblem of a maiden harp, divested of its official crown. The subaltern culture of the dispos-

sessed was imbued not just with romantic pathos but with radical sentiment, as befitted the optimism of the Enlightenment. The poet Thomas Moore recounted how on playing ‘Let Erin Remember’ from Edward Bunting’s collection of native airs for Robert Emmet, the young rebel exclaimed passionately: ‘Oh, that I were at the head of twenty thousand men marching to that air!’ It is in Moore’s Melodies, written in the

bitter aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, that we first encounter the notes of wistfulness and regret that came to be associated with much of Irish cultural nationalism. Moore is often compared to Sir Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands in this regard, eulogizing an exotic culture while ensuring its sell-by date had passed. But while Moore does indeed pine for a world that was lost, and registers the catastrophic effect of the rebellion,

1798 is not Ireland’s Culloden. Like Blake’s bard, who ‘Present, Past & Future, sees’, the United Irishmen invoke the past not just for lost opportunities, but for alternative ways of thinking about the future. This is perhaps the most valuable legacy which the 1790s imparts to a new century, as we look again to the lessons of history for possibilities of renewal in the present.

Between Filiation and Affiliation The Politics of Postcolonial

Memory

KEVIN WHELAN

The Levels of Memory Paul Ricoeur has recently emphasized three levels of memory in an ethical context.! The first level is the pathological or therapeutic, as initially explored by Freud in his Metapsychology of 1914, with its pivotal question — what constitutes an acceptable past? Both an excess of memory or a lack of it can be equally damaging; abuse can be lodged in the psyche as wounds, scars of memory, which never fully heal. The work of memory (travail de mémoire) is to establish a proper balance between mourning and melancholia.? While mourning involves the reconciliation of self with the loss of objects of love, melancholia internalizes the loss as a despairing longing for reunification, and is therefore condemned to repetition (as a damaged form of resistance to the reality principle). Freud talks of the process of moving from melancholia to mourning (by moving from repetition, through remembering to reconciliation). At the individual level as well as the national level, this is necessary to move beyond an excessive or arepressed memory, which leads only to repetition or melancholia. The second level of memory is pragmatic, the level which links memory to identity, through answering the vulnerable question ‘who am I’? This involves the issue of sameness and transformation through time (is the ‘T’

of today the same ‘I’ as the ‘I’ of a decade ago?). It also involves the issue of sameness and difference — the problem of the ‘other’ as a threat to oneself. This is accentuated where the problem of violence exists as in postcolonial situations. If violence is the originating moment in the mobilization of collective identity, cultural memory then becomes a storage system of violence, wounds, scars, anger. The third level of memory is the ethical or political. Memory is not a static, narcissistic or inviolate monolith; it is always possible to educate or

heal memory, through the suasion of narrative, which adjudicates between memory and forgetting. Memory is not coercive or intransigent; the

92

Between Filiation and Affiliation

93

availability of narrative enables choice in the creating (or fusing) of personal and collective identity. Narrative means that it is always possible to tell it another way; that possibility opens a space for the ‘other’, a space for dialogue, a negotiation of narratives. At this discursive level, the possibility of an ethical memory becomes available. Its ethical force derives from its desire to open the past to the future, to help construct that future through recourse to the exemplarity of the past. Ethical memory is directed towards the future not the past. It avoids the entropy of the traumatic version of memory, fixated permanently in the past. It is regulated by the horizon of justice, seeking a memory which is just to the victims as well as the victors, while it seeks to inaugurate new institutions which guard against recurrence. The existence of all three levels argues for the necessity of memory — not merely as a form of knowledge, but as an action (‘exercising our memories’). There is a duty to remember

(devoir de mémoire), because of the

inescapable linkage between past and future. We can see this in a number of ways. Memory is a necessary stay against the annihilating force of time and its erosion of traces. It is also a fundamentally human capacity, which, as Hannah Arendt has reminded us, enables a continuation of action in the

face of death.* Memory allows us to liberate ourselves from the ligatures of the past through the capacity for forgiveness; it also establishes a link to the future through the capacity for promising — a capacity to be bound by one’s words. Memory also makes us heirs of the past (what we call heritage) and its utopian possibilities. The promise of a historical event is always more than what actually happened. There is more in the past than what happened; at any given point in time, multiple trajectories toward the future were possible. Memory can restore this openness to the past, and thereby nourish the utopian instinct — we can reactivate unkept promises to create a better future by restoring lost opportunities, and betrayed possibilities. This dialogue of memory and expectation safeguards a radical memory — which also keeps alive the memory of suffering and defeat against the obliterative force of the victors’ narrative — the Hegelian principle that all that is left behind is lost — and well lost. Radical memory allows for the parallel creation of a counterpoint history, of loss, of victimization, of humiliation.° All this raises the possibility that there may be a duty to forget as well as to remember, that there is a close link between amnesty and amnesia. There may be a duty to go beyond anger and hatred to achieve a new horizon of justice, a culture with a just memory. While keeping the trace of event, while reconciling past and future, we can relinquish the hatred; memory can then aid restorative rather than retributive justice, balanced between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. In the Republic of Ireland, a distinctive history has imparted a curious trajectory to the nation-state. Firstly, it was the successor state to a colonial

94

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

power which penetrated massively if unevenly every facet of the economy, society and culture. Ireland was England’s oldest colony, as well as its first postcolony; Northern Ireland is its last colony. Ireland also has the oldest literature in English outside England as well as the earliest explicit and theoretically aware criticism in a postcolonial mode — Seathrun Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (1624). Yet, Ireland occupies an uneasy anchorage in postcolonial studies, due perhaps to its location (within Europe, and the modern First World) and to its dominant pigmentation (Thomas Carlyle had referred to it as a ‘white Haiti’). The anomalies of Ireland’s postcolonial status clarify if we look at it more precisely within typologies of colonialism. In Fieldhouse’s terms, for example, we must broadly see Ireland as a ‘settler’ colony, a group which includes South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia and Palestine.? More minutely, we might then want to look at what type of settler colony it was — mixed (like South American examples), or ethnic (like Canada, the United States or Australia) but strongly marked by religion. It would also be possible to see the Irish Free State and the later Republic of Ireland as examples of Fieldhouse’s other category — ‘administrative’ colonies run by military, fiscal and administrative élites. This distinction is crucial to the decolonization phase — which is typically easier to implement in ‘administrative’ rather than ‘settler’ colonies. Many Irish postcolonial studies proceed as if Ireland was an administrative colony (like India) thereby focusing on the post-partition South and ignoring the intractable ‘settler’ problem of the unionist population of the North. Second, the successor state sponsored a nationalistic project, constructed around the hegemonic bloc of the national bourgeoisie (agrarian and small business), and intertwining the state with the Church, education and media. Culturally, the new state lived within the paradigms created by the gifted generations of ideologues between 1880 and 1920 notably Cusack, Hyde, Pearse, Yeats and Corkery — who created the Gaelic

Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, the Irish Literary Revival, the Abbey Theatre, and a Catholic nationalist version of Irish history. This was a classical example of ‘the invention of tradition’, the summoning up of the imagined community, with all its dangers of the inward turn, with the

resultant postcolonial paralysis — the ossifying orthodoxy of the emergent nationalistic state which retains the institutional and ideological apparatus of the prior colonial state.’ The last quarter of the twentieth century in Ireland witnessed the collapse of that specific postcolonial version of identity. Within the compressed span of three generations then, Irish people have discarded a double set of imposed identities — colonial and nationalist. This double dislocation has created acute problems of representation. In the colonial model, the Irish were simply the deformed Calibans of colonial projection, who saw themselves in ‘the cracked looking glass of a servant’. But the postcolonial state merely applied a thin green veneer to disguise the awkward grain of Irish history. Culture was subordinated to

Between Filiation and Affiliation

95

the service of politics — culture as the self-conscious construction and mobilization of difference. The state’s cultural nationalism then became the effort to retrieve an authentic tradition, whose continuity differentiates the

primordial nation from those who occupy it. Culture initially has to act as the site of self-differentiation, and therefore of resistance; but once that

resistance becomes successful, the new state must then redeem the culture by cleansing it of its colonial impurities, and retrieving that which had been blemished or repressed. The cultural nationalism of the postcolonial state anxiously seeks the pure, the original, the authentic, the traditional, as a means to recuperate a depleted plenitude.’ This is the nationalistic fetish brilliantly mocked by Beckett: What constitutes the charm of our country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without help of the meanest contraceptive, is that all is derelict with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Elysium of the roofless. Hence my happiness at last. Lie down, all seems to say, lie

down and stay down.?° The postcolonial Irish state had a problem, however; if the nation existed

essentially as a narrative strategy, how could any narrative authority and closure be achieved, when Ireland’s history was so obviously contested and

broken? Sean O’Faolain diagnosed this aphasic and anorexic past as a symptom of Ireland’s hollow incompleteness: Our history has seemed to fade from the land like old writing from parchment. Traditional memory is broken. Our monuments are finest when oldest; but then so old that their echoes have died away. The pietas which is so cherished and nourished in other countries, has here an inadequate number of actual moulds to hold it. National emotion is a wild sea-spray that evaporates like a religion without a ritual. We are moved by ghosts. Something powerful and precious hangs in the air that holds us like a succubus; but what it is we can hardly define

because we have so few concrete things that express it.”

For O’Faolain, the Irish obsession with the past created a mummified society, constantly marooned between an unattainable past from which they were evicted and an attainable future which they were incapable of embracing: We lived under the hypnosis of the past, our timidities about the future, our excessive reverence for old traditions, our endemic fear of new ways, of new thinking, the opiate of that absurd historical myth, and,

the horror of the feeling of solitude that comes on every man who dares to push out his boat from the security of his old, cosy, familiar harbour into unknown seas.”

96

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Faced with the problem of creating what Nietzsche called ‘a past from which we can spring’, three strategies were available to overcome the tainted versions bequeathed by Ireland’s colonial past — ‘the malady of history’. The first, and simplest, was to generate a Plutarchan version of that history — an edifying story in which all that was not heroic or simple was erased, and in which the achievement of the state became the proper end of society. It could exist in three forms: the emulatory (as with Pearse, with his recourse to CG Chulainn and Tone) or the minatory (as with Yeats, who

used Grattan, Burke and Goldsmith in a heroically false genealogy to berate the squalor of contemporary Irish society). The second was mythic. Recognizing that Irish history was incoherent, inchoate and discontinuous, it sought to transcend its paralyzing contingency through myth, which imposed stability and order on the dishevelled, ramshackle reality. In the hands of great masters like Joyce, this mythic version had enormous potential, but it could also cohabit with the Plutarchan model, spawning mundane, congealed versions, as in the Christian Brothers teaching schema. The third version of history was rememorative — seeking to write back in that which had been erased or submerged — as in Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland (1925).*

The prodigious creativity of the 1880-1920 generation shrivelled as it was formalized in the new state into a reified command culture, with an officially approved version of Irish history and identity. This artificially constructed identity - Roman

Catholic not Protestant, rural not urban,

Celtic not Anglo-Saxon, agrarian not industrial, religious not secular — was imposed in the name of tradition but its utopian conservatism congealed into de Valera’s intolerably dreary Eden — a case study of Foucault’s aphorism that ‘the state is the coldest of cold monsters’. However, like its colonial predecessor, it too was a lightly incised inscription which dissolved rapidly through the internationalization of capital, the impact of global communications, rapid social transformations, the creation of an extensive

underclass and shifting gender roles. Over time, this hollow edifice was crumbling for the knocker’s ball which hit it full frontally in the 1970s. The early shift in the demolition squad included Conor Cruise O’Brien and Hugh Leonard; the later shift had Roy Foster, Colm Toibin and Fintan O'Toole. The shallow construction of inert Irishness offered little resistance. However, this well-directed negativity has found it difficult to refashion an

agreed Ireland, although busy scrabbling in the rubble. It has itself congealed into ossified orthodoxy whose caricature is the Sunday Independent or the more raucous brands of revisionism. These strands of opinion are all vociferously opposed to postcolonial analysis of the Irish situation. Their argument essentially revolves around chronology: ‘modern’ Ireland began in 1916, and the only appropriate time frame for understanding it has to set the clock running then. Any efforts to broaden the time frame are evasive — a delusional retreat from the reality

Between Filiation and Affiliation

97

that modern Ireland (for which read the Republic) can be understood only

as a construction of Irish people themselves alone — and a hopeless construction at that. This foreshortened history of Ireland is especially congenial to Irish-born commentators for a British public, like Toibin, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Sean McCarthy or O'Toole. They constitute in Macaulay’s terms, ‘a class between us’ — Joyce’s ‘tame geese’ who allow the colonist to salve his guilty conscience.* A further — and recognizably British — strand of this argument is the empiricist line that postcolonialism is a ‘one size fits all’ travelling theory which coerces the complexity of the world into an ideological straitjacket. The anti-theoretical stance, arguing for concretized fact against exorbitant concept, has the unintended effect of reinserting nationalist exceptionalism under the guise of complexity — the rich specificity of the Irish situation is such that no ‘simple’ model of colonialism can ever capture its uniqueness. This revisionist position also seeks to rescue Ireland from being lumped in with India, Africa or South America — revisionist historiography can be seen as an effort to provide a First World memory for a First World country, as opposed to Luke Gibbons’s much cited aphorism: ‘Treland is a first world country with a third world memory.’ This discussion has implications for the distinction made by Pierre Nora between memory and history.” Memory is spontaneous, social, collective and encompassing; borne by living societies, it is permanently evolving like a coral reef, with a cumulative, incremental view of the past. Living memory is condensed in myth, the collective construction of memory, in which is

embedded its defining narrative. Active myth is a form of legitimization of the present by the past, and it belongs to a nation not an individual. The aggressive acceleration of the tempo of change has ruptured this linkage. State-nations have given way to state-societies in which history as a professional discipline defines the self-knowledge of society, not memory. The result is the privatization of memory within the individual psychology of remembering (the domain of Freud and Bergson). In these circumstances,

history as a discipline has to undertake the task of reconstructing what is no longer. History is pre-eminently an intellectual and secular pursuit, whereas memory is affective and magical. As a result, in Nora’s phrase, ‘History is perpetually suspicious of memory and its true mission is to annihilate it.” This subversion, conquest and eradication of memory-history by criticalhistory is the crucial recent development in the notion of time; modern secular societies no longer operate within the force-field of memory, which they peremptorily dismiss as the atavistic temporality of tradition. The extraordinary force of Nora’s analysis clarifies the evolution of the revisionist debate in Irish historiography. At the start of Robert Kee’s television history of Ireland, the camera hovers obsessively close to the ground, scanning the cobbles of a Belfast street, while an old woman with a distinc-

tively Cork accent intones the heavily nationalist version of Irish history which she learned in school. This sequence discloses history as secreted in

98 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the stones — in the very ground reproduced by oral narrative (in the memory, of Nora’s distinction) — and its negative association is spectacularly revealed in the closing shot — of a massive bomb erupting out of the Belfast streets, drowning out the droning Cork voice. The next shot is taken synoptically from a helicopter panning over the Irish terrain and accompanied by Kee’s standard estuarine English voice. Here, the medium is the message; high level survey versus ground truth; centre versus periphery; professional versus amateur. The angels of intellect and rationality have to vanquish the demons of instinct and tradition, lucid logic exorcizing an enchanting realm. This involves binary oppositions — rational versus emotional, objective versus subjective, sceptical versus credulous. Hence, the hygienic tropes of revisionism — of stripping, cleansing, disinfecting the toxicity of a memory-history. Characteristic too is the strict insistence on chronological exactness — history privileges events, whereas memory is attached to sites; history is experienced as a product, whereas memory exists as process. These distinctions provide a context for understanding revisionist myopia about myth, and also for why its project brutally abbreviates ‘traditional’ Ireland into the truncated caricature which the new state endorsed in its version of command culture. In following Lyons rather than Lyotard, in their crude distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history’, Irish historians are in thrall to an even more striking myth — that history itself is not a form of myth, and that it alone can escape the constructive element of

narrative form. Irish Modernism and the Famine

An often-asked question in literary studies is about the relationship between modernism and peripherality.’* Why has modernism, especially its British manifestation, a peripheral rather than a metropolitan phenomenon? Why did Ireland produce so many modernists (Joyce, Yeats, Moore, Wilde, Shaw, Synge) and England so few? An Irish answer to this question might begin by claiming that the nameless decentred subject of modernism is very like the colonial subject. The colonial encounter in Ireland has already created a sense of history out of synchronicity, and a hollowed-out identity. The Irish were already linguistically estranged, between two languages culturally adrift. The modernist viewed language as an object to be attacked from outside, an externalized monolith to be sculpted by the

artist, with his heightened awareness of language. Such a viewpoint is more readily available to those who are already aware of the instability of language — the Yeatsian position that ‘Irish is my national language but English is my mother tongue’.”? This linguistic position is already estranged and sufficiently distanced to allow use of the English language while escaping the specific gravities of its traditions, the dense weight of its parochialisms. An aesthetic virtue can be wrung from historical necessity, turning linguistic disenfranchisement to advantage.

Between Filiation and Affiliation

99

This creates the possibility of what Seamus Deane has identified as a dialectic between dumbness and eloquence.” The Irish literacy revival could be seen as an extravagant discourse in the English language about dumbness in the Irish language. It constantly sought access to a world elsewhere — the world of Gaelic civilization - dismissed, expunged, unknowable, vanished — whose very absence must be articulated or ‘summoned’ — to use aYeatsian word. That articulation requires a new language that is not exactly English even if it is English-based. This is also a culturally diagnostic, a linguistic parable of post-Famine Ireland, which brilliantly illuminates Benjamin’s aphorism: ‘No one has ever known mastery in anything who has not first known incompetence.’ These cultural conditions are those of post-Famine Ireland. We can think of Beckett's terse ‘nothing is more real than nothing’ as a gloss on cultural change after the Famine, as indeed is his famous retort to the question

whether he was a British writer — ‘au contraire’.2" His personal predicament, voiced in 1968, can be seen as a brilliant parable of the postcolonial subject: ‘I have always sensed that there was within me an assassinated being. Assassinated before my birth. I needed to find this assassinated person again. And try to give him new life.’* One final annotation is necessary here. The conditions of colonized Ireland cannot be adequately accommodated within the canonical British forms of representation, like

the realist novel.” This forces Irish writing to be both in its search for alternative representational forms and its own procedures, because these alternative forms insufficiently canonical, and are therefore unratifiable

highly experimental always subversive of are always deemed or corrupt. Here, we

can see a long line from Tristram Shandy to James Clarence Mangan, to

Joyce and Flann O’Brien. In other words, Irish literature is always a minor literature, because it is a colonial literature — disempowered by the canonical forms of the colonizer’s discourse, re-empowered by the experimental quest for alternatives to it. Irish literature seeks to rewrite its marginality as anew centrality, as its precociously decentred colonial subject becomes the classic modern subject. This becomes clearer if we consider Derrida’s recent meditation on monolingualism. He explicitly identifies himself as piednoir located behind the triple dislocation of being alienated from the Arabic Berber languages of Algeria, the French language of France, and from his Jewish origins.

Derrida — like the Irish writers of the Revival — is eloquent about the silence, about the ‘terror’ of a hyphenated identity, about the chasm created by the transvoiding of memory, and about the consequent instability of his voice: ‘I was the first to be afraid of my own voice, as if it were not mine to contest it, even to detest it.’*4 Derrida has no source language, only a target

language, no language of the past only of the future. This aphasia creates the unappeasable desire for a first language — a mourning for what one never had — a language of the ‘other’ but radically different from the

100

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

language of the ‘other’ as the language of the master or colonist. This other language would speak the memory of the originary defect, would describe what did not happen, would be a language of spectrality, negative traces and scars. Since this prior language does not exist, it must be generated from within the resources of the existing given language. This is the double hand that Derrida possesses in relation to French — a hand recording out to touch and thank, a hand to restrain, and to keep him at a distance. He describes this impulse of love and of aggression as a caressing of French with borrowed claws, as he feels both outside and inside the language. The outside space is an elsewhere whose geography and language were unknown and prohibited — an elsewhere to which Derrida feels that he has been exported in advance. A linguistic alien, his mantra becomes ‘I have

only one language and it is not mine.’ As we have seen, this is also the linguistic position of a Joyce or a Beckett. It is not unique to Derrida. Héléne Cixous — with her Spanish/French/Jewish father, and her German/

Jewish mother — has similarly stressed her Algériance and its curious sense of having departed but never having arrived.” Joyce, Modernism, and the Famine

It is possible to discern two strands within modernism. ‘Right’ modernism (Eliot, Pound, Lewis) suggests a unified, authentic Western culture, of hier-

archy and social order, with an organic cultural unity and no ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Mournful and elegiac, it laments the loss of the organic community, Gemeinschaft, a victim of the alienating anomie of modern industrial society. ‘Left’ modernism (Beckett, Joyce, Brecht) accepted this deracination and was uncompromisingly avant-garde and determinedly political — as in futurism, constructivism, surrealism. It celebrated the demotic not the élitist, the urban not the rural, and delivered it in the

hybrid multiplicity of a fragmented tradition. The choice between these two forms of modernism was cultural as well as individual. The ‘right’ wing model of a deep past opposed to a shallow present was not available to Joyce — because an Irish deep past no longer existed. It had been eviscerated by a dual colonialism — the English and the Roman — that curious complicity of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism which made Ireland ‘the scullery maid of Christendom’ and the home of ‘the gratefully oppressed’.** So thorough was the evacuation that an indigenous Irish culture could no longer be resuscitated even by a determined policy of cultural revival — to believe otherwise was to live in a world of Gaelic kitsch,

by ‘the broken lights of ancient myth’. The only reality bequeathed by the Irish past is a treadmill of brute repetition — the endless circling of Johnny Morkan’s horse around King Billy’s statue in ‘The Dead’. Modern Ireland is haunted by the afterlife of that deeper world from which it is permanently estranged. And here is Joyce’s most profound insight: the Irish in this condition are not deprived of modernity; they literally embody it.2° Their

Between Filiation and Affiliation

101

provincialism and alienation is central to the condition of modernity, not its benighted opposite. For Joyce then, to be colonized is also to be modern; the derivative shallow identity of the Irish subject is also the classic modern identity. In Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce employs a repetitive lexicon to describe this colonized world — spectral, shrivelled, stale, vague, mean, dull, dark, melancholy, sombre, sour, sullen, gaunt, bleak, bitter,

denuded, pallid, grey, servile, consumptive, narrow, tawdry, gloomy, listless. It is a world of shadows, condemned

always to the second hand, to an

identity based on alienation from self and others. In ‘The Dead’, the highpoint of Dublin culture, as it appears at the dinner party, is a forgotten legion of second-rate Italian and English opera singers. Joyce’s critique is not just an abstract, generalizing one and it is profoundly rooted in a searingly penetrating analysis of post-Famine Irish culture. In chapter 5 of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus walks from northside to southside across Dublin city, and his journey in space quickly becomes one in time. Stephen draws parallels between the paralysis of ‘a bleak decaying seaport’ and his own unease, while contemplating a series of versions of Ireland. Passing ‘the great dull stone’ of Trinity College, he rejects ‘the fetters of the reformed conscience’, before engaging with nationalistic Ireland. In its cultural manifestations, he contemptuously dismisses the dutiful bad verse of Thomas Moore, ‘the nationalist poet of Ireland’ and the

Gaelic Revival — as symbolized by the GAA and the Gaelic League. In a long passage, he explores the Hidden Ireland concept, before turning away from ‘the broken lights of ancient myth’. And having rejected literary nationalism (Moore), the Irish language, popular nationalism, the GAA, he

also rejects political nationalism, in a consideration of the ‘tawdry tribute’ of the Wolfe Tone monument.** The Irish past, as with the character of Michael Furey in’The Dead’, can only return to the present as an absence — the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral. Stephen then traverses

Stephen’s Green

to Newman

House, where

in a remarkable

passage, he registers his unease at Roman Catholicism as he passes down a proleptically Kafkaesque corridor: The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the Jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of

Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.”

These reflections precede the celebrated encounter with the English Jesuit, with its equally alienating reverberations: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on

mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His

102 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired

speech.*

This remarkable chapter ushers in the equally celebrated conclusion of the novel, where Stephen rejects the nets of nationality, language and religion, combating them with the weapons of exile, silence and cunning. This has usually been taken as Joyce’s dismissal of Ireland but it should more properly be taken as his well-informed judgement on the nature of post-Famine Ireland. He rejects essentially the Ireland of the Devotional Revolution, of the second-hand language, of a spurious nationalism. Joyce would have endorsed Yeats’s stinging rebuke of Irish culture as ‘one made timid by a modern popularization of Catholicism sprung from the aspidistra and not from the roots of Jesse’.34 Read in this way, although it is never overtly mentioned, Joyce’s book, beneath its taut surface, is acutely informed by the prowling presence of the Famine. Escaping the despised post-Famine present, only two options are open: a retreat into the Irish past (rejected as unavailable except in a shallow revivalism), or a soaring flight of aesthetic transcendence. This second solution is dangerous and potentially deforming, a free fall without the parachute cords of memory and identity. In this reading, the Famine is the unnamed horror at the heart of Joyce’s Irish darkness, the conspicuous exclusion that is saturatingly present as a palpable absence deliberately being held at bay, ‘the terror of soul of a starving Irish village’.*® As a counterweight to the vacuity of post-Famine Irish culture, Joyce and the other Irish modernists espoused the importance of representation as a process which rescues presence and fullness from depletion and shrivelling. Joyce, Wilde, O’Casey, Beckett, Shaw and Yeats were all from Dublin, which so glaringly presented that pallid vacuum. A cult of representation for all of them becomes a means by which the political can be replaced by the aesthetic. The artist restores the aura in the aesthetic realm which had been stripped by the brute contingencies of politics. The aesthetic absorbs and then saturates the political. This process also requires a cult of the artist-self created as at once intimate and exilic, immersed in reality but detached from ‘the local stupidity’ (Pound). Here is the classic modernist stance, which required, as Nietzsche shrewdly observed, ‘the pathos of distance’ to allow for the creation of the autonomous work of art. In Ireland, that pathos of distance was cultural not individual, the distance

travelled from an indigenous Irish culture, securely grounded and selfsufficient. The Famine represented the most visible landmark on that terrible journey. There is a famous moment at the end of ‘The Dead’ where Gabriel Conroy becomes aware of the snow falling outside his hotel window: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark,

Between Filiation and Affiliation

103

falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling,

like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.*°

The snow here is not just an objective correlative of Gabriel’s psychic desolation. His comfortable middle-class journalistic world has just come apart at the seams with his devastating realization that the true love of his wife Gretta’s life was the young Galway man, Michael Furey, who had lost his life for the love of her. Gretta’s passion had been reawakened by the singing of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ — a folksong which summons the deep, oral, Irish-

language, Jacobite, Gaelic past of the west of Ireland. By contrast Gabriel occupies the shallow bourgeois present, typecast as a provincial journalist. He lives life vicariously, at a distance from it; throughout ‘The Dead’, he

observes things at second hand, as here where he is looking through a window — a recurrent metaphor for separation in this short story. Joyce uses the snow to move the scene from Dublin to the west of Ireland, ending in

the desolate graveyard ‘where Michael Furey lay buried’. Furey becomes a symbol of a rich passionate life which has vanished — it is now ‘barren’ — the vibrant life of pre-Famine Ireland, now safely paled by ‘crooked crosses’ (Roman Catholicism). The snow can then be seen as a metaphor for the cultural change in post-Famine Ireland — that stultifying pallor which the combination of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism imposed on Irish life, which reached its nadir in Dublin, ‘the mask of capital’.*”

Joyce’s snow recalls earlier moments in Irish literature. One of the inspirations of his short story was Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh Ye Dead’ — a favourite party piece of Joyce’s.3* Moore’s lyric concerns the Irish folk belief that the shades of men who have died on foreign soil (notably the Wild Geese) return to haunt their familiar and beloved places of origin. Moore’s politics ~ although thickly syruped and disguised — is radical here: the song returns to his familiar ground of vanished possibilities and the betrayed present.

His Ireland is haunted by the United Irishmen and their redemptive projects — the fading of the light which is a leitmotif in Moore for the defeat of their Enlightenment project and the consequent stasis in Ireland. Like his revenants in this lyric, Moore obsessively revisits the radical politics of his youth, before he and they had been evicted into the callous present — a cold world of shadows, of the living dead, of the broken dream. Moore’s master image is of the dead condemned to glacial cold, ‘to freeze ‘mid

Hecla’s snow’. In one sense, Joyce’s short story is a brilliant variation on

Moore’s lyric.

104

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

But it is not just Moore that is frozen into Joyce’s snow. His favourite Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, is also there, and his 1846 Famine poem ‘Siberia’.*? This oblique meditation on Famine revolves around the image of ‘the killing snows’. The poem mimics the trajectory by which the intimate human circadian rhythms gradually slow to an inhuman geological time. There is an inhuman violation of the body’s basic integrity; its barriers are breached by a grotesque invasion of materiality, an infestation which slows the blood to a sandy sludge. Consciousness is then displaced into a space beyond — beyond biology, beyond memory, beyond ethics. An entire culture is annulled, sinking into a glacial coma, a cultural deep freeze of silence, isolation and death. Human

time cedes to a chiliastic time,

beyond redemption. All of this is observed in the poem with the detached fascination of experiencing one’s own dissolution; its voice emanates not from a warm, living body but from a spectral mutant of it. Mangan tracks the Famine’s ontological violence — history's appalled reversion to geological time, into a space and a time which precede and follow human geography and human history and which are supremely indifferent to them. Again, we can feel the weight of Mangan’s snow impressed on Joyce’s snow — notably in the final sentences where Joyce generalizes out from Gabriel’s predicament. There is a further presence and pressure in the writing of this ending. Throughout Dubliners there are palpable echoes of George Moore — notably the ‘Zola’s ricochet’ Moore

of A Drama

in Muslin

(1886). Moore treats

Dublin as ‘a land of echoes and shadows’, whose precise physical description conveys ‘the moral idea of Dublin in 1882’, where ‘the souls of the

Dubliners blend and harmonize with their connatural surroundings’, in which ‘the poor shades go by, waving a mock-English banner over a waxwork

show’.*? This Dublin

is ‘a corpse,

quick with the life of the

worm’.*t For Moore, the city lay ‘mysteriously dead — immovable and mute beneath the moon, like a starved vagrant in the last act of a melodrama’.” Moore’s version of Dublin as a necropolis, a city of the dead, the leprous and the paralytic is powerfully present in Joyce’s Dubliners, and nowhere more so than in ‘The Dead’, which brilliantly reworks some of Moore’s motifs — the statue of O’Connell, the dinner party disrupted by a political discussion, the world of the journalist. One of these motifs is snow. In the

Galway-based section of his novel, Moore envisages the plain but intelligent Alice Barton — one of his ‘muslin martyrs’ — staring out the window at the snow-drenched west of Ireland landscape, as she comes to a realisa-

tion that there was no escape for her ‘from this awful mummery in muslin’, this ‘white death’: But through her gazing eyes the plain of virginal snow, flecked with the cold blue shadows of the trees, sank into her soul, bleaching it of every hope of joy; and, gathering suggestions from the surroundings, she saw a white path extending before her —a sterile way that she would have to

Between Filiation and Affiliation

105

tread — a desolate way, with no songs in its sullen air, but only sad sighs, and only stainless tears, falling, falling, ever falling — falling silently. Her life is weak and sterile, even as the plain of moonlight-stricken snow. Like it, she will fade, will pass into a moist and sunless grave, without leaving a trace of herself on the earth — this beautiful earth, built out of

and made lovely with love.¥

Much of this is recycled by Joyce, even to the famous chiasmic cadence of the ‘falling faintly’ — ‘faintly falling’ snow. Joyce has also redeployed Moore's use of a figure gazing through a window at snow as a metaphor for desolate detachment and isolation, and the snow as a proleptic evocation of future psychological pain. The snow in ‘The Dead’ then is not just weather. To be meteorologically accurate, rain is the more appropriate western weather — but this does not work so well in the economy of Joyce’s work, as we can see in his 1913 poem ‘She Weeps over Rahoon’, which rehearses the end of ‘The Dead’: ‘How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, / Ever unanswered, and the

dark rain falling.’“* Translating the rain into snow greatly intensifies the ramifying registers of ‘The Dead’; snow combines the personal and the cultural, while drawing on its many earlier figurative uses in the Irish literary tradition. Rememoration

There is an insistent concern for rememoration in the work of Toni Morrison, an awareness that ‘the act of imagination is bound up with memory’ and that individual memory and social memory are inextricably linked. In a vivid passage, she explores the links: They straightened out the Mississippi river in places to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that — remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our origi-

nal place. It is emotional memory, what the nerve and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding.”

In the recent commemoration of the Famine, the very visible presence of women was strikingly novel — from Mary Robinson and her poet laureate Eavan

Boland,

to Nuala

Ni Dhomhnaill,

Sinéad

O’Connor,

Christine

Kinealy, Alannah O'Kelly, Margaret Kelleher and many others, Irish women were actively involved in an act of cultural recuperation, of rememoration. This generation matured in a new paradigm of Irish history, which, for the first time, had to seriously acknowledge the presence of women. Boland attacked their marginalization within the historiographical consensus,

106

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

claiming that, with respect to representation, Irish women ‘always have been outside history’.*® As a result,

Womanhood and Irishness are metaphors for one another. There are resonances of humiliation, oppression, and silence in both of them and

I think you can understand one by experiencing the other.*”

The silence and invisibility increased in the case of the Famine dead and Irish women emigrants — victims of a double erasure. Much of the women’s response was an act of reclamation — as in Alannah O’Kelly’s installation pieces and performance pieces.* From 1992 to 1997, O’Kelly’s work included The Country Blooms — a Garden and a Grave (1992), The Sanctuary — Wastelands (1994), A Beathu (1996), Omés (1997) and Deoraiocht (1997). All explore O’Kelly’s responses

— anger, humiliation, sorrow — as a prelude to healing, through song, dance, keening and video. O’Kelly explains her Famine emphasis: ‘It just seemed so huge, a huge black area, such a big bloody deal. It swept through the country and changed it forever, changed the way things were going. It has to be good for us to awaken to it.’” Her work, as in Deoraiocht (translated as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’), oscil-

lates between the public and the personal. A common focus is the mound of Teampall Duach Mhor — a mass Famine grave which consists of an unstable mixture of bone and stone, held together only by the volatile sand, and vulnerable to erosion due to its liminal location on a remote Mayo seashore. O’Kelly’s work uses uncanny biological doublings — images of the barren mound juxtaposed with eerily beautiful video footage of her (similarly shaped) breast emitting milk under water. This dialogue between death and life, private and public, is an enduring theme. Deoraiocht also re-enacts her journey from her natal Gorey in County Wexford to An Ceathru Rua in Connemara — which is also for her a journey back through cultural and linguistic time. On the seashore, in a personal act of grieving her mother’s death, she videotapes her final letters to her mother washing in and out of the sea, and juxtaposes these private communications with images of formal workhouse records which evoke the Famine dead. Over this visual homage to ablution and dissolution, she dubs a sound track which mixes her own

keening with a faintly whispered litany of the names from the workhouse registers. The keen for O'Kelly is literally a woman’s voice, but she also uses it as a calling to consciousness, a response to the void. Other evocative images link the rotting carcass of a whale dissolving to bleached bones, to the Famine mound adjacent to it. O’Kelly uses it to suggest the Famine dissolution of an intact, Irish-speaking culture — a culture left high, dry and dying through the sheer rapidity of post-Famine change. A similar trope occurs in Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem sequence ‘Na Murutcha a Thriomaigh’ (‘The merpeople who dried on land’),5° which explores the devastating cultural change induced by the Famine, changes

Between Filiation and Affiliation

107

which made Irish people like ‘fish out of water’.5! ‘In our attempt never to know anything like the Great Famine again, we even changed language.’ ‘Ceol’ (‘Music’), for example, uses the snow metaphor one more time. The poet lies in bed, listening to the weather forecast which tells her that the west is under snow. She then flicks to a playing of ‘Las Cantigas de Santa Maria’.** This thirteenth-century Spanish music has a clear Moorish substrate, which survived official attempts to censor it, and which is still triumphantly audible seven centuries later. (The parallel of the Irish and English languages is inevitably present in this Irish language poem by its greatest modern practitioner.) The poem then proceeds to its climax: Eirim. Ta an spéir chomh glan, an domhan chomh folamh.

An duthaigh maguaird athraithe 6 thalamh. Braithim chomh dur, im’ phar ullamh

le scéal mo bheatha a riant air.

Ta an ceol go halainn. Cloisim an ghrian ag éirf ann is { ag rince fa thri sa spéir maidin fhuar reoite direach mar i seo

seacht gcéad éigin bliain 6 shin sa Spainn. Cuireann sé dathanna is foirmeacha ar foluain

im’ mheabhair ata chomh ban le paipéar,

chomh glan, éaddéchasach, le baile fearainn tréigthe 6n nDrochshaol ata cludaithe le sneachta I rise. The sky is so clear, the world so empty. The surrounding territory altered from the ground up. I feel the impulse to inscribe my life on this prepared parchment. The music is lovely. I hear the sun rising in it dancing through the sky, On a cold, frozen morning exactly like this 700 years ago in Spain. It conjures up colours and forms in my mind, that is as white as paper, as empty, as forlorn, as an abandoned, townland from the Famine,

obscured by snow.™

Triangulation: Filiation and Affiliation A crucial feature of all forms of representation is the space from which we speak or — to put it another way — the appropriate distance between filiation (that to which we are born) and affiliation (that to which we aspire). If we

are too close to filiation, we are asphyxiated by the pressure of proximity. If

108

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

we veer too far away, an excessive liberatory distance can be equally lethal (famously rehearsed in Burke’s savage assault on French Jacobins). Yet the

move between filiation and affiliation is the standard Enlightenment ploy: the distance travelled is the necessary space for instrumental rationality, which prevents complicity between a pliant, corporate intellectual and the state and its institutional practices. An appropriate distance creates the possibility, in Edward Said’s formulation, for ethical witness — the necessary distance from the thing addressed while simultaneously addressing one’s self to one’s culture.® If the distance is too far, the intellectual becomes scandalously detached to a point of pure indifference. In these circumstances, what is required is an agile, supple balancing act — a contrapuntal choreography which triangulates between the gravitational force-field of filiation (with its narcosis of atavism) and the alienation of an excessive affil-

iation. This negotiated buoyancy is the proper space of the intellectual or the artist, and the reconciling point between ethics and aesthetics. In Minima Moralia, Adorno finally endorses the autonomy of art — its necessary indifference to the conditions from which it arose, and the fact that it is not directly deducible from them, while not being entirely free of them either. The work of art is simultaneously disengaged and incriminated. Immersion in the archive of actuality will never produce a sufficient account of the otherness of art. Art realizes its emancipatory function in the creation of alternative futures. The very disengagement of art is therefore the analogue of human freedom, the instantiation of that which is not yet available. Adorno’s reflection helps us escape the pessimism of the postcolonial subject, and the vexed question of whether the subaltern can speak. The task of postcolonialism cannot just be a critique of forms of coercion, nor a recuperation of anterior futurities, which releases a repertoire of alternative possibilities. Postcolonialism must also constantly instantiate that movement of freedom which is art; it must constantly negotiate between memory and inspiration, between filiation and affiliation. We can finally revert to Ricoeur and his discussion of the truth claim of memory — the Kantian imperative of history as a record of what really happened (‘Wie es eigenlich gewesen’). If imagination is unleashed, history and memory remain leashed and faithful to the pastness of the past, and have always to return to the body count. The fundamental task of the historian is the retrieval of traces, the rescuing of voices, the expansion of the

archive. 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’. Ricoeur argues that ‘we must have trust in language as a weapon against violence, indeed the best weapon there is against violence’.** Testimony — of the historian, the intellectual, the artist — is the link between inspiration and memory, between mourning and melancholia, between filiation and affiliation.

Dumbness and Eloquence A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland SEAMUS DEANE

I In 1947, the centenary of the Irish Famine’s worst year, the Irish government asked the Irish Folklore Commission to send collectors and researchers around those parts of the country that had been most severely affected by the catastrophe, and to record what memories of that time still survived. The fruit of that labour, a formidable array of large folio volumes in which those memories were recorded in both Irish and English, is now housed in the Department of Irish Folklore at University College, Dublin. Two convictions dominate what was remembered. One was that the Famine did indeed have a genocidal dimension. Genocide was of a piece with traditional British government policies towards the Irish Catholic majority. The other, sometimes felt to be compatible with the belief in genocidal intent, sometimes not, sometimes entirely independent of it, was that there must have been a radical fault in Irish civilization, and most

especially in the Irish-speaking civilization, that allowed it to succumb so completely to the potato blight and all its attendant ills. Some of the old people interviewed — and necessarily, they were on average an elderly group — believed or remembered that their predecessors had believed that the Famine was a punishment from God; and whatever the responsibility of the British government or of anybody else, that it ultimately constituted a divine judgment on a way of life that did not deserve to survive and that had to be expunged. Victims often blame themselves; oppressed peoples are frequently absurd in their self-estimation. This material contains some classic examples of this mutilated condition. But it is interesting in other respects too. In it we see that in popular culture, a new phase of the long argument of the previous 250 years about Ireland’s relation to modernity and atrocity had already begun. Clearly, the beliefs recorded here were first articulated in print by John Mitchel, and have conventionally been associated with him

109

110

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

and with a fiercely resentful republicanism of which he is considered in some circles to be an early warning example. There is little doubt that Mitchel’s characterization of the Famine as an act of genocidal policy on the part of the British government informs many of these memories. To a much lesser extent, but still notably there, is also his belief that the influ-

ence of the Roman Catholic Church in advising people to accept their fate and to resign themselves to God’s will robbed the victims of their urge to resist and therefore allowed the export of food from the country and the evictions and clearances to take place without serious opposition. But these beliefs were scarcely unique to Mitchel, although he was certainly the most vivid exponent of them. The double impact of the two imperialisms, British and Roman, on the Irish psyche was to become a favoured topic in Irish writing after the Famine, most famously in Joyce’s fiction.’ The historical debate about nationalism and colonialism, which is also a debate about the relationship between modernity and atrocity, of which the contemporary version known as revisionism is a reprise, begins with the Famine. It is a debate generated by the question of what the Famine meant. The end of ‘Old Ireland’ and the emergence of ‘Modern Ireland’ (perhaps)? The well-known argument that it was terrible, but in the long run beneficial, to lose so many lives and yet make economic reform and improvement possible, has often been made by Panglossian historians and economists. But it has many companions. To its left is the nationalist argument that, for all the attempts to extinguish, oppress, and degrade the Irish, their ‘spirit’ would endure. The people’s cultural durability was said to be visible in, for example, their unshakable devotion to Catholicism in the face of the dungeon, fire, and sword of the Reformation; or their retention of their warm ‘Celtic’ sympathies and loyalties in face of the commercialized ‘Saxon’ selfishness of British capitalism. In sum, the Irish are a spiritual people, much given to religion, poetry, superstition, depression, alcohol, schizophrenia, improvidence, intuition, and impulse; they thereby form a startling contrast with the anally retentive, philistine, hypocritical, and coldly calculating British, with their empire and their composite United Kingdom with its brilliantly designed flag that is no more than a butcher's apron. To its right, is the anti-nationalist argument that Ireland was conquered and Gaelic civilization destroyed because it had indeed a fatal flaw: it was out of step with and even hostile to the March of Progress, of which capital development and the English language were identifying features. The Famine, in this view, had at least the merit of making both of

those agencies central to any proposed transformation of Ireland. The version of cultural nationalism offered by the Irish Revival seemed to be a temporary rebuke to this argument, although it could be claimed that Joyce and Shaw and perhaps even Synge understood that Irish modernity was precisely a condition in which the ‘cultural’ view of ‘tradition’ and the ‘economic’ view of capital development were joined in unequal combat.

Dumbness and Eloquence

111

A characteristic postcolonial difficulty for Ireland arose from the conjunction within these various debates of the economic issue and the so-called spiritual issue. As in the case of India, but also in keeping with many colonized territories, Ireland had claimed for itself a kind of internal independence predicated on a spirituality (‘National’, ‘Irish’, ‘Celtic’) that distinguished it from the oppressor British system and even, in some of its more overheated supporters, was said to distinguish it from the rest of the world.” It was easier to do this in the late nineteenth century when there was a general counter-cultural movement in favour of the wisdom of the East within the metropolitan centres of the West; and Irish writers were ready to adapt this notion of Eastern spirituality in general to their own Western island in particular. Yeats is the most obvious example, but there were many gradations in the wide spectrum of Irish mysticism or, more exactly, mysticism about being Irish. But with the achievement of the Free State’s independence, the claim to a spiritual domain and to a form of spiritual exceptionalism had to be sustained along with an effort to achieve that economic and material development which, as Ireland claimed, had

long been thwarted by the initial colonial relationship and then by the more intricate colonial union with the neighbouring island. Independence achieved freedom from the most obvious forms of coercion but it did not easily win freedom from long-established structures of domination and habits of dependence. Ireland’s bivalve relationship with and within the United Kingdom produced anomalous conditions in which economic backwardness and modernizing projects were intermixed just as, politically speaking, the country was alternately bribed into passivity or coerced into obedience. It was closely bound up with and clearly distanced from the federation to which it belonged and to which it was simultaneously foreign. The closest analogy is Algeria. It too had been incorporated within a metropolitan system, and yet had inevitably also remained a colony of France. This intensified the bitterness of the separation between Algeria and France and between Ireland and the United Kingdom. It also intensified the difficulty of achieving independence and perhaps overstimulated the colonized country’s desire for and dream of autonomy.’ Perfect autonomy,

either in politics or economics,

is a fantasy most fervently

indulged by the hopelessly dependent. The pressure of this peculiar domestic-colonial,

British—Irish

relationship

also intensified

the wish

for a

rhetoric of separatism which had an appeal that was particular to Ireland, and yet was also universal in its range. It was the only possible reply to the local/universal appeal of specific Britishness and universal, imperial pretensions to ‘civilization’. By the thirties, in the midst of a world-wide recession, it seemed to some Irish intellectuals, who largely ignored the recession itself, that the economic failure of the new state, which was indeed to persist until the sixties, had its explanation in the cultural regressiveness of a polity that had

112 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

rephrased spiritual supremacy into Catholic triumphalism and a provincial, censorious and illiberal hatred of modernity. Out of this conjuncture came the new historical revisionism, led by Sean O’Faolain’s two books on great Irish leaders of the past - Hugh O’Neill and Daniel O’Connell.* The two books are really one book, written twice with a different set of names and the same theme. Both O’Neill and O’Connell, leaders who came from the heart of the Old Irish civilization, had been educated into modernity (one

via the Renaissance, the other via utilitarianism) and attempted to lead their people towards those sunlit uplands. Each recognized that Gaelic civilization suffered from a fatal weakness, an implacable nostalgia for the pre-modern. Of the two, O’Connell was clearly the more successful. He created the Catholics as a political force, turned their faces towards the

modern world and advocated the abandonment of the Irish language as a means towards that end. O’Connell’s advocacy of English as the language of modernity had an even greater reverberation after his death in 1847. For prominent among those recorded memories of the Famine in the Department of Irish Folklore at University College, Dublin, is the reaction of the people at large against the Irish language. It was the Famine Irish who testified most damagingly to the belief that the retention of the Irish language meant death and exile, poverty and economic disadvantage. It seemed that it was in the language itself and in the later attempts to revive it that the fatal flaw resided. The weakness of a civilization that had been expelled from the modern world was audible and visible there. The weakness persisted in the hopelessly nostalgic and impractical efforts to restore the language and the values it was presumed to have realized in the past and still to hold in suspension for the future. Such beliefs are still widespread, more than 150 years later. Perhaps it is just as telling to remember that they were also widespread 200 years earlier. As in Wales and Scotland, in Ireland it was widely believed and stated that the native language was a barrier to civilization. In Swift’s words: ‘I am deceived, if anything hath more contributed to prevent the Irish being tamed, than this encouragement of their language, which might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense, and less trouble.’® The disaster of the Famine combined with all the other forces of industrialization, urbanization and educational policy to make the flight from Irish comprehensible as what Sean de Freine calls ‘a millenial or utopian movement’.® But it also involved accepting what the same author called ‘the ethnocentric Ascendancy viewpoint’ that Irish was a backward language and that even to speak it was a hindrance.’ It is this catastrophic dimension that is, I believe, critical in any attempt to understand the intri-

cate relationships between various forms of competence in the English language and the varied forms of ‘authenticity’ that are often indicators both of a level of ‘incompetence’, when that is measured against standard

Dumbness and Eloquence

113

English, and a form of vigorous eloquence when the standard form of English is deemed to have become featurelessly uniform. But 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, which is also part of the successful history of British imperial expansion, that Irish linguistic behaviour is best examined.® The relationship between the Irish and the English languages in modern Ireland, at least since the Famine, has a bearing upon and may even be homologous with the wider relationship between tradition and modernity. Looking at the narrower issue may help to illuminate the wider one. If the fatal flaw lay in the Irish language and, by implication, in the whole civilization that wrote and spoke it, then it hardly matters what exposed it — the violent militarism of the British state, the emergent capitalist world system, an accident of Nature, or divine intervention. It was there and all that vanished as a result of the exposure had to be understood, in however demoralized a spirit, as the inevitable loss that was exacted by the much-hypostasized idea of progress, as it was then known (or development, as it is now called). Yet the abandonment of a language that had such a long history, such an elaborate literature and had been the intimate form of representation and communication for so many centuries in so enclosed an area produced problems that refused to dissolve. Among them were the inability of considerable numbers of the Irish people to speak English in a manner that was comprehensible to native English-speakers; the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of understanding a past that had, in many of its most influential and scholarly forms, been largely represented in the abandoned language; the recognition that the abandonment of the language involved the abandonment of so much else in traditional customs, practices and ways of thought that the security of any group identity or of what the nineteenth-century called ‘national character’ was seriously weakened, if it survived at all. In addition, with a weakened or lost security of identity in this communal sense came a readiness to accept a surrogate, even though that had to be concocted from a mix of political and cultural stereotypes that had been produced to serve various propagandistic purposes at different times. The caricatured barbarian Irish of the tradition of historical writing in the English language, the unmatchably civilized and aristocratic Irish of the Gaelic tradition, the Speakers from the Dock, the bel canto tenors moored

behind the sleek pianos of the middle classes, the ballad singers in streets and pubs that increasingly took their material from the beshamrocked pages of The Nation newspaper and its almost uniformly dreadful submartial music and lyrics, the simian creatures of the British tabloid imagination,

the Fenian heroes of novels and of prison literature, of badly translated sagas and fustian poetry of a quantity and quality only matched in recent times, the Celts, the Gaels, the Hibernians, the Catholics, the Rebels and

114

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the Rapparees, Paddy the drunkard, and Paddy the Malapropist, were all huddled together into the Irish/Irish-American identity that survived deep into the twentieth century and is only now being redesigned in the virtual spaciousness of postmodern prosperity. From Thomas Moore to Crofton Croker, from Mrs Hall to Somerville and Ross, from William Maginn to

George Moore, from Mangan to Joyce, from Boucicault to Yeats, Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan to Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Bowen, we see authors attempt to find an exemplary mode of representation for an Irish community

or communities

that, we

are told, have never before been

represented properly or at all or which are only now being represented at the very moment of their departure from history. To top it all, we are also and often told that the experience of these communities or organizations defies representation. Here I want to narrow the issue further. It is no news to anyone that Irish writing in the English language is recurrently obsessed with the problems involved in the idea of representation. Swift and Burke, Joyce and Beckett would be the four writers most plagued and yet aggravated into eloquence by the impoverished resources of the language they exploited. It is equally well known that Irish writing in English has (inevitably but with astonishing ingenuity) appropriated the contrast between provincial yet natural modes of speech and value, and metropolitan yet anaemic modes. This has been a staple feature of the work of Anglo-Irish dramatists — Farquhar, Steele, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Shaw, and, with a different inflection of the same

paradigm, Wilde and Synge. Since Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent it has been a regular revenant in Irish novels, although in fiction the respective rewards for native woodnotes, wild and metropolitan accents and values have been less predictably distributed. But the two issues — the contrast between metropolitan and provincial and the problematic issue of representation — have in common a peculiar attitude towards language: it is that language is ultimately insufficient for the purpose of representation. Metropolitan sophistication and eloquence is usually the index of hypocrisy, moral vacuity, absence; native inarticulacy, even though it be often associated with a degree of slyness or low cunning, is usually the index of authentic feeling, the more so in ratio to the degree of inarticulacy. We are all familiar with the sectarian version of this Protestant inarticulacy versus Catholic eloquence, the one a crucial element in a set of values that comprise solidity, stolidity, even stupidity, and loyalty; the other similarly positioned in a set of values, if that is the word, comprising disloyalty, instability, cleverness, and insincerity. This often conflicts with the racist version in which the Irish Catholic is the butt of humour because he or she cannot master the English language and produces instead a comic-pathetic patois that indicates an ineducable condition of backwardness. It is not at all surprising that in any colonial situation, the mastery of the language of the colonizer, and the tense situa-

tion between that and the language(s) it displaces, should be so critical an

Dumbness and Eloquence

115

issue for writers in particular. Further, the displacement of Irish by English, which is one of the consequences of the Famine, allies the loss of language with tragedy; but equally, it allies the loss of language with the arrival of modernity or, at least, the arrival of the conditions that made both modernization and modernity possible in Ireland. It is the combination of this set of issues with the broader problem of representation that provides much Irish writing with a distinctive problematic. It is remarkable that literature in Irish and literature in English by Irish authors should have in common a reputation for being so technically accomplished, so given to displays of virtuosity, and so inclined to degenerate, in their weaker moments, into conditions of inane verbosity or gnomic Alexandrianism. It would be less remarkable if it could be shown that each tradition of writing fed off or influenced the other. But this was only true in rare instances. Both traditions were independent one of the other, especially in the eighteenth century, when their dual coexistence became an important fact of Irish cultural life. It was equally important that Irish was the language of a weakening and English of a strengthening civilization; this reality was integral to both literatures, not an external circumstance. But it was integral to the literature in English in retrospect; it was not so evident at the time to Swift or to Burke that either the English/British civilization in Ireland or civilization in general would successfully endure, or endure in any recognizable form, the challenges it faced. In the modern period of Irish history, which may be dated from 1690, both literatures have been periodically given to the representation of cultures that seemed to have no future or a very dubious prospect of one. Gaelic civilization’s prospects were dim, to say the least, after 1690; but English civilization’s prospects in Ireland often seemed dim too, both to Protestant alarmists for law and order, and to those who found that the colonial relationship upon which it was based was paradoxically the source of its frailty. Reason and madness were near allied in Swift’s writings, not because Swift was a deeply disturbed individual but because he was deeply perceptive about the anomalous condition of Ireland and, by extension, of

any version of civilization that pretended to be anything other than local or provincial. Yet if it were no more than that, did it deserve to be known as civilization?

Under

what

conditions,

economic,

moral, political, could

universality (or even colonial expansion) be established and legitimized? The baroque style of Swift’s early work, particularly of A Tale of a Tub, and the ‘plain’ style of almost everything he wrote in the eighteenth century proper, rehearse the conflict between a particularity of detail that is overwhelming and a universality that is blandly vacuous. His adaptation of the plain style, itself the basis for the generic Enlightenment style of transparency, perfected by Voltaire and Gibbon, is deceptive because it so effectively conceals the virtuosity it seeks to satirize. Madness disguised as reason, expertise operating as a form of insanity, civilization perverted in

116

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the name of its preservation — these are some of the obsessions that Swift's writings accentuate to the point of vertigo. My concern here is briefly to acknowledge his well-deserved reputation for linguistic virtuosity and the alliance, in the critical reception given his work then and since, between that virtuosity and, on the one hand, various forms of excess, illness, psychosis, and madness and, on the other, his ‘patriotism’. In effect, the

‘mad’ view of Swift transferred to him all the ills and insanity that he attributed to the political and moral situation he represented in his writings; this also tainted the political reputation he gained rather than the political situation he satirized. It is the first, although the classic case in Irish writing, of the linkages between linguistic virtuosity and a political situation that was in some respects atrocious and in others inexplicable, because it was (in Irish conditions at least) self-destructive. As in Gulliver’s case, when atroc-

ity is expressed and defended as polite common sense, when actuality is transferred into nightmare in the name of progress, or the eating of children solemnly offered as a cure for famine, the virtuosity consists in the maintenance of the syntax, grammar, and tone of the civilized and progressive European. Burke, too, has been recognized as a great writer much given to excess, and the excess has often been associated with his nationality. It manifests itself in his rhetoric, of course; this is profoundly Hibernian, which is to say

hysterical, strident, self-consciously empurpled, irrational. The political beliefs of a writer so defined are as difficult to summarize or even to respect as they are easy to denigrate because of the taint of ‘national’ excess or personal incapacity. Burke was much more interesting on this topic than his denigrators when he addressed the question of language and its peculiar powers in his early treatise The Sublime and the Beautiful.? There he stated the problem clearly in his critique of clarity. Adam Phillips, in his Introduction to a recent edition (1990) of the famous treatise, calls attention

to the implication in Burke’s account of language that it is uniquely powerful . . . because it is, unlike the realist painting of his day, non-mimetic, what we would now call an arbitrary system of signs. Words are not windows we look at the world through. And it is the absence of this visual notion of clarity that stirs our most intense feelings. Clarity, for Burke, and not its more conventional antagonist

Reason, is the antithesis of passion.’®

One of the confusing elements in Burke’s essay is his assertion that the Sublime is beyond the reach of language because it has no limits; linguistically, this involves us in incoherence. Yet in art the Sublime

produces

delight while in Nature it stuns and paralyzes. The connections between delight and paralysis are indicated but not dwelt upon at any length. Instead, Burke chooses to develop the companion connections between vigorous languages that can, by deploying the passions, give some ‘idea of

Dumbness and Eloquence

117

the thing described’ and polished languages, like French which, however clear and perspicuous, ‘are generally deficient in strength’. Here we have a foreshadowing of the Irish and English uses of language; ‘the languages of most unpolished people’, like ‘the oriental tongues’, have a great force and energy of expression; they retain their natural awe before the world and are not ‘critical in distinguishing’ things. These are conventional beliefs of the time, but Burke is disturbing the assumptions upon which they are based. The polite and civilized are eloquent, the uneducated are dumb; yet it is also the case that the ‘natural’ are eloquent, the polished are dumb. It is the contradiction exploited but not explored in Anglo-Irish drama of the eighteenth century and then again renewed as a matter of crucial distinction between Irish and English, peasants and city-dwellers, in the Irish drama of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The linguistic turn Burke gives to his account of the Sublime and of representation in language undergoes modification in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where the failure of reason to control the aesthetic response evoked by the Sublime is experienced as a sense of pain, loss, and even terror. This then leads to a characteristically Kantian assertion that such an experience is foundational for the transition from aesthetic to moral experience. Yet such a move also brings the individual from a private to a social level; morality has a social dimension that private experience lacks. The association of pain or loss with these transitions from private and individual to public and social levels is later reasserted and reoriented in Freudian psychology with the extension of the conceptual reach of the Sublime to the theory of sublimation. Under the influence of Lacan, the linguistic emphasis is revived, still within the context of a loss or sense of loss that

must be redirected or compensated for. Phillips, who had read Burke’s treatise in the light of his own and Burke’s preoccupation with language’s capacity for representation, later intensifies the argument when he speaks of psychoanalysis as ‘one way of speaking up for our formative linguistic incompetence, for the necessary relationship between our verbal uncertainty and our fluency; for the profit of loss’.” There is a consistent political implication in all of this; the speaker of a vigorous version of the new language is always someone who is unpolished, or uncivilized, or who is as yet a child. The language of reason is ineffective for the representation of childhood experiences. Another language is required, one that is less plain and more sumptuous in its thetoric, less transparent and more opaque — the language of the unconscious. Indeed, the acquisition of language is a necessary introduction to the adult world and may have no necessary relation to those experiences that belong to the prelinguistic stage. The acquisition of language as such is different from the acquisition of a new language, but the doubt that a prelinguistic universe can be translated into language weakens the belief that one language can be translated into another. This is especially the case

118

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

if the ‘translation’ is accompanied by coercion and (sometimes) spectacular violence. It is therefore no great surprise to find that the relationship between the condition of inarticulacy and eloquence should be so memorably represented in central works of the Irish Revival such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907). Stephen Dedalus and Christy Mahon both begin in profound inarticulacy and both end in astonishing eloquence. They do so by making an account of their acquisition of language the governing experience of their lives. Beginning in hesitation and stammering, they both achieve mastery over words and over the Dublin and Mayo cultures that they must ultimately leave for the sake of their own moral and linguistic freedom. The inherited languages they have absorbed are authoritarian in structure: they represent the claims of Roman Catholicism, British political and cultural imperialism, Irish and local patriotisms. But the two young men are, above all, sons in rebellion against parental disciplines. They both achieve a radical, individual isolation which is both a triumph and a defeat. In each case, the freedom, the linguistic independence, is created by a form of imagining, or forging, that is close to but not identical with lying. In one sense,

these works

would

seem

to emblematize

the movement

from

enslavement to freedom that is characteristic of the political hopes of the period to which they belong. This is partly true. But since that movement is represented by them as a linguistic evolution, it must be allowed to be highly nuanced and not at all a simple narrative of progress. Synge’s play, more obviously than Joyce’s novel, indicates that the greatest difference between the condition of dumbness and that of eloquence is that in the first, lying is impossible and that, in the second, lying is both necessary and inevitable. It is again an issue that psychoanalysis dwells upon. An aphasic or an autistic person, it has been claimed, cannot lie. ‘Faced with the structural rigor of the real,’ claims John Forrester, such a person ‘loses all notion

of the possible.’* This gives us some clue about one of the effects of communal catastrophe, somewhat like Burke’s description of the effects of the Sublime which always has terror at its heart. It paralyzes, stuns, petrifies. It robs the victim(s) of the power to imagine any other possibility. It is a reality so fierce that it cannot be denied although the wish to deny it is as strong as any wish could possibly be. The effect is to create a condition in which, in Ireland’s case, the language of the real, in all its rigour, is Irish — and that emerges as silence; and the language of the possible is English - and that emerges in eloquence. Eloquence is as rich as imagination and possibility and the thought of the new can be. It is the language of modernity. The condition of dumbness, aphasia, or silence is the repressed condition of non-modernity,

if not indeed anti-modernity, the condition of nothing new being possible and the vision of traditional life as nothing but a grinding, monotonous, and ultimately catastrophic nullity. Yet, assuming — however blithely — that

Dumbness and Eloquence

119

the repressed always returns in some guise or shape, it could be claimed that the sweet irony about Irish eloquence is that it so often incorporates within itself the Irish language as such, or those versions of Irish incompetence in the English language which mark the gradations between the stage of ‘infancy’ (‘infans’, as in Joyce’s Portrait) and the stage of adult possibility, as when Stephen and Christy Mahon respectively turn towards exile from their dying communities. They seek freedom in some other land or territory that is not Ireland but that is truly a country of the imagination, a country of the possible although not entirely a possible country. Had they remained inarticulate, the rigour of the real and the peremptory force of authority would have quenched the possibility of possibility that is released with (even by?) their rapidly increasing ability to speak with a force, vigour, and eloquence lacking in the routinized langage of the inhabitants of the controlled and submissive social realm of modernity. Joyce and Synge were not stray voices in this regard. Yeats and George Moore, in their different ways, promoted, as part of their cultural crusades,

the linguistic freedom and vigour that they believed was allied to political and social independence for Ireland. Thomas MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), with its significant dedication to George Sigerson, the editor of the important anthology Bards of the Gael and the Gall (2nd ed., 1907), introduced the notion of an ‘Irish Mode’ of

literature which was neither English nor ‘Celtic’ and was distinguished by a fusion of the Irish and English languages.” For all of these writers, the true language of modernity was an Irish English that fused the traditional and the contemporary, ‘good sense’ and ‘fine fabling’.“ But there was also a tragic note to be heard, rarely absent in Irish poetry, drama, or fiction in the long period of Revival and counter-Revival from 1880 to 1950. It is audible as silence, the silence of the other language that haunts the English language, sometimes in the shape of its syntax and grammar, or of its idiom and vocabulary, sometimes merely as reference or implication. On rarer occasions, as in Beckett — for instance, in his radio

play All that Fall (1957) — it operates as the language for that which is unsayable in English, or simply is unsayable as such.’® The unsayable has two realms. One is the temporal; it is the realm of the prelinguistic. The other realm is historical; it is the realm of atrocity, communal immiseration, ethnocide. Language may be understood to be irrelevant to the first and incompetent for the second. Or it may be understood to be incriminated in the second, as itself part of the reason for and part of the material structure of the collapse. During the Revival, the Irish language was associated with all of these positions and the English language, in its ‘Irish Mode’, was assigned a creative role in emancipating the Irish communities from that culturally autistic silence in which the Irish language and civilization seemed to be entombed. Although the English-language literature of the Irish Revival rarely mentions, and much less deals with, the Famine that

120 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

preceded it by a generation, it nevertheless meditates endlessly upon the linguistic condition that was part of that event's cultural inheritance. ‘Revival’ is a term that more properly applies to the immense effort expended by several organizations across a century to revive the Irish language. From the Gaelic Society (1808) to the Gaelic League (1893) the vision blurred

and cleared alternately until, in the last decade

of the

century, it finally seemed to have found the sharp focus it needed. But what the Gaelic League did was in effect to create an organizational base (over 600 branches by 1904) for insurrectionary politics; it certainly gave an impulse to the learning of the language but the schism between the living language and the philological tradition that had made it an object of academic study, just as the language ceased to be widely spoken during the Famine, was never healed. It is still a standard feature of the linguistic condition of Irish that those who are scholars and experts in the language maintain it as an esoteric subject always threatened with contamination by those who stumblingly, inaccurately, and ungrammatically speak or try to speak it. The pursuit of authenticity by those who, in preserving this notion of Irish, have created as its opposite a jargon or patois, has been immeasurably damaging to the preservation of Irish. The division within the Irish language between extremely sophisticated scholarship and a somewhat delinquent common speech has been part of the Gaelic tradition since the destruction of the aristocratic Gaelic civilization in the seventeenth century;

it continued to be part of the extramural division between English and Irish in the nineteenth century. In each case, the paradigm was based on a contrast between the commanding skill of a literary élite and the hapless incompetence of an uneducated mass. Even the history of the Gaelic League itself has been read as the fall from a literary exclusiveness into a mass political movement in which the language was a victim of a process of degradation. Extramural disputes are more frequently conducted in racial and intramural disputes in class terms. In each case, there has to be an élite and a mass; in each case there are also great traditional skills and recently and imperfectly acquired or distorted rudiments; in each case too there is, at the heart of the matter, producing these oppositions, a political trauma. It seems even more obvious now than it did in 1980, when it was first produced, that Brian Friel’s Translations is one of the key texts for the understanding of this set of issues. It poses the question of language loss and acquisition in the light of a modernity that is founded on expertise and violence, and of a traditionalism that is founded on fidelity and anachronistic pedantry. The relationship between dumbness and eloquence is variously explored. Sara begins and ends in dumbness, having had a brief entrance into the eloquence of identity. But for the present purpose, what is most interesting in the play is its critique of the very position that it most affectionately represents — that of Hugh and his civilization. The critique rests on the recognition that Hugh and the Greek-Latin-Irish culture he embodies is

Dumbness and Eloquence

121

petrified. It has become hermetically sealed within its own universe. In fact, Friel’s diagnosis here is very similar to that of O’Faolain almost half a century earlier; and of the relatives of the Famine victims making their reports in 1947. The old civilization was doomed, not only because it was economically impoverished, but also because, with all its learning and ritual and failed rebellion, it had never learned what modernity taught as its first lesson — that change, even rapid change, is an abiding principle of the communal as of the individual life. The fault lies within the old system itself and, more deeply, within the language of the old system that, because it could not undergo change, must now undergo transmogrification. Roland is the betrayer of his father’s world, but, as the play keeps reminding us, betrayal is another word for translation. Hugh’s world cannot be ‘translated’ into the martial, technological world of the British Empire. All that can

happen is that it might echo within it as a noise that has lost its source. Coercion helped to kill the Irish language and compulsion helped to abort its revival. But its more recent efflorescence is surely related to a sense of emancipation from both. The political requirement is not that we become eloquent in a language that is our own, whether that be Irish or English or both; it is to become eloquent in a language that we never had, but which is believed to exist, if only because of our dumbness in it. That is the language of freedom.

Mutinies India, Ireland and

Imperialism

AMITAV GHOSH

My knowledge of the relationship between India and Ireland started with a recent interest in the idea of mutiny — especially mutiny and forms of resistance among Indian soldiers. The British Empire employed many soldiers of Irish and Indian origin. These men played a large part in the expansion and consolidation of the empire. To take just one example, two-thirds of the force that defeated the Kingdom of Burma in 1885 consisted of Indian troops. Similarly, Irish soldiers were frequently used to suppress ‘unrest’ in India. Indians stood much to gain by joining the army: steady salaries, land grants, assured jobs for their sons. Yet, it was often these very soldiers who became the fiercest, most unforgiving enemies of the empire — a fact not unforeseen by the empire’s architects. Early in the nineteenth century General Munro wrote: ‘The spirit of independence will spring up in [the British Indian army] long before it is even thought of among the people. The army will not wait for the slow growth of liberty but will hasten to execute their own measures for the overthrow of the government.”? Munro was proved right in 1857 when many of the empire’s Indian troops revolted, spearheading what was perhaps the greatest of all anti-colonial uprisings. There was never to be an armed uprising on this scale again in India, but there were many other minor instances of rebellion. Perhaps the most significant of these was at Singapore in 1918, when Indian mutineers seized control of the island’s garrison. Generally speaking, Indian mutineers had very little success: their plans were almost always thwarted by the empire’s extensive intelligence services. But at the same time, I believe that they had a deep, if often hidden, impact on the

colonial administration. For instance, mutiny (and the anticipation of it) was woven into the very fabric of the British Indian army. To take just one example, one of the Indian army’s unique institutions was ‘the cote’. I quote from a biography of a famous Indian soldier:

122

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism

123

Near each company’s quarter-guard was a ‘cote’ or small building, in which all the men’s weapons were chained. Except when the arms were in actual use, they were locked in this building . . . Indians believed that the real reason for (this) was the fear of another sepoy mutiny. No matter how much

the British officers liked their Indian troops, they

seemed to sleep better knowing that weapons were under lock and

key.” Similarly, Indians who served in artillery units had to be content with doing the menial jobs of loading and carrying ammunition. They were not allowed to actually fire the guns — a precaution, presumably, against the possibility that they might one day choose to turn them against their masters. Collaboration, in other words, while gratefully accepted, was never taken for granted. The most interesting aspect of this to me is the fact that Indian soldiers often dramatically revised their attitudes to the empire after quitting active service. Many of the earliest Indian settlers in North America were former imperial servicemen. In the early years of the twentieth century, in collaboration with a group of Indian student radicals from Berkeley, these ex-servicemen formed an organization called the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party. The Ghadarites were generally socialist in their orientation, but their principal political strategy consisted in trying to turn the Indian army against its imperial master. I am sure it will come as no surprise to learn that the Ghadarites had close links with the Irish resistance in America. The Indians were, comparatively, novices in the arts of sedition: it was the Irish who

were their mentors and allies, schooling them in their methods of organization, teaching them the tricks of shopping for arms to send back home; giving them instruction in their techniques of fomenting mutiny among those of their countrymen who served the empire as soldiers. It was from the Irish, too, that they learnt the subtleties of creating alliances with their enemy’s enemy — Germany, in this instance. After the United States entered the First World War, several Indians and Irish men were to find themselves facing charges of conspiracy. Very little has been written about the Ghadar Party, and it has often been dismissed as an ineffectual organization. Yet it is a matter of record that agents of the Ghadar Party caused great anxiety to British administrators, especially in the Punjab. It was this anxiety that was partly responsible for the great massacre of Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar in 1919. This mass killing counts as perhaps the single most important event in the history of the Indian national movement. The Ghadar Party’s efforts could thus be said to have had a very important catalytic effect on the Indian struggle for

freedom. I have also come be very interested in some of the psychological aspects of mutiny — especially so far as it concerns Indian collaborators with imperialism. There seems to me to be something almost incomprehensible

124 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

about the sheer magnitude of the rage that possessed imperial soldiers once they had stepped across the line of mutiny. The extraordinary violence and bloodiness of the 1857 uprising are well documented. But I am reminded also of the Singapore Mutiny of 1918, in which the rebels faced their firing squads hurling defiance to the last. Perhaps the most intriguing account of this phenomenon comes from a Japanese prisoner of war, Yuji Aida.? At the end of the Second World War Yuji Aida spent many months in a British-run POW camp in Burma. From this curious vantage point he was able to observe the Indian soldier in both his guises: as the servile servant of empire and as the defiant rebel. Among the British troops who guarded Aida’s camp there were many Indians; he writes at great length about their extraordinary subservience and self-effacement in their dealings with their imperial masters. But there were also many Indians among Aida’s fellow POWs. These were members of the Indian National Army — former imperial troops who had turned against the British and joined forces with the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Aida tells us, not without some bewilderment, that these former imperial soldiers,

far from being subservient, were in fact a good deal more defiant than were their Japanese fellow-prisoners. Yet these men, too, must once have walked the earth in the guise of the servile Indian. How do we account for these transformations — these journeys from foot-licking servility to enraged, unbending defiance? I ask this question because it is my feeling that the poles of this journey were much farther apart for soldiers than they were for most civilian nationalists. In other words, I do not think that the rage that possessed these former soldiers had many parallels outside the army: the great majority of Indians were, I suspect, far more nuanced, far less emphatic, in their attitudes towards the British. What was it exactly that carried these soldiers from one extreme to another, from servility to enraged defiance? There are, I am sure, many possible answers to this. For the moment I would like to talk about just one of them — one that relates to Seamus Deane’s essay in this collection (see pp. 109-21), in that it touches on the issues of language and meaning. I suspect that a part of the reason why Indian mutineers set out on their circumpolar journeys was that they, uniquely among their compatriots, understood what victory and defeat meant in the imperial view of the world. They were perhaps the only Indians who were able to engage fully with the idea (so often expressed in British writing of the post-1857 era) that Indians were ‘a defeated race’. It should be noted that this was not a notion that had much currency in India’s civilian population. Many, if not most, Indians saw the subjugation of their country as a largely ‘political’ matter: they thought of themselves as undefeated in their inner world, sovereign within the realms of their

own (various) cultures.‘ It may well be that this was a species of escapism, a means of coping with a reality that was psychologically too painful to

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism

125

acknowledge. Or it may be that this position was, in substance, largely true. Whatever the case, this was the prevalent view — not just in India, but

also in Egypt and other parts of the colonized world. This was perhaps one of the ways in which colonized people reconciled themselves to their condition; it is in these terms that many Indians look back on the empire even today. This was not however a view that imperial soldiers could easily hold: their familiarity with the experience of inflicting defeat was too close, too intimate. It is worth remembering that while in Britain’s service Indian (and Irish) soldiers were almost always on the winning side (it was not often after all, that the empire lost a war). Yet the Indians and the Irish were not quite victors and the victories they fought for were never quite theirs: it was not even clear whether they were the victors or the vanquished. Many Indian soldiers have told me stories about the whispered taunts that greeted them as they marched through the territories which they and their predecessors had helped to conquer: ‘There goes the army of slaves on its way to find new slaves for their masters.” It was in the acknowledgement of defeat, I suspect, that some Indians found a commonality with the Irish.

The defeat I am speaking of was not merely a fact of history, a leftover from the past: it was more profound than that. I think they also recognized that the future they were fighting for would bring yet another kind of defeat. The empire that was their adversary had set the world upon a certain historical trajectory: I think they recognized (in a way that we have come to forget) that it was beyond their power to alter this. Such victories as the future might hold for them could only be local, particular, parochial — an ‘Indian’ or ‘Irish’ nation — but the broader global patterns would always remain well beyond their reach. Indeed, inasmuch as their local victories

cut them off from those global patterns, they would also be condemned to remain permanently on the wrong side of history, walking forever in step with the globe’s malcontents. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why the first postindependence generation of Indian (and Irish) leaders tried so hard to make a mark on the stage of the world — in the Indian case through the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. It is also, I think, one

of the reasons why India’s political leadership today feels so compelled to cling to its nuclear alternatives: it is on this sad, suicidal thread that they

have pinned their last hopes of influencing world events, of breaking out of the parochialism that proved to be the result of the Pyrrhic victory of achieved nationhood. It is very difficult today, looking back upon the inter-war period to remember what the world looked like to people who lived with colonialism. I was forcibly struck by this when I first began to look into the history of the Indian National Army. This movement, as I have said, was spear-

headed by Indian soldiers who were serving in Malaya (present-day Malaysia) at the time of the Japanese conquest of that territory in 1941-42.

126

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

During the war, these soldiers were labelled JIFs (Japanese Indian Forces) by the Allies. After the war, the Imperial government tried its utmost to present them as traitors and fascist sympathizers. But, rightly or wrongly, this was not how they were perceived by the Indian public. In India in the 1930s and 1940s it was taken for granted by many Indians that fascism and imperialism were twin, inseparable evils. Hitler’s vision of conquest, expansion, and racial domination was seen as a grotesque mimicry of a model of national success that had been made current by such imperial powers as England, France, and Holland.

I was recently looking through the 1939 issues of an English-language newspaper published in my home town, Calcutta. The paper was The Statesman, well known for its pro-British sympathies. The item was headlined: ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands’ and this is what it said: Under the heading The New German Colonial Claim the Colonial League’s Weekly Bulletin quotes the following passage from . . the official organ of the Nazi Party . . . ‘Forty-seven million Englishmen today rule a territory which is 140 times as great as their home country, and 40 million Frenchmen rule a territory which is 21 times as great as France. National Socialist Germany is of the opinion that the European balance of power will have found a meaning when the German people has at its disposal a territory which bears the same proportion to the German population of 80 million people as the territories disposed of by the English and the French. But not until then!’

Looking at my xerox copy of this article now, I notice beside it an advertisement placed by Calcutta’s Metro cinema (‘healthfully cooled for comfort’). The ad is for the film Too Hot to Handle with Clark Gable and

Myrna Loy — two of my father’s favourite stars. It strikes me that my father was eighteen at the time and may well have read this news item (he was an avid Statesman reader). The following year he was to sign up to join the British Indian army; he was to fight in North Africa and Burma and was eventually to find a place on Lord Mountbatten’s personal staff. As with so much else, I wish I had found this article while he was still alive. I would have liked to ask him what he had made of it. My father was in Burma towards the end of the war. There were occasions when he found himself exchanging fire with members of the Indian National Army. These ‘turncoat’ soldiers were a ragtag bunch by this time, half-fed and armed with obsolete weaponry. My father, like everyone else in his unit, had only contempt for these men: what did they think they were doing? It was not just that they were traitors: they were pitiable, almost comic; it was hard to take them seriously. But at the end of the war,

when my father returned to India, there was a surprise awaiting. He had expected, I imagine, that young men like himself would be received as heroes: he had no doubt seen newspaper pictures of Allied servicemen returning to rapturous welcomes in New York and London. But as it turned

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism

127

out things were different in India. The soldiers who were received as heroes were not the young men of the British Indian army: they were the sad, defeated, ragtag bunch that my father and his colleagues had laughed at in Burma — the men of the Indian National Army. The British attempt to discredit the Indian National Army proved to be futile. The harder they tried, the more popular these men became. The Indian public appears to have understood, instinctively, that these men had faced a genuine dilemma: which was the greater evil — European imperialism or Japanese militarism? Was it acceptable to ally with the one in order to oppose the other? Clearly many, if not most, Indians believed this to be so. Yet, even though there was overwhelming support for the Indian National Army at the time, it later came to be almost forgotten, excised from history. No major Indian historian has written about it; none of the standard histories mentions this force except in passing. Why is this so? I suspect it is because the beliefs that were implicit in the Indian National Army’s actions have fallen into a kind of desuetude — principally the idea that imperialism was the progenitor of fascism, the parent evil. It is not that anyone seriously disputes this proposition: how could they? Nazism and fascism laid explicit claim to this heritage (as we saw in the passage above). Moreover, the facts of the matter have been repeatedly established: there can be no serious doubt that colonial territories were used to test many of the techniques that were later to be employed by fascists, Nazis, and militarists (for example, the concentration camps of South Africa; the elaborate racial categorizations employed by the Dutch and the British; the systematic extermination of entire tribes in German-ruled East Africa, et cetera).

Yet it remains true that the proposition that imperialism was the progenitor of fascism, indisputable as it is, carries very little moral, legal, and imaginative weight today. I think it worth asking why this should be so. There are, I think, several answers. The first and most obvious, of course, is that the old imperial

powers emerged on the winning side of the Second World War. They thus acquired, as it were, the space and time to reinvent themselves and their history. Another reason lies in the recent history of postcolonial states — all their failures having been, by some curious sleight of hand, chalked up to indigenous peoples rather than to those who had so steeply tilted the decks against them. But there is another, possibly more important reason why it is no longer possible to assign any moral weight to the proposition that imperialism was the progenitor of fascism. Imperialism, as many opponents of the empire realized, has moulded the entirety of the present, the world is instinct with this evil, in every aspect of its being. To speak of this is to point to a banal truism; it carries no more weight than a radio warning about the dangers of direct sunlight. Such responses as it evokes are rarely more emphatic than a yawned ‘whatever’ (or, possibly, a muttered ‘deal with it’).

128

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

It is worth remembering that many of the Ghadar Party’s leaders (most notably Har Dayal) eventually revised their positions to the point where they ended up as supporters of the British Raj. It is worth remembering also that their comrades were not greatly shocked when these changes of heart came about. Perhaps somewhere in their minds they had acknowledged all along that resistance was, in the end, truly futile. There was nothing left to

win.

lrish Orientalism An Overview

JOSEPH LENNON

Thou vagabond varlet! Thou swiller of sack! If our heads be all scarlet Thy heart is all black! Go on to revile IRAN’s nation and race, In thy fish-faggish style! James Clarence Mangan, ‘To the Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Bool

Djenkinzun’ (1846)} ‘Why has our school . . . been interested mainly in something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this is Europe, that is Asia?’ W.B. Yeats, Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924)?

During Ireland’s Celtic Revival cultural nationalists accentuated Ireland’s Celtic history and mythology, positing an ‘authentic’ Irish identity that predated English colonial influence. Many of the ‘revived’ images, forms, ideas, and narratives, however, were not actually from an ancient Celtic

tradition in Ireland; indeed many had come from constructions of the Orient. Irish writers and cultural nationalists such as W.B. Yeats, James

Stephens, and George Russell (AE) borrowed extensively from West Asian and Asian cultures — or European approximations of them — to augment

their neo-Celtic narratives.’ The tradition of Oriental motifs in Irish letters stretches back through the works of Aubery de Vere, James Clarence Mangan, and Thomas Moore in the nineteenth century to works of Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Pery in the eighteenth.* On the one hand, it stems from ideas about the nature of civilization and concep~ — tions of Oriental and Celtic cultures, which emerged during the English Enlightenment and developed during Britain’s period of imperial growth. On the other hand, mythic links between Celtic and Oriental cultures had an

independent history in native Irish and Gaelic culture since medieval times.

129

130 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

This essay traces the major branches of this Oriental-Celtic connection in Irish literature from the eighteenth century to the early mid-twentieth, beginning with a discussion of Irish antiquarianism and ending with a section on the mutual identification of W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. In the nineteenth century, the Orient developed into an important imaginative realm for Irish writers and intellectuals; so much so that, by the time

of the Celtic Revival, a prominent aesthetic and theosophical school of Irish Orientalism existed. For many Irish writers, the motif of the Orient allowed a variety of rhetorical strategies, many of which provided discursive control over an aspect of empire, that is, the representation of (other) colonized peoples. Although some pieces of Irish literary Orientalism merely extended the discourse of Orientalism to Ireland (at times including the exotic Celt or Gael as objects of Orientalist study), many worked against the dominant representations of Orientalism, exposing the Orient for its constructed and politicized nature, highlighting its connections to colonial power and nationalist struggle. Such Oriental representations replicated, as a matter of course, many of the trappings of the discourse of Anglo-French Orientalism with which they affiliated, sub specie, but such representations

need to be recognized for their difference. Furthermore, these representations reveal the liminal position often occupied by the Irish writers and cultural nationalists within the British Empire, who could at once belong to both the imperial metropole and the colonized periphery. The variety of strategies associated with such a position — both collusive and subversive — suggests the scope and inherent liminality of Irish Orientalism, particularly as it pertains to nationalism and decolonization in Ireland. Alongside the expansion of European colonialism, Orientalism developed as an academic discipline and knowledge base, as well as a set of cultural and political expectations about Asian and West Asian peoples and cultures. In the same years, Celticism also emerged as an area of inquiry. While Celticism is a discourse distinct from Orientalism, both developed concomitantly. Both occur as Romantic strains in the English literature of the late eighteenth century, especially in imperial histories, Gothic literature, early Romantic poetry, Oriental romances, and Celtic pseudo-translations (cf. James Macpherson’s Ossianic tales).5 Moreover, studies of the Oriental

and of the Celtic merged in the Irish antiquarian and philological studies of General Charles Vallancey, Henry O’Brien, Sir William Betham and others, in

which the Celtic race was argued to have Eastern origins, a conclusion based on various readings and misreadings of medieval and classical allusions to the Celt. According to this school of thought, the Celts or Milesians had

first colonized Ireland via Spain and Egypt and were related to various ‘ancient’ Eastern cultures: Egyptian, Carthaginian, Etruscan, Phoenician,

Armenian, Hebrew, Chinese, Indian, and others. But these arguments were not universally accepted in the British Isles.’ Two competing schools of thought developed from the same medieval

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

131

and classical texts on the origin of the Celts, as Joep Leerssen notes in Remembrance and Imagination (1997): the ‘Scytho-Celtic model’ propounded that the Celts, descended from the wild biblical Scyths, had migrated across Europe over a long period of time, and the ‘Phoenician model’ argued that the Celts (actually the Southern Scythians or Magogians or, as Sir William Jones noted, the Persians*) had migrated more directly from the East, that is, along the Phoenician tin trade route by sea from the Middle East to Carthage and around the southern edge of Europe to pre-Roman Spain and the British Isles. The differences on this matter corresponded with the cultural and political divide in Ireland over England’s colonial presence in Ireland. Native Irish intellectuals and writers had developed the Phoenician model to argue for the ancient pedigree and civilization of the Celts, who had been brought to their poor present condition, they asserted, by successive foreign invasions. The Scytho-Celtic model had also been used for generations to rhetorically confirm the barbarity of the Celt. Edmund Spenser, for instance, employed this version in his View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), in which the English poet proposes that the barbarous, Scythian Irishry be exterminated. Leerssen elaborates on the nature and implications of this split later in the eighteenth century: Those who took a positive interest in Irish antiquity, who relied on native amanuenses and were willing to envisage a prestigious, highly civilized origin for the country’s native inhabitants, tended to favour the Phoenician model . . . More conservative, anglo-centric scholars, who

preferred to believe that Ireland was primordially a barbaric country where all traces of culture were introduced by outside influences such as the Vikings or the English, naturally rejected the Phoenician model

and endorsed the Scytho-Celtic one.”

While both schools continued, the Phoenician model enjoyed prominence in the work of early Irish cultural nationalists, achieving such cachet in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that nearly every native history of Ireland included a section on, or at least a reference to, the Eastern

origins of the Celt. Numerous Celtic philological and antiquarian studies appeared, bolstering the links between the ancient Celt and the East. Artefacts, ancient ruins, and even not-so-ancient ruins, such as the round

towers, were compared synchronically with contemporaneous structures in the Orient (in India particularly) in order to confirm the Eastern origins of the contemporary Irish. In a woodcut from Vallancey’s Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language (1772) a defunct, isolated, and inaccessible ‘Round Tower at Ardmore Ireland’ is depicted next to a similar ‘Round Tower in India’, which is shown in a living context, not only with a tree and another building but also with a man at the top of its steps, entering the functional tower. In this representation, the ancient and absent Celtic mirrors the

living and present Orient. This inverse comparison implies not only some diachronic similitude

132

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

(common to Orientalist works), but also demonstrates that any immanent

revival requires a strategy for bridging distance — temporal and geographic — between cultural models. Revivalism usually has meant more than reviving a ‘dead’ past into the space where it once ‘lived’ — a move that only bridges time and does not admit the understanding that cultures span geography over time. The immanence of a cultural revival demands that the model for the revival be located outside the present here and now. The process of recovering a culture is usually the attempt to trace historical cultural roots, the paths of which stretch beyond the present time and place. In this sense, place itself is diasporic, and history becomes a story of migration. Recovering the past, in the Irish case, has meant more than modelling the present culture on an idea of the past (based in history and/or present ideals). Revivalism has also repeatedly sought cultural models, connections, and contexts in distant cultures. Such distant searches

helped confront invasive models posed by the proximate and the modern, that is, the geographically close and imperial culture of England. Much of this antiquarian ‘scholarship’ resonated in Irish culture, as Leerssen astutely details, particularly the round tower debate, which captured the attention of the Irish press and the reading public and left a lasting impression on Irish nationalist iconography and the popular imagination. Between 1770 and 1845, the Royal Irish Academy published numerous tracts and essays on the similarities between the Irish language and Eastern languages. Two prominent studies roughly mark the beginning and end of this period in which linguistic and antiquarian proof for the Celt’s Eastern origins was sought: Vallancey’s Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language, Being a Collation of the Irish with the Punic Language (1772) and William Betham’s Etruria — Celtica; Etruscan Literature and Antiquities

Investigated; or The Language of that Ancient and Illustrious People Compared and Identified with the Iberno-Celtic, and Both Shown to be Phoenician (1842).

Vallancey, a founder of the Royal Irish Academy, was the most celebrated Irish antiquarian of his time, but his pseudo-scholarship lost credibility in the nineteenth century, and, as Leerssen notes, ‘Vallancey’s name has by now become a by-word for hare-brained fancy. He read dictionaries as modern critics would read Finnegans Wake, based elaborate theories on comparisons between languages of which he was utterly ignorant — Gaelic and Algonquin, or Gaelic and Chinese’." A glimpse into Vallancey’s 1786 Preface to A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland confirms the point; in this section he asserts that the Phoenician-Scythians travelled not only to Ireland: To a common compare the ancient Irish; for so doing:

reader, it must appear the reveries of an etymologist to language and deities of the Brahmans with those of the but to the philosopher . . . there will appear solid reason the Brahmans and Guebres were originally a mixture of

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

133

Dedanites and Persians, or Scythians. Fohi, the civiliser of the Chinese,

was a Scythian. The Japanese were Scythians.?

Emphasizing the great mobility of the Scythians and the Celts, Vallancey links the Irish with the founders of other great civilizations, attempting to bridge the geo-temporal distance and make the Scythians relevant. As Leerssen notes, ‘[Vallancey] could blithely assert that the great Gaelic sixth-century legislator Cenn Faeladh was known in China under the name of Confulus, erroneously rendered as Confucius’. If such assertions seem

absurd today, we must recall that the models of antiquity on which Vallancey and other antiquarians based their arguments were drawn from the Old Testament

or the Hebrew

Bible, wherein the world’s linguistic

differences stem from the Tower of Babel and all humanity from Noah. While Vallancey’s ideas on the origin of the Celt were later disproved by more rigorous scholarship, particularly that of George Petrie," later Celtic philologists like James Cowles Prichard successfully constructed linguistic arguments for the inclusion of Celtic languages into the Indo-European family of languages based on work Vallancey began (cf. his The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations Proved in a Comparison of Their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages, 1857).'° This inclusion signalled a validation of Celtic culture while not negating the Oriental-Celt theories. Indeed, the legacy of Irish fascination with the Orient continued during the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, albeit in more allegorical and mystical forms. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as the construct of the Orient began to represent a lack of civilization in Anglo-French Orientalism — that is, the absence of liberty, rationality, progress, and national autonomy — the link between the Celt and the Oriental had moved into Irish culture at large. References to the Celt’s Eastern origins were made in texts spanning many genres: pamphlet collections of pseudo-letters, occasional and epic poetry, political tracts, Oriental romances, newspaper articles, children’s

literature, British and Anglo-Irish novels, and Irish-language stories. For example, in a footnote to one of W. Smith’s Historical Explanations of Emblematic Cards; For the Use of Young Persons ‘card LXXX, King Henry VII, or the Union of the Roses’, the following explanation is given, ‘the Iberno Celtic (or Irish) somewhat resembles the primitive language of the Hebrews; and is very like that of the old Phoenicians’.’* This sort of linguistic dating validates the antiquity of Irish and the Celtic languages while highlighting its anti-modern backwardness. Similar references occur in overtly unionist, Anglo-Irish pamphlets, such as the anonymously written Hibernize Lachryme; or, The Tears of Ireland,

A Poem (Dublin, 1799).

Despite being Anglo-centric, the author of this poem relied upon the Phoenician model of Celtic origins, connecting the ancient Irish to the ‘Philistines’ (who sound more like the contemporary people of Palestine),””

134

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

also referring to them as both ‘Milesians’ and ‘Phcenecians’. But not all such comparisons emphasized backwardness. Nationalist political pamphleteers invoked the Oriental origins of the Celt in order to justify anti-colonialism, as ‘Julius Vindex’ does in Vindication of the Irish Nation,

and Particularly of the Roman Catholics, Against the Calumnies of Libellers, Part IV (Dublin, 1802). ‘Vindex’ argues against the rhetorical practice of the English ‘barbarizing’ the Irish in justifying their conquest. Significantly, the argument turns the lens of ‘savageness’ onto the British and uses ancient Oriental-Celtic history to justify the civilized pedigree of the Irish. The author repeatedly uses the word ‘colony’ to refer to Ireland, despite the recently passed Act of Union with Great Britain - a move that was common in nationalist circles. The Celtic-Oriental link was continued on an allegorical level in one of the most popular works of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Moore’s Oriental romance, Lalla Rookh (1817), which had received one of the largest

book advances to date from the English publisher Longman and Company.’® In some British magazines, favourable reviews made overt Celtic-Oriental comparisons between the subject (the Orient) and the author (an Irishman) of the text, discussing the similarity in Irish and Arab temperaments and natures. For example, Francis Jeffrey (a friend of Moore and fellow Whig) makes a particularly pointed comparison in the Edinburgh Review: ‘The beauteous forms, the dazzling splendour, the breathing odours of the East, seem at last to have found a kindred poet in that Green

Isle of the West, whose genius has long been suspected to be derived from a warm clime, and now wantons and luxuriates in these voluptious [sic]

regions, as if it felt that it had at length required its native element.’ Moore, the celebrated author of Irish Melodies, is rhetorically ‘suspected’ of belonging to the Orient because of both the Celt’s supposed Eastern origins and the nationalist affinities the work propounded. Even before its publication Lalla Rookh was linked to the cause of Irish nationalism; for instance, Lord Byron wrote in the prefatory epistle to The Corsair (1814), which is dedicated to Moore, about both the Irish ‘cause’ and the brilliance

of the forthcoming Lalla Rookh. Moore also tailored his Oriental romance to fit with the tenor of Oriental interest in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially to fit with the enthusiasm for the luxurious East that English writers, such as his friends Byron and Samuel Rogers, had raised. But he also rhetorically appropriated the discourse of Orientalism to suit Irish issues, particularly Irish nationalism, as we see in ‘The Fire-Worshippers’ section, a point that has often been missed in criticism (excluding Nigel Leask’s important work British Romantic Writers and the East, 1992). The incredible splash that Lalla Rookh made in England and Ireland — some critics hailed it as the pinnacle of Orientalist poetry” — strengthened the link between the geniuses of the Celt and the Oriental while subverting British Orientalism, a point I will

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

135

turn to later. James Clarence Mangan also picked up on these associations,

incorporating them into his ‘Literae Orientales’, a series of pseudo-translations of West Asian poetry and prose (along with Mangan’s invented Oriental poems), which appeared in Dublin University Magazine from 1837 to 1846 — perhaps one of the most obvious of his parodies is his ‘To the Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Bool Djenkinzun’ (1846), in which an Orientalized Persian voice lambastes Britain’s John Bull Jenkinson for

his transgressions in the East (see epigraph p. 129). As David Lloyd has argued in Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987), these versions of Oriental translations are best understood as ‘parodic translations’ of Persian,

Turkish and Arabic literature.” What is relevant to note here is that Mangan did not merely reproduce the standard Orientalist techniques of translation; instead he revealed (and thus subverted) the process of translation itself, as Lloyd explains in his intricate study of Mangan’s cultural nationalism: ‘What [parodic translation] refuses to do is to supersede the anterior [or original] texts on which

it depends, a relationship which is itself parodied [by Mangan’s footnotes] . .. By holding open that relationship, the parodic text invokes reflection upon the appropriative or refractory nature of translation precisely by refusing to exonerate itself from the same processes.’ Lloyd treats Mangan’s translation strategy as both a subversion of contemporaneous translation theories and an element of his cultural nationalism. But Mangan’s strategy had even wider ramifications. By ‘refusing to exonerate’ the traitorous work of the translator,” Mangan’s translations and accompanying texts also rhetorically challenge the process of supplanting an ‘original’ Oriental text with a civilized Orientalist version. In other words, by pointing out the incommensurability of Orientalist translations and their original West Asian texts, Mangan rhetorically deflects a fundamental goal of British and French Orientalism: to supplant and govern the Orient with European knowledge of it. Furthermore, while Lloyd does not discuss Mangan’s sense of the semiotic link between the Oriental and the Celt in detail, he does point out that

Mangan dryly noted ‘according to Vallancey every Irishman is an Arab’ in a preface to his ‘Literae Orientales’.** Indeed, Mangan was certainly interested in ‘the parallel fashions of Orientalism and Celticism’: The exoticism of both, which is sustained in the popular imagination by the comparative remoteness of their location from the centers of Empire, is involved in the notion of an ‘original people’ in the sense of one that is less removed from untamed natural origins than the civilized European . . The ‘originality’ of the Oriental poet — or the Celtic — lies in his closeness to the ‘origins’ of humankind and human feeling [which, it was supposed, had begun in the Orient].”°

Mangan’s response to such theories, particularly with regard to Oriental poetry, is simply to deny and even invert the premises on which they are

136

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

based.”° This strategy of inversion, obviating the centre, is common in Orientalist texts of Irish writers, particularly cultural nationalists; by creating a semiotic link Mangan’s ‘parodic translations’ furthered such subversive uses of Orientalism, disrupting many Orientalist conclusions and, by extension, imperialist Celticist conclusions. In order to better understand this type of strategy, we must briefly examine the parallel movements of Orientalism and Celticism. In Orientalism (1979) Edward Said traced the development of the Orient as a European and American construct. Said’s argument focuses on AngloFrench Orientalism and its nexus of ‘historical specificity, knowledge, and power’ (to borrow from Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg’s critique of Orientalism).?” This nexus of Orientalism had much purchase in Ireland, as did many Anglo-French narratives, but it cannot fully account for the place of Orientalism in Irish culture, particularly in the texts of Irish cultural nationalists and anti-colonial intellectuals and writers. English and French Orientalists habitually represented Asian and West Asian cultures as sensual, exotic, and primitive, often discussing their lack of skills for selfgovernance both as cultures and races — categories that often elided into one other. Such linked portrayals of diverse colonized peoples aided both colonial administrators and imperial sympathizers in justifying and administering colonial rule across the globe. Likewise, nineteenth-century English pundits and imperialist administrators, as well as French and English Celticists, characterized ‘the Celtic races’ as feminine, unintellec-

tual, natural, and pre-modern, particularly the Irish, and especially in the decades around the Irish Famine. Two seminal works from the nineteenth century on the Celtic races — an essay by historian, Orientalist and Celticist, Ernest Renan, “The Poetry of the Celtic Races’* (1854; first English translation 1893) and a critical study by Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867)” — treat the ‘Celt’ as essentially feminine and, therefore,

complementary to the more masculine Germanic or Teutonic races (emphasizing the Saxon influence in English society). For Arnold, the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt formed a sort of family — with the Anglo-Saxon as the stern, unimaginative parent and the Celt as the ineffectual, intractable, and dreamy child — ‘always ready to react against the despotism of fact’.*° Significantly, both works refer to the Orient in defining Celticity. Anglo-Irish intellectuals went further and compared the Celt and the Oriental in a more damning manner than these Celticists. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, a century after British colonialism had taken hold in the Orient, many Anglo-centric Irish intellectuals, most of whom had long opposed theories of the Oriental origins of the Celts, asserted and highlighted the lack of civilization and racial ‘primitive’ similarities of the colonized peoples. For example, in an 1833 article, Rev. Samuel O’Sullivan

compared Irish Ribbonism to the Thuggee in India, ‘if the Thugs are their

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

137

superiors in the article of safe and expeditious murder, they are immeasurably beyond the Thugs in the article of skilful perjury’.31 Such comparisons became more racialized and increased with colonial expansion. For instance, John Pentland Mahaffy’s severely racist Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical Conditions (1869) repeatedly compares the Celts with Orientals, Africans, and native Americans, as well as with

neolithic hunter-gatherers.*? Mahaffy, a Trinity professor and well-known Dublin intellectual, cites ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as Renan and other Orientalists in drawing his conclusions that the Celtic Irish represent a ‘perpetually’ primitive people, semiotically linking the Drunken Irishman to the Red Indian and the Black Sambo: Celts have shown indubitable and marked peculiarities from the days of Julius Caesar to the present; so much so, that a brilliant description of the Gauls, by a great living German historian, might pass for an account of the present Irish peasantry . . . ‘the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles, of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity — no trader was allowed to pass before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news — and

the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts’.*8

Mahaffy’s essentialist argument, overtly disdainful of the working class and rural Irish culture, was not uncommon

in Anglo-Irish intellectual circles.

Nor were depictions of the rural Irish as a primitive people uncommon in conservative English culture, as numerous studies over the last two decades have demonstrated. Such depictions of the Irish seemed obvious complements to similar characterizations of various Asian and West Asian peoples and cultures. Mahaffy’s pseudo-scientific conclusions regarding Celts, Orientals, and other ‘primitives’ only strengthened the semiotic connection between Ireland and the Orient and the presence of the Oriental Celt in Irish culture. Even though the political perspective of Anglo-centric scholars like Mahaffy differed enormously from that of cultural nationalist poets like Mangan, both relied upon the same Celtic—Oriental link. The Land League even employed the comparison in its own anti-colonial rhetoric; one 1879 poster read, ‘From the China towers of Pekin to the round towers of Ireland, from the cabins of Connemara to the kraals of Kaffirland, from the

wattled homes of the isles of Polynesia to the wigwams of North America the cry is: “Down with invaders! Down with tyrants!” Every man to have his own land — every man to have his own home.” Later, for many nonCatholic Revivalists, the analogical process that linked the Celt and the Oriental could also be employed in the creation of a new Irish identity, once the valences of the characterizations were reversed, that is. Indeed, at

138

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the close of the century,

W.B. Yeats, AE, and James Cousins** consciously

identified the Irish Celt with the Occident’s cultural ‘other’ as a means of cultural unification and rhetorical resistance against British colonialism — and, almost to the extent that they identified with the Celt, they identified with the Oriental. Historically, Irish identification with the East was rarely culturally intersubjective? — which is to say, rarely a relationship in which equals recognize themselves in one another, or, to borrow from Hegel, a relation-

ship in which individuals recognize self-consciousness in the other.*” Such relations rely primarily upon mutual recognition and reciprocal communication. The Irish, particularly the Anglo-Irish and wealthy Catholics, occupied a liminal position in the ‘imagined geography’ of empire,* existing as both colonizer and colonized, depending on their position in Irish society and the purpose of their rhetoric. Furthermore, Irish-Asian and Irish-West Asian relationships were generally mediated through the British Empire, in that Orientalism as a knowledge base was always already implicated in the power dynamics of British colonialism in the Orient. Nevertheless, many instances of colonial resistance and intersubjective cross-colony relationships exist. At the height of the British Empire, the Celtic-Oriental connection allowed Irish writers rhetorically to assert both their proximity to the centre of empire and their proximity to the periphery, depending on their context, purpose, and audience. For instance, nationalists and cultural nationalists used the connection to resist colonialism, just

as unionists used the connection to promote English imperial dominance. The flexibility and allegorical dimension of this Celtic—Oriental connection did not restrict Irish writers in English from publishing in England nor from promoting a non-anglicized Irish national identity, stereotypical or otherwise. In short, during the late nineteenth century, this liminal narrative of rhetorical positioning and semiotic posturing mirrored Ireland’s own liminal position in empire. While using tropes of the Orient did not require any immediate understanding of the actualities of colonial life in England’s distant colonies, the Celtic—Oriental semiotic connection often propelled Irish cultural nationalists beyond Orientalism toward an international critique of European colonialism. And, occasionally, the connection coincided with a mutual and

surprisingly personal (if not entirely factual or intersubjective) cross-colony identification between cultural nationalists in both Ireland and non-European colonies, particularly India, as we will see in the case of Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. By ‘cross-colony identification’ I mean a strategy for decolonization that includes establishing cultural (and sometimes political) connections across both geographic distance and the colonized periphery. Such connections are imagined within the boundaries of empire yet exist without the mediation of the imperial centre (for example, travellers from Ireland or India establishing relations without the official mediation of the

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

139

East India Company or the British Raj).3? Such connections form when colonized individuals recognize an experience in a distant colony as familiar or notice that other colonized groups share circumstances or racial and cultural traits, which may in fact have begun as administrative comparisons between colonized peoples. The comparisons can be easily subverted, however, to nationalist or decolonizing aims, as when James Stephens

asserted the similarities between Celtic and Hindu myth and history in an attempt to create a new national narrative.*° Furthermore, such subversion was embodied by liminal figures such as playwright and socialist journalist Frederick Ryan (who edited the Egyptian Standard in Alexandria, 1905-7) and Ulsterman, Roger Casement, who, while still working as an imperial administrator in the Congo, began to promote human rights and nationalist struggles in Europe’s colonies. (Casement eventually vigorously promoted reforms in Africa, South America, and Ireland and later was

executed by the English government for his part in the preparation for Ireland’s Easter Uprising of 1916.) The writings and actions of such cultural nationalists imaginatively and temporarily unify the periphery against the centre, rejecting the role designated them by the metropole, despite their borrowings from Orientalism. Cross-colony identification is a reaction to imperialism, but like all efforts at decolonization, successful or not (variously discussed as nationalism, abrogation, appropriation, nativism, collaboration, liberal and radical decolonization, adulteration, allegory, hybridity, and strategic essentialism),*? it

attempts to alter colonial pathologies of power. Also, like other decolonization strategies, the strategies of Irish Orientalism did not entirely succeed. The Celtic—Oriental semiotic connection reified along with Celticism during the Revival, and cross-colony identification was mitigated by several factors stemming from Ireland’s liminal place in empire: England’s geo-cultural proximity to Ireland (and its influence on issues such as race and governance); the romantic, distancing nature of most Orientalist images and impressions; and the pervasive doctrinal sphere of Orientalist knowledge in Europe — what Edward Said has termed, ‘latent Orientalism’.*? Despite such inhibitors, many cases of cross-colony identification emerged and inspired cultural independence and decolonization. The complicated dynamics of colonial representation in Irish Orientalism differs from the normal binariness of colonizer/colonized relationship. England, as the imperial metropole, exists as the centre and mediator of all sanctioned colonial relationships — as James Cousins puts it in his auto-

biography, We Two Together (1950): ‘London lay between Ireland and India.” Britain’s Oriental colonies exist at the periphery; Ireland exists in a ‘poth/and’ place between the centre and the periphery. Through Orientalist texts, England represents the Asian and West Asian colonies, which attempt to ‘write back’ to the centre, but who do not represent themselves in the metropole. Irish writers have more access to self-representation in

140

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

the metropole but this is primarily through English-language texts and self-exoticization (particularly more anglicized writers such as William Maginn and Thomas Moore) than the non-European colonies. Most knowledge of the Oriental periphery comes to Ireland through British representations of the Orient, yet Irish culture often uses such knowledge for new purposes — economic, cultural, political. Historically, the imaginative literature of Irish Orientalism offered Irish writers a discursive clutch to disengage from the standard power dynamic of English/Irish relations and then imaginatively re-engage the colonial discourse through allegorical or other devices, readdressing Irish tensions from a vantage that did not promote an ‘either/or’ binary of centre and periphery. Such works of Irish Orientalism engaged the colonial discourse from a perspective that could operate with an inclusive ‘both/and’ perspective — that is, both the centre and the periphery — rhetorically able to employ both the Orientalist perspective of the colonizer and the nationalist convictions of the colonized. In the mid-nineteenth century, such a perspective allowed Irish cultural nationalists the flexibility both to argue for a more secure place for Irish officers in the East India Company and to create the voice of an Oriental speaking back to the empire about imperial inequities, rhetorically unifying the periphery against the centre. Although this voice often was riddled simultaneously with Orientalist notions, it often imagined a new power dynamic for the colonized and colonizer and promoted an independent national culture as well as a stronger presence in empire. Irish Orientalism developed in conjunction with British and French Orientalisms and also as an imaginative riposte to global colonialism. On one hand, it differs in audience and purpose from British and French Orientalisms; on the other hand, it often remains rhetorically similar, but

only as a parody is similar to its original.** One particular area of similarity concerns how Orientalist texts comment and build upon one another in a highly intertextual fashion. Said provides some useful terms to discuss the intertextual and author/audience relationships inherent to Orientalism: Every writer on the Orient .. . assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself [and, of

course, with specific colonial events and places]. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitute an analyzable formation.**

Irish writers are no different in this regard from British or French writers. They ground their ideas — even anti-colonial ones — on Orientalist precedents, literary or otherwise, the bulk of which were British, French, and

German sources (for example, see the copious Orientalist notes in Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Mangan’s ‘Literae Orientales’).

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

141

A clear instance of the train of borrowings in Orientalist projects can be traced in the pseudo-Oriental letters genre of the eighteenth century. The anonymously published Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to His Friends at Trebisond, Dublin 1757 (alternately attributed to Viscount Edmund Sexton Pery and Judge Robert Hellen)” borrowed characters from, and purported to be the successor of, Baron George Lyttleton’s Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend at Ispahan, London 1735 (the first collection of pseudo-letters written originally in English), which had itself borrowed characters from, and purported to be the successor of, Charles Montesquieu’s anonymously published Les Lettres Persanes (John Ozell’s English translation, Persian Letters, appeared in 1722), which itself had popularized the genre that was made well known by Giovanni Marana’s internationally popular Letters writ by a Turkish Spy . .. at Paris (8 vols., translated 1687-93). Also, one of the best works of the genre of pseudo-Oriental letters, The Citizen of the World (1762), had an Irish man, Oliver Goldsmith, for its witty

author. Irish Orientalist literature fully operates within this process of borrowing and building upon other Orientalist texts. Indeed, such intertextuality greatly enables the process of parody; parody in Irish Orientalism is less obvious than a burlesque or a travesty because it purportedly exists within a tradition of literary affiliation and repetition. It seems to be a contribution to the field, rather than a subversion of it, as Mangan’s ‘parodic translations’ seemed genuine to many Oriental enthusiasts despite his strategies of inversion. Such parody enables subversive narratives in which the authors see themselves in the Oriental ‘other’, and, therefore, in

a sense, deconstruct their own colonization in the rewriting of a narrative of colonialism. The relationship between object (the Orient) and the author (the Orien-

talist) is crucial in the analyzable formation of an Orientalist text. As Said notes, ‘Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient.’ In his analysis of Orientalist philology and literature, Said maps the distinct positions of British and French Orientalists in relationship to the Orient, which, en masse, he argues, constitute different analyzable

formations. Much of Said’s analysis of Anglo-French Orientalism, therefore, only accounts for the encouragement of Orientalist visions and the introduction of Orientalist knowledge in Ireland, in part, because of the simple

fact that Irish writers tend to locate themselves differently vis-a-vis imperialism and the Orient than British and French writers. Also, writers within

Irish Orientalism, depending upon their particular strategic location, used the Orient for divergent ends. For instance, in Irish literature, the strategic location of Pery’s pseudo-Oriental letters differs from the Oriental letters of William Sampson and John Wilson Croker, yet all three participate in Irish Orientalism. Sampson used an Oriental voice in his ‘Chinese Journals’ to advance radical issues of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. Croker’s Chinese correspondent in An Intercepted Letter from J— T— Esq. Writer at

142 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Canton to His Friend in Dublin (1804) discusses the Quang-tongese, an allegorical Oriental group representing the Dublin Irish, in mixed tones of condemnation and appreciation. In vivid contrast, Pery, the earlier, more Anglo-centric author of Letters from an Armenian in Ireland, reports on both

the Anglo-Irish

and

the ‘old Native’ Gaelic-Irish,*?

commenting

frequently on their drunkeness and need for governance. Such a variety of strategic positions can be accounted for, to some extent, through their chronology. Prior to the Celtic Revivalism of the late eighteenth century and the antiquarianism of the Royal Irish Academy, Pery’s text provides an image of the Irish as geo-temporally distant from both England and the Orient. His Oriental narrator, Aza, after witnessing a native Irish caoineadh, or funeral

wail or dirge, rhetorically assails the native Irish, treating them as subjects of only natural law, who remain more entrenched in custom and superstition than the ‘progressive’ Oriental. Aza frequently describes the Irish as exhibiting traits also commonly attributed to ‘Easterns’; the ‘Voluptuous’ Irish represent here the Oriental’s Oriental. Unlike his literary antecedents (Montesquieu and Lyttleton), Pery does not include a discussion of primitive Troglodytes. He describes, however, an excursion through the ‘wild and varied beauty’ of the Irish countryside, which is marred only by its Milesian inhabitants.** The rural, Gaelic Irish seem

to be the modern

Troglodytes (as Vallancey actually later argued), painted as a once glorious but presently rude people. The following lengthy quote is a large part of the letter. One necessary note: Aza and Omar's ‘Friend’ and guide into the countryside is an Anglo-Irishman — the necessary interpreter of the Gaelic culture — their ‘Conductor’ identifies himself as part of the Gaelic culture,

despite his cynicism. We have viewed this Island and it is worth contending for: We travelled all this Day thro’ a fair Country, along the Side of a Lake bordered with Shrubs of choicest Smell and Beauty; . . . our Journey was [through] Scenes of wild and varied Beauty: Whilst we were amusing ourselves with the Variety of Prospects and the Music of the Woods, we were suddenly alarmed by the Yells of Women howling, and beating their Breasts, and throwing themselves prostrate on the Ground; the Eccho [sic] of their Lamentations from the Water and the Hills was dismal:

That, said my Friend, is the Funeral of a Christian of a different Sect or Opinion from that which is established by our Laws, and those Cries are so peculiar to this People, as to be distinguished by the Name of this Country. — Of a Sudden, their Groans ceased, and they rose from the Ground and departed with much appearance of Mirth: What, said Omar, means this Change? Is the Dead revived, or have they so soon forgot their Kinsman or Friend? Those, answered our Conductor, are neither Kinsmen nor Friends of the Deceased; what you saw is a Ceremony

performed without any real Sorrow, and as well over the Undeserving, as

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

143

the Deserving; Custom has established this feigned Representation of Woe, and Custom is with us more powerful than Laws.*?

The caoineadh was frequently critiqued at the time, but it does not need much exegesis here.™ Perhaps the most significant aspect is that the Oriental narrator describes the native Irish as more superstitious and entrenched in custom than the Oriental traveller. This representation depicts Gaelic culture as pre-Enlightenment or even anti-Enlightenment culture: the Conductor claims, ‘Custom is with us more powerful than Laws’. Such a

position inverts the cardinal power dynamic (Occidental over Oriental) of this genre in this anti-Gael text (Enlightened Oriental over barbarous Occidental/Celt), both strengthening the position of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland and asserting the peripheral place of the native Irish in empire. This Gael, and by extension all peripheral Celts, is Orientalized by a representation of and a representative from the Orient - Omar, the cosmopolitan traveller. Pery’s early contribution to this tradition reveals the distance that Irish Gaelic culture had from modern English culture in the mid-eighteenth century; this is, in a sense, the geo-temporal distance that later Celtic Revivalists would bridge in their representations. In the literary texts of Irish Orientalism, we often find an Oriental visit-

ing Ireland and England or commenting on Europe, whether allegorically or directly, which points to a significant difference between it and British and French literary Orientalism. While ‘pseudo-Oriental letters’ and other accounts of Orientals in Europe originated and flourished in French and British letters — especially in the Enlightenment critiques of the ‘barbaric’ European society (cf. Montesquieu and Diderot) — the primary AngloFrench Orientalist texts concerned European exploits in the East. Edward Said discusses this important aspect of British Orientalism: ‘the Orient was a place of pilgrimage, and every major work belonging to a genuine if not always to an academic Orientalism took its form, style, and intention from the idea of pilgrimage there. In this idea ... the Romantic idea of restorative reconstruction ...

is the principal source.’ In other words, much of

British and French Orientalisms depicted Europeans making pilgrimages or travelling to the Orient to discover it, map it, control it, and/or resuscitate

it to the civilized state from which it had supposedly fallen — in short, to ‘re-civilize’ it.>° In contrast, much early Irish Orientalism either depicted ‘civilized’ Orientals visiting Ireland or modern Enlightenment Britain (or, in the case of Irish antiquarianism, ‘Orientals’ coming as the first colonizers of the

British Isles), or gave voice to Oriental individuals or nations as they struggled against the British or another imperial force (for example, the Ottoman Empire). For instance, an ‘Irish Officer’s’ anonymous Dublin pamphlet, The History of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan .. . with Some Account of the Fair Circassian (1819), depicts the Persian ambassador to England on a fictitious visit to Ireland” — a place, it turns out, he greatly admires and

144

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

continually compares with Persia.* The flattering portrait of the ambassador on the cover makes him the counterpart, in some

respects, to the

anonymous ‘Trish Officer’ who writes of him — this is in much contrast to James Morier’s unsympathetic and degrading portrayal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan in his popular Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Also, Richard Madden, a nineteenth-century Irish historian of the

United Irishman, wrote about his years spent in the Turkish Empire, and much of his work concerns his support of nationalist and emancipation movements in Ireland and elsewhere — for example, he documented both Cuban slavery (1840) and the story of Egyptian nationalist Mohammed Ali (1841). Half a century later, Lady Gregory’s ‘Arabi and His Household’, from the London Times (23 October 1882), describes Arabi or Urabi — the leader of

Egypt’s thwarted nationalist rebellion — as ‘gentle’, ‘humane’, ‘earnest’, and ‘truthful’ through the voices of his family, refuting the representation of Arabi in the English press as a cowardly despot aspiring to power. Through such allegorical, Orientalized representations of other colonized peoples, Irish writers and scholars gained some discursive control over the representation of empire. Thomas Moore wrote in the 1820 Preface to Lalla Rookh that he had had difficulty writing his romance. He was in a sort of post-fame hangover, after the initial success of his early Irish Melodies. But once he found an allegorical path in which he could represent the tensions of Ireland, he launched into the work:

But, at last, fortunately, as it proved, the thought occurred to me of founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire-worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters. From that moment a new and deep interest in my

whole task took possession of me. The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of

Ireland soon found itself at home in the East.*?

The Ghebers in ‘The Fire-Worshippers’ have often been read as representing the rebellious Irish, hounded by the invading Moslem/British forces. As Howard Mumford Jones noted in 1937, ‘The overtones are unmistakably

those of Irish rebellion, particularly the Robert Emmet episode. Moore hymns the doomed patriots and goes out of his way to excoriate the wretch who betrayed their cause ... Hafed is a Persian Robert Emmet, Hinda the unfortunate Sarah Curran, and the traitor a composite portrait of government spies.’ Alternately, Daniel O’Connell is allegorically lambasted in ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ as the satanic demagogue, Mokanna, who manipulates the religious faith of the masses. Moore, writing of the ‘Fire-worshippers’ section, once explicitly noted: ‘I should not be surprised if this story of the Fire-worshippers were found capable of a doubleness of application.’*' Moore's use of allegory — ‘a doubleness of application’ — here seems to be a more regulated and considered, but no less integral, version

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

145

of what Luke Gibbons has described as allegory in Ireland. In discussing the use of allegory by the agrarian protestors, the Whiteboys, Gibbons notes: ‘It is not simply, therefore, that allegory [is] ... a mask that can be removed at will: it is part of consciousness itself under certain conditions of colonial rule.” Moore’s Orient allegorizes an Ireland that embodies (what Gibbons describes as) a ‘double struggle’ — ‘the anti-imperial struggle, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an internal struggle...

between

constitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurrectionary tradition’.® Moore does not treat the Orient as an escape or pilgrimage for curious Europeans, rather he seeks a symbolic ‘home’ in the Orient to illustrate the double struggle of Ireland — both anti-imperial and an ‘internal struggle’ over divergent modes of decolonization. In Lalla Rookh Moore bridges the distance between the Orient and the Celt through this ‘doubleness of application’. Significantly, his goal of working for, what he termed, ‘the cause of tolerance’ seems to be a common one for Irish Orientalists who are also cultural nationalists; undoubtedly this is a proportionately underrepresented theme in Irish literature. This Irish cause, however, is not easily noticed when reading his work in the light of British Orientalism. For instance, Terence Brown has argued that the immensely popular Lalla Rookh merely ‘confirms prejudices about Ireland and the Orient’ without check: So the Irish are oriental exiles who find their ‘native element’ in ‘voluptious [sic] regions’ east of the Bosphorus. In writing an Oriental romance, therefore, Moore confirmed British stereotypes of Ireland. But,

he also wrote of the Orient in ways that made quite certain that any politically suspect potential in his material would have no opportunity

to inhibit his critical and commercial success.™ While Brown is correct in concluding that Moore relied upon the discourse of Anglo-French Orientalism for his financial success — Moore was given the incredible advance of 3,000 guineas for the work — Lalla Rookh does not merely echo British and French Orientalisms. In Moore’s numerous and voluminous footnotes, we can discern a subversive difference and discover

how the author straddles the divide between the centre and periphery of empire.

One particular footnote both reveals Moore’s strategic location and demonstrates his liminal position by offering a redefinition of the Enlightenment view of liberty. The footnote refers to these lines from ‘Paradise and the Peri’:® Downward the Peri turns her gaze, And, through the war-field’s bloody haze

Beholds a youthful warrior stand, Alone beside his native river, — The red blade broken in his hand,

146 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory And the last arrow in his quiver. ‘Live,’ said the Conqueror, ‘live to share

‘The trophies and the crowns I bear!’ Silent that youthful warrior stood — Silent he pointed to the flood All crimson with his country’s blood, Then sent his last remaining dart,

For answer, to the Invader’s heart. [sic]

False flew the shaft, though pointed well; The Tyrant liv‘d, the Hero fell! —

Yet mark’d the Peri where he lay, And, when the rush of war was past,

Swiftly descending on a ray Of morning light, she caught the last — Last glorious drop his heart had shed, Before its free-born spirit fled! ‘Be this,’ she cried, as she wing’d her flight,

‘My welcome gift at the Gates of Light. ‘Though foul are the drops that oft distil ‘On the field of warfare, blood like this,

‘For Liberty shed, so holy is’*®

While this fallen hero seems to merely indicate a sense of resignation and an acceptance of earthly defeat in exchange for eternal rewards, Moore’s sentimental heroism also challenges the imperial discourse from which it emerges. The last line of this quote is interrupted with the following footnote, which has a marked change of tone. The note begins by implicating the trope of the despotic Orient, highlighting its place in the reader’s sense of the Orient — but then it turns to another agenda: *Objections may be made to my use of liberty in this, and more especially inthe story that follows it, as totally inapplicable to any state of things that has ever existed in the East; but though I cannot, of course, mean to employ it in that enlarged and noble sense which is so well understood at the present day, and I grieve to say, so little acted upon, yet it is no disparagement to the word to apply it to that national independence, that freedom from the interference and dictation of foreigners, without which, indeed no liberty of any kind can exist; and for which both Hindoos and Persians fought against their Mussulman invaders with, in many cases, a bravery that deserved much better

success.*”

Here is the liminality of Irish Orientalism — complicit but subversive; imperial and also native with ‘a doubleness of application’. Although Moore mingled in an Anglo-centric (though Whiggish) world when he wrote Lalla Rookh, he still wove a strong anti-colonial statement into the melodramatic Oriental romance, offering nationalist rhetoric and allegory amidst the

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

147

tropes and language of British Orientalism. While Moore refers to ‘Mussulman invaders’ instead of English colonizers, the allegory when noticed implicates English imperialism. Moore’s footnote — the paratext to the text — instead of justifying Orientalist conclusions, offers a redefinition of Eastern liberty, one amenable to Irish nationalism, one in which liberty itself depends upon ‘national independence’. Other Irish writers also turned to the Orient and strengthened the idea that the Irish were ‘oriental exiles who find their “native element” [in the

East]’ — but not to bolster the stereotypes of Britain (as Brown claims for Moore) — rather to claim the stereotypes as a way of asserting difference within sameness, if crossing geographic distance through imagination, as a mode of cultural decolonization. The power to represent a colonized people is usually consonant with the power of self-representation, both of which run the danger of merely reproducing the power structure within which they operate.® Irish writers who wrote about an essentialized Orient, in a sense, sought to revise the discourse that also implicated them. Like similar representations of ‘we’ the ‘real Irish’, this is a sort of strategic essentialism (to borrow from Gayatri Spivak), which loosens the fastened binary relations of colonizer and colonized. Moore’s Irish Orientalism uses the tools of the dominant

discourse

to rhetorically subvert it, creating a modified

version of liberty which would include national autonomy, in a sense, working toward decolonization from within the dominant discourse. By representing the liminal position between the ‘First World’ and the ‘Third’, Irish Orientalists expose the machinations of empire. In such a ‘both/and’ space, the hegemony of empire becomes more discernible by the simple fact that it is observed from multiple vantages. As Leerssen notes: The ambiguous case of Ireland, both part of Europe and part of a denigrated colonial periphery, hugely complicates this straightforward binariness. Ireland is subject to hegemonistic representation, but also has access to it. English exoticism did not silence the Irish voice as it silenced the native voices from the colonies; conversely, when Ireland

uses the language of exoticism, it does so in less ethnocentrist ways than in England. With Irish authors, it is not just a matter of watching or being watched, seeing or being seen: Ireland is in the Twilight between First and Third World, between the ones in the dark and the ones in the light; Ireland watches how it is watched by England; Ireland watches

itself watching the Orient.”

Representing the Orient initiated these Irish writers and thinkers into a new complicity with empire. But, in doing so, many Irish Orientalists also gained insights about their own representation in empire and their own (constructed) Celtic identity. This process becomes akin to observing oneself in folded tripartite mirrors, wherein one watches oneself observe oneself from a vantage not limited by the binariness of direct reflection. Such fresh vantages are crucial for decolonization, and, therefore, the strategies for

148

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

producing it are valued and, unfortunately, are reified at times. This tripartite vantage helped Irish writers renegotiate their position in empire. By witnessing how they were represented (and how the English operated elsewhere), they could imaginatively break from the colonial binary of colonizer and colonized, and alter their one-to-one, colonizer/colonized relationship to include other points in the circumference of the periphery. In doing so, the distance between colonized and colonizer becomes a constant, while

cross-colony distance lessens as proximity imaginatively builds; the imperial binary of metropole/periphery becomes a relationship of a united circumference joining around a fixed centre. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, and Orientalists from Ireland (such as Lafcadio Hearn and Stanley Lane-Poole Smith) increasingly made contact with West Asian and Asian cultures (many even ‘went native’). Significantly, the Irish person in the Orient, like the Irish author of pseudo-Oriental texts, could easily occupy the role of both colonizer and anti-imperialist nationalist. For instance, the nineteenth-century Irish and Greek Orientalist, Lafcadio Hearn, who left Ireland as a youth but carried visions of his Irish father and homeland with him throughout his life, occupied a nebulous position as Oriental and Occidental. Although Orientalist stereotypes haunt his texts, he does not observe the strict code of most Orientalists — that an ‘irreducible distance’ exists between the White Man and the Oriental.”1 Many Irish writers also explicitly compared the negative effects of colonial projects in Ireland and in Asia and West Asia. For instance, George Bernard Shaw, in his 1906 and

1929 prefaces to John Bull’s Other Island (1907), compares the violence of

British Black and Tans in Ireland with British violence in Egypt at Denshawai and in India at Amritsar. In a 1911 issue of The Irish Review, Frederick Ryan intelligently explores the ‘The Persian Struggle’ against foreign capital and concludes: ‘How entirely intelligible, one had almost written, how Irish, it all is.’”* Also, J. Chartres Molony’s comparison of India and Ireland in The Riddle of the Irish (1927) discusses this cross-colony recognition caused by imperialism: ‘Diwan Bahadur N. Subramaniam, once a well-known figure in South Indian life, remarked to me that Indian and Irishman should understand each other. “Each,” he said, “is one of a conquered race, and the conqueror is the same for both.’ This identifica-

tion differs dramatically from the perspective of T.E. Lawrence or other British Orientalists, in which Occidentals and Orientals could not fully understand one another because the white man was always the observer,

the Oriental always the subject. Represented as being both of Europe and not of Europe, colonizer and colonized, also made the Irish a group with which other colonized groups could identify. In 1944, Trinity Orientalist M. Mansoor coined the term, Irish Orientalism, in his study of the subject.” As a scholar of Irish scholarship

on the East, Mansoor points out in the introductory section of his study

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

149

that in English and Irish letters ‘enough has been said to show that... an affinity with the East had long been part of the Irish temperament’.”5 Significantly, Mansoor, author of The Story of Irish Orientalism, was ‘not himself Irish’ but was a ‘native speaker of Arabic’, to quote the Trinity Orientalist R.M. Gwynn in the Foreword to the study.” I note this primarily in order to make clear that Mansoor described ‘the Irish’ as a group exclusive of himself, yet one with which he felt kinship — he treats himself as a representative of the Orient watching the Irish watch. The process of representation becomes foregrounded. Others in Asian and West Asian colonies also watched Ireland watching. For instance, in Gora (1910; first English translation 1924), a novel of the Bengali thinker, nationalist, and

writer Rabindranath Tagore, the titular character discovers that he himself is not an Indian Brahmin, but actually an Irish orphan. Unlike Kipling’s Kim, another Irish orphan in India, however, he is initially distraught when he discovers his European ‘whiteness’ and realizes, by extension, that he must be racially complicit with the system of colonial oppression. At the turn of the twentieth century, Celtic Revivalists began to exploit and develop Celtic-Oriental connections further, associating them with ‘international’ and modern European aesthetics by highlighting the positive, anti-modernist sides to Celtic-Oriental stereotypes but believing they were borrowing ‘directly’ from Asian art and philosophy.” In ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897), Yeats famously responded to Matthew Arnold not by refuting Arnold’s formulation of Celticity but by emphasizing the positive and heroic traits of the imaginative and nature-loving Celt. Significantly, he does not drop the incidental comparisons between the Oriental and the Celt, but rather adds a more specific comparison between Celtic

mythology and ‘Mahomedan’ literature,” thereby, in a sense, transvaluing the values of the colonizer to the colonized while furthering a native tradition of comparing the Celt with the Oriental. Yeats and other Irish writers such as Stephens, Cousins, and AE studied

in even greater depth than Mangan and Moore specific artistic, philosophic, and cultural forms of Asia (particularly of Arabia, India, China, and Japan) and borrowed tropes from them, incorporating them into their neoCeltic mystical works. In order to recover a lost Celtic past, they imaginatively (or mystically) commuted geographic distance through travel (astral or real) and textual borrowings. This form of non-satirical parody and Orientalist affiliation was involved in their self-conscious project of creating new national ideals and a new identity for Ireland — attempting to refashion what Homi Bhabha has termed a ‘national narrative’,”? or to use

a term AE coined in 1916, the ‘national being’.* They wrote plays, essays, stories, poems, and novels with Oriental themes, ideas, and images inter-

woven with Celtic themes. Stephens went so far as to mingle Indian philosophy with his versions of Irish mythology (cf. In the Land of Youth, 1924) and have Irish storytellers mix talk of karma with tales of ‘the seraph

150

— Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Cuchulain’ (‘Brien O’Brien’ in The Demi-Gods, 1914).*! Also, these Revival-

ists drew heavily upon the thought and writings of Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky (cf. Isis Unveiled, 1910). Blavatsky’s teachings delusively appropriated Indian and other Asian philosophies into her system of theosophy. But, in general, two of the best-known examples of the Revivalists’ borrowings from Asian literature are Yeats’s Japanese/Irish Noh dramas and Stephens’s version of the Tain Bé Cuiailnge (the main Irish mythological cycle) written ‘in light of the Veda’, as Yeats observed.* By identifying Irish myth, literature, and culture with the ‘Orient’, these Revivalists not only created allegories of Ireland, they also imaginatively distanced Ireland from England and ‘de-Europeanized’ the country with Orientalized images of a non-British, non-industrial, non-urban Celtic, Gaelic Ireland. In the Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924; addressed to Lady Gregory) Yeats recounts how he invented verse for the Irish hero Cuchulain, based on ‘[verses] Indian poets have put into

the mouth of Krishna’, and how some plays of the Revival had ‘an odour, a breath, that suggests to me Indian or Japanese poems and legends’.® Yeats then asks the pointed and self-conscious question for the Irish Orientalist (ostensibly addressed to Lady Gregory): ‘Why has our school... been interested mainly in something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this is Europe, that is Asia?’** While Yeats did not fully understand this cultural inheritance of a Celtic-Oriental ‘something in Irish life’, he, like other Revivalists, was familiar with the Phoenician origins myth and sought to re-establish a thread of the cultural connection through theosophy. Indeed, his awareness of this ‘something’ signifies how embedded in Irish culture were the centuries-old links between the Celt and the Oriental. In many ways, these links culminated during the Revival when cultural nationalists (re)invented their identification with the Orient as both some-

thing new and something ancient. The Oriental element that they recognized ‘in Irish life’ felt so closely familiar, in part, because of both the tradition of it in Irish culture and their inherited Celtic colonial identity. Furthermore, he later wrote in the Introduction to An Indian Monk (1932),

that he believed his borrowings were not merely adopted from Orientalism: ‘We have borrowed directly from the East and selected for admiration or repetition everything in our own past that is least European, as though groping backward towards our common mother.’*> Much of Celticism and Gaelic romanticism also share this impetus. In the Introduction to Tagore’s Gitanjali (1912), Yeats comments that reading Tagore’s verse was like recognizing a voice in a dream; this seems to be a metaphor for recognizing sameness in a cultural other — the unifying of the colonized circumference. The poet's fascination with the Orient was both varied and long-lived, as illustrated by his involvement with three Indians throughout his life: Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and

Shri Purohit Swami. Yeats became interested in the teachings of Chatterjee,

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

151

an Indian mystic, relatively early in his career, in the 1890s. This interest became manifest in his Indian poems of Crossways (1899). Notably, his interest in the East developed at the same time his interest in the west of Ireland and the Celtic Twilight took off. During Yeats’s sojourn with Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage in the second decade of the twentieth century, Yeats began to formulate ideas about the nature of the Orient and his own political and aristocratic aesthetic. He actualized this aesthetic in his Irish/Japanese Noh dramas, Four Plays for Dancers: The Dreaming of the Bones, At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and Calvary (first performed between 1917 and 1920). Both men also became interested in the work and persona of Rabindranath Tagore and began promoting Tagore’s work in England and Ireland.** Yeats wanted to mimic both Tagore’s and Japan’s ‘illustrious’, ‘unbroken’ tradition — or as he urges his readers in his Introduction to Ezra Pound’s and Ernest Fenollosa’s 1916 translations of Japanese and Chinese literature: ‘it is now time to copy the East and live deliberately’.*” Only two weeks after meeting Tagore, Yeats hosted a dinner for the Bengali writer, and soon helped him publish Gitanjali, a volume of his poetry in translation. While Yeats and Pound were not Tagore’s only supporters, they, along with William Rothenstein, were his best advocates and promoters in Europe at the time. They created an impressive mantle for the Bengali poet and successfully drew international recognition to his writing — Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, 1913, ten years before Yeats’s own Nobel. Later he wrote the Preface to Tagore’s symbolic drama, The Post Office, which he arranged for the Irish Players to perform, headed by Lady Gregory. Yeats’s deepest stated motives for promoting Tagore, however, derived from his interest in (what he saw as) the ancient continuity of the Orient. He saw in India, and in all of Asia, a unified culture that had not been

ruined by modernization, in short, an ideal for the burgeoning Irish nation — ideas that only differed from British Orientalism in their application. In his Introduction to Gitanjali, Yeats wrote, ‘The work of a supreme culture, [Tagore’s lyrics] appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.’** But, as Roy Foster notes, in arranging the Irish performance of The Post Office, Yeats ‘determined that [Tagore’s] message should be spread to Ireland’,? where he felt it was sorely needed for the national renewal and decolonization. Later, in the 1930s Yeats became fascinated with the life and writings of Shri Purohit Swami. He prompted Swami to write an English-language autobiography and then wrote its Introduction (his autobiography, An Indian Monk, and his mystical treatise, The Holy Mountain [1934]) as well as the translation of the Ten Principal Upanishads (1937) which Yeats co-authored.” In these writings, Yeats returns to the

roots of Irish Orientalism and relies on the ‘Phoenician model’ of Celtic origins to rejoin Ireland to its pre-colonial, pre-Catholic roots:

152

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory I associated early Christian Ireland with India; Shri Purohit Swami. . . might have been that blessed Cellach who sang upon his deathbed of bird and beast; Bagwan Shri Hamsa’s pilgrimage to Mount Kailas, .. .

suggested pilgrimages to Croagh Patrick and to Lough Derg... Saint Patrick must have found in Ireland, for he was not its first missionary, men whose Christianity had come from Egypt, and retained character-

istics of those older faiths that have become invention.”

so important to our

But Yeats was not merely interested in building mystical or allegorical bridges; he saw these cultures as having the same cultural roots.Tobecome the voice of Ireland, he must be able to hear and identify with the voices of his ‘brother’ poets in India. Significantly, his enthusiasm for these Indian writers and their voices seems to have been reciprocated, particularly in the case of Tagore. Yeats was not merely interested in Tagore; he was deeply affected by Tagore’s vision and persona, and Tagore was also fascinated with the persona ofYeats as the ‘national’ voice of colonial Ireland, even writing that he found Yeats to be an exemplary poet, comparable to the Vedic poets.” The reasons for this mutual admiration and cross-colony identification are complex, however, and require some

discussion. The two men

had

similar positions in their own societies, both assuming the persona of a ‘national’ poet in a British colony, albeit one in the East and one in the West. Both writers emerged from artistic, and in some ways, influential

families in British colonies to become figures on the world stage. Both had strong, intellectual or artistic fathers and little contact with their mothers.% Furthermore, both grew up in culturally liminal worlds, belonging to both the culture of the colonized and the colonizer — British and Bengali or Irish. Both had aristocratic leanings and sympathies,** and both emblemized the peasantry in their work. Both were nationalist poets but eschewed patriotic violence and race-hatred. At the time they met, both were writing and producing symbolic and mythical dramas.** And, in regarding one another, they both respected the persona of the other more than the work, even viewing one another as the embodiment of a culture and a poetic sensibility. Significant is the fact that both poets described one another as the embodiment of his own country, the spirit and voice of a people. In his Introduction to Tagore’s prose translations of his Vaishnavainspired poetry, Yeats confesses how much the pieces impressed him: ‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’ The blend in Tagore’s ‘songs-offerings’ of lucid, vivid, and sensual imagery with spiritual concepts struck a chord with Yeats, who had worked to create such a blend in his early poetry (cf. Crossways, 1889). Despite the fact that the Tagore family belonged to the Brahmo Samaj —

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

153

Tagore’s grandfather having been an early supporter of the monotheistic, Western-influenced religious sect —- much of Bengal’s popular Hindu Vaishnavism found its way into Rabindranath’s verses.” Vaishnavism and its blend of the divine and the physical was often mistaken to be a dominant Oriental sensibility, and a main component of Hinduism.% While Bengali Vaishnavists encouraged such generalizations, Orientalists ballooned such representations in Europe. The same dynamic was replicated between Tagore and Yeats. Tagore encouraged Yeats’s comments on the subtlety, spontaneity, and passion of his poetry, but much ofYeats’s praise of Tagore was also a naive Occidental’s praise for the Orient — or a confusion of Vaishnava poetry for all of Asia’s ‘temperament’. For much of artistic and intellectual Europe during 1913, the artistic, spontaneous, and mystical Tagore represented spiritual health. For Yeats, however, Tagore’s spiritual poetry meant more than a fresh expression of the spiritual, it was an avenue to avoid the claptrap of established European religions, particularly the schisms between Catholicism and Protestantism. Tagore provided neutral spiritual ground for the AngloIrish poet to discuss ‘universal’, cultural, and national issues. Indeed, Yeats once commented in a letter to Lady Gregory that ‘my last lecture — that on Tagore — was to some extent an attempt to free myself from the need of religious diplomacy’. Freeing himself from this ‘religious diplomacy’ meant he did not have to choose his words to avoid offending or alienating either Catholics or Protestants. With Indian philosophy as a subject, Yeats was free from that very Irish problem — sectarian politics. Again, the ‘cause of tolerance’ becomes a dominant theme for the Irish Orientalist interested in cultural nationalism. Furthermore, Yeats sharply felt conflicting allegiances to Irish and English culture, identifying, in a sense, with the cultures of both the colo-

nized and the colonizer. We may recall that in 1910 he accepted a pension from the British Prime Minister that doubled his annual income. As Foster notes, ‘Sinn Fein journalists took to pillorying “Pensioner Yeats” as a lackey of the British government’.’° As an important point of comparison, we might also recall that Tagore had accepted the title of knighthood from the English King but later famously asked Lord Chelmsford to ‘relieve’ him of it in response to the British government violence at Amritsar in 1919.1 Yeats, although he had rejected an offer of knighthood in 1915, did keep his pension until his death in 1939. Reminiscent of Thomas Moore's ambivalent nationalism, Yeats’s dual allegiance was subtly supportive of empire, at times seeming to be that of a subject’s. This Orientalist aspect of his view of Tagore is summed up in a statement he made to Edmund Gosse, urging him to make Tagore an honorary member of the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. Yeats wrote that his election would be ‘a piece of wise imperialism’ and that ‘if we pay him honour, it

will be understood that we honour India also’.” But Yeats’s relationship

154

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

with the centre of empire should not negate his relationship with the periphery. He still found Tagore’s ‘message’ to be akin to his own antimodern aesthetic and his national aspirations for Ireland, as he explained to William Rothenstein, ‘[Tagore] pointed a moral that would be valuable to me in Ireland.’ Tagore helped Yeats visualize a ‘supplementary’ role for the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, that is, as an intermediary between the English and the Catholic ‘Irish-Irish’.1 In short, Yeats, and Irish Orientalism in

general, reflected Ireland’s liminal position in empire. While their poetic visions and personal lives had similarities, perhaps their main difference concerned the scope of their politics. At the time, Yeats argued both against the ‘debasement of modern politics’ and ‘the lowering of artistic standards for a general audience’. And, without realizing that Tagore may not have entirely agreed with his aristocratic aesthetic, Yeats publicly praised him for ‘his determination to adhere to higher things’ (Irish Times, 24 March 1913): ‘Do not think I am condemning politics. They are necessary for Ireland, and I have no doubt they are necessary for India; but my meaning is — different men for different tasks. For those whose business it is to express the soul in art, religion or philosophy, they must have no other preoccupation.’’” But Tagore did not treat politics merely as a ‘preoccupation’, even though he devoted considerable time to literature. Tagore’s awareness of international and colonial politics was much clearer than Yeats’s. In 1922 he expressed his concerns with the enterprises of an overly nationalistic and imperialistic Europe, as well as the violent nationalistic factions in India — themselves results of Indian cultural decolonization and India’s own ‘double-struggle’. In ‘East and West’ (1922), he argues that colonialism has damaged Asia and Africa but also Europe: ‘the forcible parasitism [Europe] has been practising upon the two large continents of the world — the two most unwieldy whales of humanity — must be causing to her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration’ .1” Tagore recognized Yeats’s cultural nationalism as something important for a colony, even as something to emulate in Bengal. In his essay ‘Poet Yeats’, he explains: “Yeats has made his poetry confluent with the ancient poetic tradition of Ireland. Because he has achieved this naturally, he has won extraordinary recognition. With all his vitality he has been in contact with this traditional world; his knowledge of it is not second-hand.’ What Tagore did not understand about Yeats or the Celtic Revival is that much of the imagery and sensibility had less to do with ancient Ireland than it had to do with invented images of the Celt, and second-, third-, and fourth-hand inventions at that. Nevertheless, Tagore understood much, and

he reveals a clear understanding of what is now seen as part of a process of decolonization: ‘Everyone knows that for some time past Ireland has been undergoing a national awakening. As a result of the suppression of the Irish spirit by British rule, this movement has grown in strength . . . Her situation is reminiscent of our own country.’ If Yeats saw India in Tagore,

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

155

Tagore also saw Ireland in Yeats. Even though he admitted that he did not greatly admire Yeats’s poetry,” Tagore could still write romantically: ‘In Yeats’s poetry, the soul of Ireland is manifest.’ And, while Yeats also admitted that he found his fellow poet’s writings dull at times, he clearly identified with the vision and persona of Tagore. Clearly, Yeats served somewhat as a model for Tagore, just as Tagore did for Yeats. It was Yeats’s presence, stature, and imagination that Tagore admired. Moreover, Tagore’s vision was one with which Yeats identified and saw as a model for Ireland: ‘A whole people, a whole civilization,

immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we... had heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.’™ In a work dedicated to Tagore, New Ways in English Literature (1920), James Cousins recorded the

praise that both poets gave one another, concluding, ‘[there is] something stirring in the spectacle of a poet of transcendent genius standing on the house-top of enthusiasm, proclaiming, on the slightest provocation, the splendours of the genius of a brother-poet’.4 Although the two grew indifferent toward one another over the years, when they did meet again, Yeats told Tagore that he admired his novel The Home and the World (1915, first English translation 1919), claiming that he thought it also ‘very true of Irish society: had it not stirred up strong feelings in Bengal as it would have done in Ireland if written by an Irish writer?’.™* Also, years earlier in writing about his contemporary India, even after his friendship with Yeats had cooled, Tagore found a symbolic role for an Irish man as the titular character of his 1910 novel Gora, which I have mentioned. The character Gora (meaning white in Bengali) is an Irish orphan, who, unaware of his Irishness, has assimilated into Indian culture. This position of the Irish orphan adopted by Indian culture is like an ion with a neutral charge — it depends upon another charged atom to determine its own charge. In a sense, an Irish man in India is a free-floating signifier that Kipling could use to bolster imperialism and Tagore could use to bolster Indian culture. As the Revival moved on, many of the Celtic and Oriental models, like many strategies for decolonization, reified. Many writers at the time

reproved Celticism for its indulgent self-inflations, foreshadowing more recent critiques that treat Celticism as a debilitating type of nativism; likewise, they criticized the similar and related enthusiasm for the Orient. James Joyce, for instance, disparaged both the fancy of the Celtic Twilight and the popular fascination with Oriental images and themes. In his short story ‘Araby’, for example, a young boy becomes disillusioned with romance at an exotic Oriental carnival; the story’s setting links the Orient with illusion and fancy. Joyce was not alone in such a perspective; Oliver St John Gogarty and, later, Samuel Beckett also lampooned such fascinations

156

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

with both the Celt and the Orient as romance and nationalistic fancy.” Irish Orientalism

did not

disappear,

however;

varied

Oriental

motifs

continued to crop up in literature, albeit usually without a sense that Oriental models could revive a Celtic Ireland. For example, the motif appears in the pseudo-biblical Irish-language stories of Padraic O Conaire (1883-1928) and, throughout the century, in the popular magazine stories about missionaries and soldiers of fortune in the East. The motif of the Orient continues to develop and change throughout the century, yet several constants include comparisons of ancientness between Asian cultures and Ireland, an anti-sectarian ‘cause for tolerance’, and the assertion of same-

ness across geographic distance."* These themes underscore the diasporic outlook in Irish international relations, where cultural affinities with distant cultures are often highlighted, even if Irish relations with its own immigrants is not always as welcoming. As a narrative, and even a cultural discourse, Irish Orientalism both

extended and deflected the broader and more well-known Orientalisms of Europe, particularly of England and France. Irish Orientalism includes many strategic locations of writers and intellectuals, a number of whom pursued knowledge of the East and created images of the Orient for purposes other than the justification of European colonialism in Asia and West Asia. For nineteenth-century Anglo-centric intellectuals, the Celtic—Oriental link could confirm the barbarity of the Irish. In the hands of the Revival’s cultural nationalists, this became an allegorical way to obviate empire by revealing cross-colony identifications and promoting more equitable East-West relations. Often by examining struggles in the East, Irish cultural nationalists gained specific lessons for decolonizing Ireland, as Frederick Ryan’s 1911 essay on Persia in The Irish Review demonstrates: In the case of Persia, also, we learn the essential unity of the human problem under all its different phases and the futility of the philosophy of Western despots who, anxious to dominate and exploit the East, set up the pleasant doctrine that the peoples of the East love despotism, and thus fundamentally differ from the peoples of the West . . . It is in this realisation of human kinship, this shattering of the pride of race and the pride of power and the pride of religion . . . that there lies the

greatest hope of moral advance. "7

Ryan concludes by making his Irish—Persian comparison clear: ‘How entirely intelligible, one had almost written, how Irish, it all is.’ In addition to offering a critique of the nature of Orientalist and imperial representations, this anti-colonial essay strengthens cross-colony identification along the colonized circumference of empire, unifying it against the centre. Historically, Irish Orientalism simultaneously participated in the rhetoric of the imperial metropole and the colonized periphery; it became both a

Trish Orientalism: An Overview

157

way to participate in empire and a way to deny it. Its strategies did not merely replicate or form a subset of Anglo-French Orientalism, nor did its narratives merely repeat and internalize British colonial stereotypes of the Oriental. Irish Orientalism formed a distinct discourse — a path of resistance, if also, at times, a path of clear collusion. During the most prominent moment of Irish Orientalism, the Celtic Revival, this discourse

reasserted a centuries-old strategy of an independent tal-Celtic sensibility and culture in the face of received Such a move was a form of cultural decolonization. purposes of individual writers, the Celtic narratives

and ancient Oriencolonial stereotypes. Despite the varied consistently linked

Ireland with both Asian

often imaginatively

cultures and Orientalism,

and/or politically unifying the circumference of empire (as opposed to a disjointed periphery). Such cross-colony comparisons do not negate colonizer/colonized relations, nor Irish complicity. But they create a liminal space for critiques to exist. Irish Orientalism reflects Ireland’s own liminal position, existing at the edge of Europe, alongside distant marginal cultures in the imagined geography of empire.

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization James Cousins, the ‘Irish Poet from India’

GAURI VISWANATHAN

By the time of Home Rule agitation in both Ireland and India, anti-colonial movements blended into a more internationalist vision then beginning to emerge in the years following the First World War. To extreme nationalists, internationalism was complete anathema, a more refined term to prolong the evils of colonialism indefinitely under the guise of a universal humanism. However, to those who still considered themselves nationalists, but

believed they had a responsibility that extended far beyond the immediate goal of liberation from colonial rule, internationalism was the only solution to a world totally sundered by ethnic fratricide. The frightening reality of states at war with each other threatened to engulf with equal devastation those states aspiring to newfound independence. Therefore, when the Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore raised his voice in India on behalf of the ‘expanding soul of humanity’, the language of universalism that underlined his appeal for ‘some spiritual design of life’ earned him brickbats from his compatriots, who

mocked

his views

as

hopelessly romantic and beguiled.? Incidentally, Tagore was a puzzle not only to his own countrymen. He equally intrigued those in other countries who looked to Indian anti-colonialism as a potential model for combating racism in their societies. For instance, a short but cryptic letter by Tagore to The Crisis, a periodical devoted to African-American issues which was at the time edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, raised eyebrows among African-American readers. They were rightly stunned that Tagore, ‘a colored man’, should strike so universalist a note even while experiencing the most humiliating forms of racism.? Tagore’s call to Indians and other oppressed subjects to break out of the ‘forced seclusion of our racial tradition’ astounded those who were trying to recover all that had been suppressed by centuries of white oppression. Tagore’s declaration that ‘we must show, each in our own civilization, that which is universal in the heart of the unique’ appeared to reintroduce the colonial logic of universal humanism, just as his appeal to fellow subjects to

158

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

159

harmonize their growth with ‘world tendencies’ seemed to place the centre of their cultural development outside themselves. Yet, as Du Bois admitted in a moment of total agreement with Tagore, the struggle against racism in the African-American community was falling victim to the same provincialism that had given the defining strokes to European colonialism and American white supremacy. Tagore’s isolation, especially in India, was all the more pronounced because his stance on internationalism as the political philosophy of the future appeared to converge with that of Europeans then residing in India. Indeed, internationalism appeared to many to have become the cultural priority of European émigrés in India who, neither sympathetic to the continuance of British colonial rule nor keen on seeing a violent takeover by extremist nationalists, favoured a more spiritual successor to the inevitable demise of empire. Movements with a global reach, like theosophy, gained strength during the same period, advocating a ‘brotherhood of man’ as a metaphysical counterpart to a British commonwealth destined to supersede empire. From our own perspective as critics of the discourses of both nationalism and colonialism, the real challenge lies in evaluating the motives and intentions of those advocating internationalism. Were they simply continuing colonial rule in a different form? Or were they genuinely crafting a world-view that sought an ideal meeting point as much between philosophy and politics as between a narrow, provincial nationalism and rank colonialism? Among Tagore’s most avid supporters was the Irish poet James Cousins. Born in Belfast in 1873, Cousins left a flourishing poetic career in Dublin and settled in India at the behest of the theosophist Annie Besant, who invited

him to be the new literary subeditor of her newspaper New India. Though Cousins’s views on theosophy were fairly unexceptional, virtually alone among theosophists he developed a perspective on war, violence, and fratricide that allowed for a creative synthesis of spirituality and politics and brought him much closer to post-nationalist forms of thinking about decolonization — views that were highly suspect at the time.? His sympathy for Tagore was sparked by the hostility shown by many Indians to the latter's internationalism, to which they opposed their own nationalism as the only viable response to the oppressions of British rule. In Cousins’s view the distinction ill served the nationalist aspirations of the vast majority of Indians. He joined his voice to Tagore’s to argue that, by imposing narrowness and exclusiveness on its aims and methods, Indian nationalism proved that its true enemy was not the British but, rather, itself. Describing nation-

alism as an ‘act .. . of national selfishness’, but without quite dismissing it as false consciousness, Cousins maintained that the emerging, anti-colonial sentiment in India was producing a new racialism, the ‘enlargement of consciousness beyond mere personal interest towards the realization of a corporate life in the geographical or racial groupings called nations’.* Like

160

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Tagore, he maintained that nationalism’s self-centredness cut it off from world unity, turned creative energy into destructive fever, and set up antagonisms generating more antagonisms.® Cousins reiterated in forum after forum that the enemy of Indian nationalism was not internationalism but an alien self-absorption. Needless to say, to Indian intellectuals such statements had the inflammatory power of a ‘red rag to a bull’, and they saw both Tagore and Cousins hijacking the agenda for freedom from British rule and turning it into a more benign form of colonialism.

Literary Migrations James Cousins’s advocacy of internationalism marked the culmination of a poet's career split between Ireland and India. In his native Ireland Cousins had built an established literary reputation as a prolific author of numerous collections of poems and plays, and he was at the helm of literary activities involving Ireland’s cultural renewal. His standing in the Irish Literary Revival was undisputed, yet his name drops out of the canon on his departure from Ireland to India in 1915. Though Cousins continued to publish poetry in the four decades he spent in India, this work, along with his voluminous output of literary criticism, has received little if any critical attention even in India, where his work in education and public service is fondly remembered and celebrated. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Cousins was a failed poet who had sacrificed whatever talent he had by migrating to India and throwing his lot with an esoteric movement more interested in occult happenings than literary achievements. In a strange admixture of condescension and compatriot feeling, Padraic Colum describes his efforts to see Cousins published in America as doomed to failure from the outset. Colum writes, referring to himself somewhat pompously in the third person: The year was 19— , and James Cousins was then on a tour of the United States. So too was Padraic Colum, but Colum already had a substantial following and was the toast of the lecture-circuit. By contrast, Cousins wore a more anonymous face, acquiring the vague appellation of the ‘Irish Poet from India’, a title conferred by William Rose Benet writing for the Saturday Review of Literature.’

Colum’s comradely but dismissive comments about Cousins’s work might appear not unwarranted under the circumstances. After all, the market for poetry is never a certain one, especially the poetry of aman who could not be placed in any single, comprehensible tradition of writing. How were Western critics to deal with the work of a man who fused Irish mythological heroes and Hindu deities, or whose sense of poetic location was a blur between Dublin and Madras? Yet, until Cousins left Ireland perma-

nently in 1915, he was widely regarded as an accomplished poet who held great promise in rising to greater heights. The poetry he wrote prior to 1915 was included in a number of significant anthologies of Irish and English

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

161

verse, such as the Dublin Book of Irish Verse, 1728-1909 (1909), the Oxford

Book of English Mystical Verse (1916), Anthology of Irish Verse (1948), 1000 Years of Irish Poetry (1949), and the Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958). And

though disparaged by Yeats and Joyce as a mere versifier, Cousins was a respected member of Irish literary and intellectual circles and stood at the forefront of a movement to revive Irish arts. Indeed even Yeats’s and Joyce’s contempt for his poetic talents was not entirely on aesthetic grounds, since it was also laced by a nervous apprehension about his popular reach. Joyce, for instance, carped at Cousins for being favoured by publishers who at one time rejected Joyce’s work and published Cousins’s poetry instead. In a string of biting doggerel stanzas Joyce lampooned what he considered his rival’s contrived poetical ear.* Yet for all the sneering by Yeats and Joyce, there was no denying the active involvement of both James Cousins and his wife Margaret in all aspects of Irish political and literary life, the full range of which is measured by their embrace of a curious blend of scientific and anti-scientific interests. They were involved in such diverse topics as astrology, theosophy, occultism, vegetarianism, agricultural co-operatives, mythology, the promotion of the Gaelic language, the revival of Irish drama, women’s suffrage, anti-imperialism, reincarnation, and anti-vivisec-

tionism. Whatever the perspective in writing about the central figures embracing this range of interests and heterodoxies in Dublin in the early twentieth century, it was a fact that, as one critic observes, ‘the same name

(Cousins) drops again and again’.? How then did it come about that James Cousins’s name

virtually

vanished from the Irish literary canon, allowing Padraic Colum to demote

him unceremoniously to the ranks of a marginal, indeed unknown poet? Acknowledged in Ireland at one time as a promising writer and committed intellectual, Cousins remained in other people’s shadows all his life, perhaps achieving some measure of personal recognition only in India, where he was better known for his contributions to education and social service than for his poetry and literary criticism. Certainly his name does not even enter as a passing whisper in any of the recent books on Irish Studies, some of them justly acclaimed for their revisionist, postcolonial insights.” The relegation of Cousins to poetic oblivion is accepted with stoic resignation in the following comment by Alan Denson, a compiler of Cousins’s published record who was evidently on a crusade to save him from obscurity: ‘Words written or spoken by James Cousins or his wife Margaret E. Cousins were published widespread over three continents and at least eight countries, for almost sixty years. If at all, they are remembered now only in India." Yet, as the same editor notes in an unabashedly partisan burst of indignant protest against the poet's neglect, ‘whilst [Yeats and Joyce] lived out their lives in

service to their own self-centred ideals, Cousins devoted his best energies and his subtlest intellectual powers to the education of the young and the welfare of the poor and the oppressed’.

162

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

One important reason for Cousins’s marginalization is his own tenuous position within the Theosophical Society, as well as in India under British rule. Though Annie Besant recruited him from Ireland to ran New India, she abruptly dismissed him when he wrote a series of trenchant articles on the Easter Rising of 1916. As a result of these fiery articles, Cousins was closely monitored by the British authorities, who regarded him as a subversive radical threatening to extend support to Indian insurgents.’? Though Cousins remained scrupulously loyal to Besant, his wife Margaret felt no such compulsion and lambasted Besant for her hypocrisy and political cowardice.4 Out of a job and adrift in India, Cousins subsequently accepted a teaching position in Madanapalle College, several hundred miles north of Madras. Removed from the main centre of activities in Madras, where the Theosophical Society was located, and discouraged by the daunting challenges of teaching English poetry in the provinces, Cousins felt acutely marginalized, but never without purpose. He turned his position to good advantage by immersing himself in the educational reconstruction of India, while at the same time fusing his developing theories of education with sustained work in literary and art criticism. A visiting professorship in Japan during the heyday of Japanese modernism in art and literature clarified his own thinking about the potential models India needed most as it struggled to emerge from under the shadow of the West and assert its own distinctive voice. While in Japan, he met numerous artists, pacifists, and intellectuals, such as Kakuzo Okakura, Nuguchi, Tami Koume, and Paul Richard, who were all trying to find a pan-Asian alternative to the incursions of Western civilization. His exposure to the convulsive debates in Japan on the attractions of Western modernization convinced him that India could not go the way Japan did in its uncritical embrace of the West as the source of its own artistic experimentations. He saw in Japan a country that had turned its back on the richness of its own traditions,

sacrificing creative inspiration for a hollow imitativeness. This view was to stay with him in his exploration of indigenous alternatives to the legacies of Western culture as India emerged from colonial rule, even as he resisted nationalism as a viable political philosophy. Cousins’s marginalization in Ireland after 1915 — the year he sailed to India — must also be related to the momentous event in Ireland that occurred less than a year later. That event, of course, is the Easter Rising of

1916, which profoundly affected the ways that Irish intellectuals, writers, and artists henceforth approached the question of Irish nationalism. The catastrophic aftermath of the armed struggle for Irish nationhood, the executions of civilians, and the doomed heroism of the Irish insurgents all combined to throw Irish nationalism back into the post-Parnellite factionalism of earlier, bitter days. Yeats was provoked to write to Lady Gregory: Thad no idea that any public event could so deeply move me — and I am very despondent about the future. At the moment I feel that all the

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

163

work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all of the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics.'5

Yeats’s disappointment at the intrusion of politics into literature is a telling commentary on the shattering impact of the Easter rebellion. The conviction that Irish writers could no longer indulge in pure romance would have in itself contributed to marginalizing someone like Cousins, who long after 1916 believed that the solution to world problems could only emerge outside a political framework. However, though Cousins may have already left Ireland by 1916 and was therefore out of the immediate circle of debate and discussion, it is quite another matter to say that his work had become dated because it could not engage directly with this pivotal event in Irish nationalism. Indeed, I have already referred to his New India articles on Irish Home Rule and the Easter Rising, which caused his dismissal as liter-

ary subeditor and put him under the watchful eyes of the British in India." Furthermore, though he did not directly allude to the bloodshed of 1916 in his poems, he did write a poem, “To Ireland, Before the Treaty of December, 1921’, that, in lines like ‘for your night of agonies, / I give dark songs I cannot sing’, reflects his silent participation in a world no longer his. Numerous references to civil warfare in other poems reveal how disillusioned he had become by the violence unleashed by the movement for Irish Home Rule. The most outstanding of these poems is Cousins’s moving tribute to his friend and associate Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had collaborated in publishing the newspaper The Pioneer in Dublin. Sheehy-Skeffington was, as Cousins describes him, ‘the first

sacrificial victim in the Irish struggle at Easter, 1916’, who was shot without trial even though he was trying to restrain the people from disorder when arrested. ‘In Memory of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’ includes these sorrowful lines: When with dark wrongs we waged our strife, . . . You in the clash of iron powers Should fall, and, falling, shake the world.

Cousins’s lament for the death of his close friend valiantly strives to balance the destructive consequences of the Irish revolt with the heroic impulses from which it arose.”” But Cousins expressed his most sustained response to the events of 1916 through his literary criticism. In several books on poetics and criticism published in India long after he left Ireland, he passionately argued that Ireland’s civil strife was symptomatic of a deeply flawed idealism existing at the core of the Irish literary renaissance, to which he directly traced the failed promises of the Irish political struggle. He maintained that the heady idealism of Ireland’s nationalists was compromised by a ‘self-centred realism’ never able effectively to ground politics in a goal beyond itself. If the Irish literary renaissance, like the Irish political struggle, fell far short of

164 = Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

its aims, Cousins was convinced it was because of the movement's ineffective resolution of the opposing pull between romance and realism. Although this dissatisfaction was not his alone, what was distinctive is that

the Easter Rising functioned in his critical writings as a tragic counterpoint to a more fruitful, alternative model that he found in the Aryan heritage of modern Indian nationalism. In the process of setting up an antithesis between the differential paths of Irish and Indian nationalism, Cousins reintroduced a language of race that, significantly and ironically, he had made the sole goal of his criticism to transcend.

Searching for Ireland in India Before I unfold the full scope of Cousins’s complex and contradictory racial argument, let me briefly outline his path to this position. However much his cultural criticism may have grown out of his need to provide a corrective to the alignment of the arts with functionalism and pragmatism, he was all too aware of the political realities that informed his public role as critic and educator. The substantial body of his work published in India represents his attempt to work through issues of realism and idealism in art by applying theosophical principles, or what he typically called ‘deeper unities in literature’.’® Cousins claimed that his discovery of theosophy led him to a discovery of Ireland itself. But the discovery is made less on the principle of connection than on an awakened perception of the scale of both theosophy and Ireland. Whereas he had earlier learned about theosophy primarily from ‘small manuals’, as he contemptuously described them, just as Ireland too was dimly perceived as a place confined to the known and the familiar, subsequently Cousins came to understand place through metaphysical elaboration, mysticism, and esotericism. Partly, the gain in perspective resulted from his tendency toward dialectical thinking, which projected the density of place as a product of metaphysical abstraction. However, his early Irish poems, which were starkly naturalistic rather than abstract, showed him having gone in a different direction. He claimed that A.H. Leahy’s new edition of the myth of the goddess Etain, Heroic Romances of Ireland (1905), had set his imagination alight with the vision of an embodiment of perfection captured by Etain, whom he imagined as descending from her original state as consort of the King of Fairyland to become the wife of the King of Ireland. Cousins’s interest in a legend whose trajectory of incarnation is from universal imagination to geopolitical reality was driven by the will to turn mythological fantasy into national possibility. He wrote, ‘Here was matter to my taste, the circle of the cosmic life completed in a single story, and with a nearness to the details of nature and of human psychology in its earthly phase that excited the imagination with the anticipated delight of recreating the beauties of the temporal on the background of the eternal.’ Cousins’s compulsion to contain infinite planes of meaning within the recognizable limits of linear narrative was part of his attempt to reconcile

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

165

the conflicting claims of idealism and realism in his representation of Ireland. At the time that Cousins was at work on his poem ‘Etain the Beloved’ (1912), he was also writing a book titled The Geography of Ireland, intended for publication by Oxford University Press. The book was never completed, but the two projects crystallized in his mind as a common one: he described the writing of Ireland’s geography — with its own national unity — as less a process of cartographic empiricism than of imaginative selection. Written over five summer vacations, each time in a different part of Ireland, ‘Etain the Beloved’ blended the scenery from the various provinces with such control that the details of nature never went beyond those of Ireland: as Cousins phrased it, ‘no lion roared, no parrot shrieked’.?° He disciplined his imagery never to exceed the bounds of Ireland and so delineated the geographical outlines of the nation through principles of selectivity and synthesis of remembered details dispersed across provinces. In ‘Etain the Beloved’ he wrote the geography book that he never completed as a scholarly project, yet in form it combined the deepest impulses of geography, mysticism, and anti-imperialism. Filled with local details, the poem nonetheless connected in ever-expanding circles to incorporate other scales of existence that defined, for Cousins, the imaginative yet controlled possibilities of an emergent Ireland.”4 The search for the reality behind the external Ireland led Cousins, through historical circumstances, into the folkloric bases of Irish Catholi-

cism. Although, as he himself noted, a number of the reigning writers such as Yeats, AE, Douglas Hyde, and Samuel Ferguson were Protestants, he was

convinced that, notwithstanding the Protestant domination of the arts, Irish civilization and culture lay elsewhere, but he was not prepared to say it resided in Catholicism. Rather, he argued that the sectarian divide prevented Irish culture from being fully captured by either Catholicism or Protestantism and so left its preservation in a pre-sectarian memory intact. If, for Cousins,

organized Irish Protestantism

had turned its back on

Ireland, organized Irish Catholicism manifested a split consciousness: ‘Religiously it turned towards Rome, but it had eyes and sentiment for indigenous legendary remembrance.” Enveloped by anti-Catholic sentiments all around him and taught that all Catholicism is superstition and paganism, Cousins was transformed by the realization that superstition had a literary dimension, or, as he described it more poetically, that superstition was ‘rooted in the silt of a long stream of traditional imagination’.” That discovery created a new understanding that anterior memories exceeding the history of sectarian conflict inhabited his own Protestantism. This realization marked the beginning of Cousins’s turn to difference as constitutive of Irish culture. In the long run, it prepared him for the discovery of India as both Ireland’s other and true self, even as it displaced the need to acknowledge Catholicism as Protestantism’s ‘other’. Cousins’s attendance at a lecture given by Annie Besant on 1 October

166

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

1908 — ‘a red-letter anniversary in my calendar’ — literally changed his life.™ Instructed as were most young Irish men of the time that Besant was an agent of the devil, especially because of her longtime intellectual partnership with the atheist Charles Bradlaugh, Cousins might have been predisposed to dismiss her influence. But he had himself been driven closer to atheism at the time Besant arrived in Dublin, his readings in ‘sixpenny Rationalism’ being more than a casual interest. Not only had he begun to read seriously about theosophy: he had also turned to the heterodox sermons of those like the Rev. Frederick Robertson of Brighton, who ‘put Truth in a position in front of its utterance in the Bible’.”* At any rate, by the time Annie Besant delivered her lecture on ‘Theosophy and Ireland’ on that fateful 1 October, Cousins was open to thinking about God and nation

in different ways: ‘I gathered the idea that clairvoyance, or revelation, or both, declared a long process of racial and cultural evolution out of which Ireland was ultimately to emerge as the spiritual mentor of Europe, even as India had long ago been to Asia.’* The dialectical association of spirituality with race — and with the evolution through various species and subspecies — offered Cousins one point of entry into working through the problems of idealism and realism in his work. Even as a poet in Dublin, Cousins had begun to reject romanticized reveries about the Irish past and, under the influence of Huxley and Darwin, was drawn to intellectual agnosticism and scientific determinism. But soon becoming interested in mystical experience, he turned

to India for inspiration,

and not merely because

he

associated the land with mysticism. Rather, he found India to be the practical site of a resolution between romance and realism that had long eluded him. The poetry and criticism published in India marks Cousins’s engagement with as well as departure from the Romanticist preoccupations of his fellow Irish poets, particularly Yeats and AE, as he sought out satisfactory models to deal with the pressing questions of decolonization and Home Rule, especially against the backdrop of European civil strife: I knew it would be suicidal for me to attempt to intimidate my imagination with either the personality or the poetry of AE or Yeats, though much of their early work had a permanent place in my memory. Mine must, to have any authenticity, be mine own, even if an ill-favoured thing. There was something to be sung, and a way of singing it. These should be at the highest.?”

Though eventually Cousins came to see India as the source of a spiritual revival throughout the world, it is also evident that India first offered him

a way of working through problems of a narrow nationalism in Irish literature — problems he could not resolve simply by mythologizing the Irish past.?® While, like many Anglo-Irish writers of the early 1900s, Cousins participated in the Irish dramatic movement, writing romantic verse plays based on Celtic myth such as ‘The Sleep of the King’ and ‘The Racing

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

167

Lug’, he rejected mythological romance as too local and narrow. He found himself drawn to the larger project of establishing the common foundations of Irish-Indian culture as the first step toward the overthrow of colonial rule in both countries. In India he rewrote some of his earlier Celtic plays, reworking Hindu themes and legends into his new material in plays such as The King’s Wife (1919), a poetic drama based on the life of the Hindu female poet-saint Mirabai. Such changes were not well received by Cousins’s critics in Ireland, who were prone to describing his project of establishing Irish-Indian foundations as basically a ‘pagan’ impulse. They saw such forms of experimentation as an expression of the fashionable anti-Christian feelings then running rampant, which to his critics’ minds self-consciously reproduced the tendencies against modernity, progress, rationalism,

and materialism

perceived

to reside

in the non-Western

world. Cousins’s move to India during the heyday of the home rule movement enabled him to do more than merely participate in the Indians’ agitation against British rule. By migrating to India from Ireland, he also sought to shape the literary expression of Indian nationalism by importing into India the concerns of the Irish Literary Renaissance. But while the importation would prove salutary in some respects, it resulted in a peculiar situation where Cousins’s remythologizing of the Irish past delinked him from Ireland and left him curiously removed from the realities of both place and time. The continuing use of Irish mythology in his Indian poems, sometimes with an Indian twist, leads one to ask whether Cousins was as interested in

re-creating the Ireland of his remembered past as in evoking a different sense of place altogether. In this evocation ‘Ireland’ is produced not as a real place but rather a literary, philosophical, and political concept, just as India too for Cousins had a connotation that far exceeded its geographical limits.” By leaving Ireland Cousins did not lose his place in the Irish literary canon so much as dislocate the canon itself. Everything that he wrote in India in continuation of his poetic career in Ireland was displaced and truncated, vitiating any claim that he might have had to a place in either Irish or Indian letters. His Irish work was carried over into the Indian context, but only imperfectly and discontinuously. Indeed, it is telling that his most lasting contributions were in the area of commentaries on Sanskrit poetics, a field he virtually remade his own as if to compensate for the diminished returns on the cultural capital he had invested in Ireland. If, on the one hand, Cousins was able to widen the nationalist net to include the parallel histories of two colonized societies, on the other, his

attempt to reinvent a mythology of cultural identity that could accommodate both Irish and Indian histories paradoxically deracinated him from one place while rooting him even less firmly in another. His muse may have remained Celtic, as he wrote, but that could not alter the fact that ‘nothing

was quite right with the world for the purposes of a sensitive poet’. The

168

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

attempt to universalize the shared colonial histories of Ireland and India had the reverse effect of leading him to the recognition that local experience was too powerful to allow for such a category as human experience. Cousins realized this only when he tried to transfer the Christian concepts of atonement and incarnation first to Irish mythology and then to Hindu philosophy. He claimed that he had long suspected the doctrine of the atonement because of its narrow interpretation of an event (the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ) for which both uniqueness and universality were claimed by the rival sects of Christianity. Yet he also felt that, under the ‘strange mixture of human disobedience and celestial bad temper leading to delegated crucifixion’,*! there lay some imperfectly expressed mystery of the universe and life. This became clearer when, in his studies in the old Celtic mythology, he came upon the legends of Cuchulain who, like Jesus, had a ‘reputed’ father, the earthly Prince Sualtam, and a ‘real father, Lugh, the God of Light and Master of all Arts’. Cousins writes, ‘I came to realise that the localisation of universal truth was, in human conditions, an inescapable condition of expression; that all such expression everywhere had therefore to be interpreted by the intuition and imagination; and that any attempt to treat the local expression of universal truth as in itself final and universally obligatory was a fundamental error.” It is evident in this statement how disparaging Cousins was of Christian Eurocentrism, but at the same time he resisted submitting to the view that all truth was relative. Though totally rejecting the imperialist belief that truth was ‘an entirely territorial and racial affair’, while also contesting the ‘dry-rot of Christian thought and experience’ as the only witness of spiritual truth, he attributed an exemplary power to Eastern thought that probably went too far in the other direction. Cousins’s sole logic in going this way was the simple one that, if Christianity’s claims to universal truth were based on the sense of its own ‘racial ascendancy’, then when other religions based their claims on non-racial grounds, their ‘truth’ must be given greater credence. Therefore, when the hold of racial logic was broken, he believed it was possible to assert universal truth without submitting to the hegemonic control that racialism premised.*4 What is distinctive in Cousins’s argument is that, instead of adducing a relativist

position from a Voltairean rejection of Christianity, he retained a universalist emphasis by detaching race from its composition and so could assert the claims of non-Western religions to the status of truth. In a contradiction that was to unravel his argument, race is the central category underpinning his assessment of whether truth is relative or universal. Just as clearly, spirituality —- and the internationalism that it promised — was impossible as long as the rhetoric of race continued to dominate the aspirations of both colonialists and nationalists. We can see here how closely Cousins’s views mirrored Tagore’s. Both their views depended crucially on distinguishing between what they believed was a contingent notion of

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

169

truth and an idea of truth unshackled from hierarchical relations of power, privilege, and patronage.

Race and Spirituality In making such distinctions, Cousins trapped himself in a web of contradictions that only showed the shifting connotations of spirituality in the nineteenth century. In his own usage, spirituality had associations with race, as I noted earlier when I cited his references to Irish spirituality as a product of racial evolution. In one of his most significant works, The Wisdom of the West: An Introduction to the Interpretive Study of Irish Mythology (1912), Cousins describes the resurgence of Irish literary pride as the discovery of a common Aryanism. He employs literary history in terms analogous to Annie Besant’s and other theosophists’ deployment of a racial scheme,*® tracing the culture of the Celts to an originating source in Asian religions. Subdivided

into Aryan,

Semitic,

and

Mongolian,

these

religions,

he

declares, had moved into Europe centuries before the birth of Christianity. Cousins cites Henry Maine’s Ancient Institutions to argue that the ‘cultural tendencies’

left by these older religions included Brehon laws, which, he

claims, had striking affinities to Vedic laws. Like Vedic laws that were challenged by English law, Brehon laws and institutions were contested and ultimately overthrown by the Roman law of England in the seventeenth century. The intertwining of Brehon and Vedic laws, like the interweaving of Irish and Indian cultures, provided racial continuity to their common struggle against British colonialism. In a remarkable passage Cousins writes: So subtly, however, had the Aryan influence intermingled with the culture of Ireland that when, once again, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ancient Asian spirit touched Ireland through the philosophy of India, as conveyed to it through the works of Edwin Arnold and the Theosophical Society, there was an immediate response. Two poets (AE and Yeats) found their inmost nature expressed in the Indian modes. They found also the spiritual truths that Asia had given to the world reflected in the old myths and legends of Ireland; and out of their illuminations and enthusiastic response arose

the Irish Literary and Dramatic Revival whose influence at its height was purely spiritual.*

The most striking aspect of Cousins’s description of ancient Hindu influence on the Celtic renaissance is how much at variance it is with prevalent accounts of Irish-Indian cultural influences. Far from understanding this interest in terms of the Orientalist scholarship available to Irish nationalist writers, Cousins insisted on a pre-existing religio-racial mixture of Celt and Aryan. This unique mixture prepared the ground for the ‘discovery’ of Asia’s spiritual truths. The mythologies of the past are preserved and reproduced by what Cousins clearly regarded as a racial imagination. Hence he

170

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

could argue that the Literary Revival of his time was an awakened memory of what had, in epigenetic terms, been suppressed by colonial rule. Drawing on Sanskrit poetics in an attempt to find a unifying principle of human experience that surmounted the exigencies of colonial control, Cousins’s aesthetic theories anticipated and indeed even shaped attempts to construct a confederation of nations as a successor to Indian decolonization. Predicated on the Sanskrit principle of samadarshana or synthetic vision, his notion of internationalism had an aesthetic character that was

little understood even by his own fellow theosophists. He took an avid interest in Indian art, challenging Walter Pater’s dismissal of Indian art for its ‘overcharged symbols’. What Pater saw as symbolic excess leading to vagueness and indeterminateness, Cousins interpreted as the capaciousness of samadarshana for overlapping meanings. Interestingly, Cousins saw the trend in contemporary European art verging toward the principle of samadarshana: post-impressionism and cubism were essentially concerned with overlapping and enfolding visions. Taking note of Virginia Woolf's response to the first exhibition of post-impressionist paintings held in 1910 as evidence of how human consciousness had itself undergone a revolutionary change, Cousins was totally convinced that the literature of the twentieth century would be indelibly marked by these changes in perception and understanding. Indeed, he argued that it was largely through literature and art, and not through the political order, that the new interna-

tionalism was being forged. Predicated on unity and composite vision, the aesthetic principles of Sanskrit literature were resurfacing in the Western poetic thought of the early twentieth century. The point of connection was synthesis, which Cousins claimed was the fundamental business of poetry. His preference for the poetry of the achieved vision rather than the analytic process of vision marked his search for a deeper unity in literature, rendering the antithesis between idealism and realism a false one. The complex delight in the process of exploration which the modern poets seemed to celebrate allowed for the unregulated, unpatterned search for unity that Cousins saw as a principle enshrined in samadarshana. By describing himself as an inheritor of the intellectual legacies of Sanskrit poetics, English Romanticism, and theosophy, Cousins fell back on a Romanticist conception of bringing the creative intuition of the East and the critical intelligence of the West into a synthesis. Philosophically, his interest in Indian thought reflected his inner concern for the recovery of wholeness by civilizations that had forsaken spiritual growth for material progress. Politically, however, he felt such wholeness could be achieved only when colonialism was dismantled. And here resides an intractable

problem in his thought, since even when he acknowledges the necessity for the dismantling of imperialism, Cousins insisted on seeking solutions outside a political framework. While internationalism was a goal of his work, both critical and creative, his attempt to realize world unity by reviv-

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

171

ing Indian nativism established a clearcut polarity between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism. This polarity linked him perhaps self-evidently with English Romanticism. Yet at the same time, his own turn to Romanticism grew out of his profound revulsion from the horrors of the First World War, which filled him with determination to replace narrow national prejudice with a philosophy of internationalism — a philosophy that had an aesthetic content but a political objective. Internationalism, ‘Synthetic Vision’, and the New Romanticism

The central paradox is that Cousins’s internationalism was mediated by his avid interest in Indian nativism, and it is in this incessant move between national and international interests that he expressed the impulses of a new romanticism. Devoting himself to the recovery of indigenous literary traditions with greater energy than even the Indian nationalists of the time, Cousins was committed to the rehabilitation of Indian ideals in the field of art, literature, and education, but less so for the sake of engendering a

mood of patriotism. Confident that what he called the ‘unitive vision of Indian culture and philosophy’ could provide an answer to world problems, he saw India — the ‘mother of Asian culture’®” — as the focal point of a new world reconstruction. In a formulation borrowed from the famous axiom of the Japanese intellectual Kakuzo Okakura who declared in The Ideals of the East that Asia is one, Cousins wrote, ‘In Asia all roads lead to India — or rather, all roads lead from India.’** Cousins’s pan-Asian faith was accentu-

ated as much by his theosophical belief as by his study of the works of contemporary Western pacifists and writers like AE, Edward Carpenter, Paul Richard, and Romain Rolland, all of whom affirmed that Asia could be the saviour of the war-ridden West. The undermining of European imperialism therefore lay in a new romanticism whereby India’s spirituality would save Europe from self-destruction and undo the effects of its sustained imperial depredations. Imperial dismantling was thus conceived less as a cataclysmic gesture of political liberation than the timely inauguration of a new era of pacificism, internationalism, and romanticism.

At this point it is useful to elaborate Cousins’s very important concept of samadarshana, adumbrated most comprehensively in his work Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology (1925). This work best demonstrates Cousins’s deft deployment of his skills as a literary and art critic in the service of world reconstruction. It reveals a carefully considered,

if decidedly idiosyncratic, theory about the Indian renaissance. Against the grain, Cousins argues in this work that nationalism was not the driving goal of India’s literary revival, as it was in the Irish. Because of a different motivation, the Indian literary renaissance followed exactly the opposite path of the Irish Revival, with more fruitful results. While both movements

were driven by a common spiritual orientation, Irish spirituality in Cousins’s view had become essentially compromised by the impulses

172

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

toward a ‘material and self-centred realism’.*? The result was a vicious internecine war whose level of violence was made possible, paradoxically, by the driving idealism of Irish nationalism. India, on the other hand, was not hobbled by such contradictory impulses

tearing between realism and idealism. What makes Cousins’s argument so intriguing, and at the same time so troubling, is that he attributes India’s escape from the fate of Ireland’s failed idealism to the continuing vitality of its Aryan heritage. For Aryanism, in his view, had the distinct ability to turn diversity into a form of unity, a term that he also comes to accept as interchangeable with similitude. In a rather remarkable statement, he observes that ‘the renaissances of India have been the recurrent protests of the apprehension of unity against a too elaborate diversity’. Thus, for Cousins, the Indian renaissance is not a moment of political awakening, but instead the timely reassertion of racial unity against an all-consuming diversity. In short, the literary renaissance is a recapitulation of the Aryan experience in India, a symbolic re-enactment of the Aryan conquest of pre-Aryan India.** One should take note of the fact that Cousins avoids any association of the Indian literary renaissance with nationalism but rather identifies it with a movement toward aesthetic and philosophical unity. This fundamental difference between the Irish and the Indian renaissances explains for Cousins the differential path of internationalism in the two contexts. To the West, internationalism is a condition of release from political tyranny, ‘an event subsequent to the victory of the chained Titan over the tyrant Jove’. But to the East, he argues, internationalism is an existential condition, exist-

ing here and now; it is not bound by or dependent on a linear time-frame for the attainment of political freedom, but has a repetitiveness and cyclical quality releasing it from world-historical trajectories. In the ultimate analysis, the spiritual East’s understanding of internationalism would have to be taken as the ‘measure and test of all movements that take to themselves the sacred name of freedom’.* And what

is the nature

of internationalism

in Eastern

thought,

as

Cousins understands it, and why is it a yardstick for evaluating liberation movements elsewhere? In a formulation that scrupulously avoided assigning political meanings altogether, Cousins described the struggle for freedom as essentially an expansion of consciousness.“ Where such inner growth could be accommodated by external conditions, as at certain periods in history such as the Sung era in China between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, aesthetics and politics coexisted in perfect synchrony. During such times, human propensities for violence and coercion were kept in check as a matter of course by the refinements of cultural expression through literature, music, and art. On the other hand, where external

circumstances (such as bureaucratic reason) resisted or opposed the expansive consciousness, the insistent demands of internal growth could only be met by violence. Cousins’s cautionary example is the French Revolution.

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

173

The violence associated with the French Revolution best exemplified for him the fraught consequences of the pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, when its motivating idealism had to contend with those communitarian pressures that were essentially opposed to removing all restrictions on individual development and creating the autonomous individual. Under the weight of such pressures, the tendency to respond ‘with the instinct of the self’ rather than by ‘abstract and universal thinking’ compromised the possibilities of realizing the world ideal, which became in effect a group demand, an expression of tribalism, ‘with a tendency to return to the primitive assertion of individual freedom’.® The result of the friction between world idealism and political realism was the self-centred nationalism that Cousins anathematized as an aberration from the true course of human history. The French Revolution was history’s prime example of the reduction of the ideal to the assertion of local, narcissistic needs. In Cousins’s eloquent phrase, the demand for liberty, relieved of the logic of the complete ideal, fell ‘from the level of universal human speech to that of racial and national vernacular’.** He was so convinced that the rhetoric of racial belonging thwarted the attainment of world unity that he saw his main challenge as that of asserting the world ideal without submitting to a political framework. For when the quest for freedom is presented in political terms — or in terms of a world-historical model of progress, as it was in the case of the French Revolution — he believed it could only be expressed in the language of domination and subordination, and that in turn in the language of racialism. Thus, it is easy to see why the gains of European humanism and the European Enlightenment have consistently occurred at the expense of non-Europeans. Cousins quotes the nineteenth-century poet Francis Thompson to the effect that the ‘spacious century’, which was born with the cry of ‘Liberty’ in its ears and on its lips, boasted of having ‘seen the Western knee / Set on the Asian neck, / And dusky Africa / Kneel to imperial Europe’s back’. Under these circumstances, ‘equality’ mapped out for itself a single hemisphere of the globe, the Western, and assumed a single complexion, the white. Likewise, ‘fraternity’, with unseemly literalness, remained confined to masculinity

until the new order of politically minded women in the early twentieth century challenged their exclusion from the electorate. As an era of ‘stultified idealism’,”” the nineteenth century had relegated aesthetic culture to a matter of taste and refinement, rather than regarding it as a means and expression of human freedom. The First World War, however, rudely shattered the expected fulfilment

of the promises of liberal humanism. Employing a religious vocabulary, Cousins described the world war as a punishment for the ills of colonialism, as the world stretched out in supplication for some attitude to life, turning to the proverbial wisdom of the East to revoke the legitimacy of colonial tyranny. And indeed from this perspective imperialism is just as

174

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

bad for the colonizer as it is for the colonized, imposing on the dominating eroup ‘false and selfish preoccupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull it from the path of open rectitude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech and action in the artificial defence of a false position’. Swayed by the power of liberal angst perhaps a little more than he may have realized, Cousins gave room for the articulation of a nationalist consciousness among the colonizers, while vehemently denouncing that same nationalist feeling among the colonized. Whatever the sources of such liberal guilt, it certainly led Cousins to believe that the cause of the world war was not confined to immediate actions of belligerence, but rather was a world cause with world responsibility in varying degree. In this reading, war is symptomatic of the ‘world malady’ introduced into the world by colonialism, for which a ‘world remedy’ had to be sought.” As one of the most ardent exponents of internationalism, James Cousins

urged that the horrors of the world war necessitated a model of world unity. But in developing such a concept philosophically he believed it was necessary to distinguish between a (negative) world unity forged by the domination of some countries by one master country and a more positive unity genuinely expressive of the principle of spiritual oneness. The positive notion of internationalism eschews domination as the principle of relations between nations. It offers a more egalitarian philosophy in which political freedom is attainable as a quest of the spirit. In this reworking, culture is the free space beyond religion and politics, the arena of ‘truth’. In elaborating theosophical principles of oneness to incorporate a view of nationalism as internationalism, Cousins gave expression to theosophy as a fulfilment of Romanticism. Fused with Tagore’s strictures on the dangers of bureaucratic rationality,* Cousins’s theosophy recapitulated the Romanticist condemnation of nation-building at the expense of the ‘elastic and expansive’ spirit of humanity. In Tagore’s theory of nationalism Cousins found the most potent answer to the malaise spawned by the world struggle, ‘the point which would banish from criticism of his utterances the false antithesis of nationalism and internationalism’.® The real struggle at every stage of human history, whether between or within nations, has been, Tagore tells us, ‘between the living spirit of the people and the methods of nationorganising; between the expanding soul of humanity (Indian or English) and mechanical limitations that refuse to adapt themselves to that expansion’.°? While this sounds very close to what I have described as Cousins’s historical analysis of violence, Tagore was much less interested in probing historical causes for the clash between consciousness and administrative rationality. Indeed, Tagore was far more vague in his descriptions and resorted to metaphor and synecdoche to replace historical explanation, as when he described (false) nation-building through the symbol of red-tape and organic nationhood through the symbol of the elastic band.

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization

175

Cousins’s fundamental challenges as a critic were two in number. The first goal was to detach the concepts of oneness, unity, and the common origins of all humanity from racial understandings, and the second was to reassert these notions — newly defined — outside of race. Rhetorically, it required him persistently to distinguish between two concepts of internationalism — as he did between two renaissances, two nationalisms, and so forth. On one level, such differentiation allowed him to distance internationalism from its imperial moorings. It further permitted him to expose cultural movements and migrations as a masquerade for imperialism, which, despite the pretence of forging a unity of nations, was solely driven by the impulse to dominate and appropriate. But at another level, the critique of imperialism’s universalizing impulse included even his own migration to India and his attempt to import the concerns of the Irish Literary Renaissance into another, apparently parallel setting. Cousins’s auto-critique is set against the backdrop of the historical course of imperialism, which clearly shows that the ‘plantations’ of English settlers in Ireland and the coming of the East India Company were not international movements, but rather predatory excursions from the ‘lair’ of nationalism intended to bring back as much prey as could be seized. Cousins’s questioning of his own status as a cultural émigré fuses with his critique of imperialism’s claims to internationalism. But ultimately Cousins’s vision of a post-Romantic internationalism failed him because the new, animated literary spirit that he hoped to see prevail was clearly marked in racial terms — the very terms that he claimed produced a false unity. By wishing to take the literary renaissance outside purely nationalist concerns, Cousins reintroduced Aryanism as a principle of creative change, thereby substituting one set of hierarchical relations with another. The interchangeability of philosophical unity with racial continuity may have been motivated by Cousins’s overwhelming desire to prevent the appropriation of humanism by imperializing intentions. But it could not forestall the return to a hierarchical mode of cultural production, in which diversity is flattened out and replaced by sameness and oneness — all in the name of world reconstruction. ‘Realism’ for Cousins came to mean narrow, local, narcissistic needs: it was an expression of a divisive

ethnicity whose principle of difference militated against attaining the world ideal. ‘Idealism’, on the other hand, was too rooted in conditions of temporality and political possibility to have any real meaning for Cousins. In his reading of Indian history as an ongoing repetition of the Aryan experience — of the reassertion of unity against an all-consuming diversity — he found a way of getting beyond the limitations of realism and idealism as he had himself defined these terms. But by shifting spirituality back into the category of race (as had Ernst Renan and Matthew Arnold before him) even though it was the very category he sought to dispel — Cousins drove his own work into oblivion, as other models of internationalism that were

176

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

more overtly political and economic gained ascendancy. If today internationalism signifies economic globalization rather than spirituality, it is a measure of the acute difficulties Cousins faced in developing an aesthetics that could accommodate politics without being subordinated to it.

Afterword Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism

EDWARD W. SAID

The essays in this remarkable compilation all focus on the crucial question of whether or not Ireland was a colony, and whether its history is therefore in large measure a colonial and subsequently a postcolonial one. This is no mere antiquarian or academic squabble, since what is at stake is nothing less than the whole question of Irish identity, the present course of Irish culture and politics, and above all, the interpretation of Ireland, its people, and the course of its history. Did contemporary Ireland become modern, or rather modernized, and if not, why not? Running through these essays is the argument for Ireland today as a postcolonial nation whose fragmented history and conflicting nationalisms have produced a distinctive, atypical culture. With that view goes a healthy awareness of the opposing or revisionist view, that Ireland is a European nation like France or Germany, whose culture, although perhaps marked and even afflicted for a time with some of the attributes of a colony, was never really a colony to be compared with, say, India, the Congo, or Algeria. Thus, its failings in backwardness and unmodern habits and structures are its own and certainly cannot be ascribed to British colonialism. I would not have been given the privilege of writing this brief Afterword were it not that I too have studied Ireland (albeit much less profoundly and expertly than the writers of these essays) in the context of imperialism and colonialism and more particularly with reference to the continuing struggle over Palestine, in which a narrative of disasters such as the Famine and Nakba (in the Palestinian case), mutinies and revolts, unsuccessful negotiations, prolonged military occupation, obdurate settlers, and a serious asymmetry in power, are the elements, along with a history of betrayal and disappointed (and disappointing) leaders. The signs of many such common

features seemed to me to have been unmistakable, since what drew me to Irish culture and history in the first place were the underlying connections to be drawn between knowledge and power that I had first studied in the context of Orientalism, and which forms the substance of a fascinating study

177

178

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

of the parallels between Orientalism and Celticism in this volume by Joseph Lennon. For its British settlers and rulers, Ireland was not only a geographical entity dominated by an off-shore power, but also a history, geography, culture, and population written and represented by what the British and many of their European and American counterparts said about them. There is a drawing by Daumier, for instance, that depicts two Parisian lawyers musing about the Governor Eyre controversy in 1860, in which a sarcastic connection is made by one of the two supercilious men between the Jamaican neégres and les irlandais: they're the same, he says. We should recall, on the other hand, Roger Casement’s rebellious association as an Irish nationalist between his struggle on behalf of the Congolese and his voluntary enlistment on behalf of Egyptian and Muslim anti-colonial resistance. It is to this entirety of representations and associations that a new generation of Irish critics, historians, artists, poets, dramatists and intellectuals has responded, with its own set of re-readings, re-interpretations, and reviews that in his magisterial overview Joe Cleary rehearses in detail. In this, the Irish effort is part of a major cultural and political trend not only in postcolonial societies like Ireland and India, for instance, but in places such as the United States, where the conventional national narratives have been challenged and resisted by new voices and new demographic formations, many of them the result of the vast economic and social changes that have overtaken the world since the Second World War and the end of the Cold War. Most of these are the result of huge migrations and dislocations in population that have riven formerly homogenous European societies like Sweden and Germany and turned them into entirely different places with startlingly new, never before confronted problems. Since the period of decolonization in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, ‘natives’ — formerly a designation accepted by colonizer and colonized alike — have no longer been silent, and have taken for themselves the task of writing their own histories and making their own maps. Brian Friel’s immensely resonant play Translations, while so memorably rooted in the tribulations of the 1830 British Ordnance Survey of Ireland, immediately calls forth many echoes and parallels in an Indian, Algerian, or Palestinian reader and spectator, for whom the silencing of their voices, the renaming of places and replacement of languages by the imperial outsider, the creation of colonial maps and divisions also implied the attempted reshaping of societies, the imposition of foreign languages and systems of education, and the creation of new élites, that became familiar obstacles to be overcome by the independence or liberation or anti-colonial movements that sprang forth, each in its own way trying to provide itself with alternative histories, languages, and political self-creations. Clearly then, this collection of essays is part of that effort, both in its

excavations of colonial systems of representation and, by virtue of its own critical energies, its new readings of a culture that had been dominated and

Afterword

179

is still inflected by the colonial encounter. Thus Seamus Deane’s brilliant project of rereading Irish literature here and in his edited Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing provides us with insights not only into the reason why major writers in English such as Burke, Goldsmith, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce (among many others), that had hitherto been absorbed unquestioningly into the canon of English literature, can be read with an entirely different Irish agenda in mind, but that the relationships between them suggest a wholly new formation with reference to itself and to British, French, American and postcolonial Anglophone literatures. Nationhood after decolonization has also brought a whole roster of new problems to be encountered, all of them in one way or another connected

inevitably to the prior distortions of colonialism. This is a very complex matter and has been much debated all over the world. In Ireland, it has pitted the revisionists and English supporters like Stephen Howe against many of the critics in this book: the former have said that Irish ‘backwardness’, for example, cannot be blamed retrospectively on colonialism, any more than the success of Irish development today can be compared with the amazing efflorescence and sudden crash in the economies and societies of the so-called Asian tigers. The latter say that the colonial past has not disappeared any more than it did in places like Algeria which, even though it achieved independence from France in 1962, has since undergone some

important economic development thanks to oil but has remained tied to France in other ways (for example, the huge number of Algerian immigrants there), and has suffered the worst sort of postcolonial pathologies such as one-party rule, militarism, religious extremism, and _horrific internecine strife. Who can say that the deep distortions imposed on a society by the colonialism which Fanon dissected with such blazing accuracy simply ended when the last white policeman left? How can we assume that one phase of history does not imprint the next ones with its pressures, and if so, how are they to be discerned, recalled, rebutted, resisted if they are not admitted in the first place? Besides, and here I think my colleagues in this book are at their best, who is to say that Irish culture, for instance, must only be studied from an entirely Eurocentric perspective? It is true, as they plentifully admit, that early Irish nationalists (say before the United Irishmen) did not specifically describe themselves as a colonized people like the Indians or Algerians, but then neither did the Congolese before Lumumba. Does the absence of that selfdescription invalidate the connection with European colonialism, which certainly became clear in its systemic world-historical phase during the nineteenth century? Of course not. One of the main strengths of postcolonial analysis is that it widens, instead of narrows, the interpretive perspective, which is another way of saying that it liberates instead of further

constricting and colonizing the mind. David Lloyd's use of the Indian historiographical school Subaltern Studies sheds new light on the Irish situation

180 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

precisely because what earlier became possible to see in the Indian context should make it easier and more interesting for critics, elsewhere, to find

similar structures and hidden voices in Ireland. This is not a matter of slavish copying, but rather of creative borrowing, a common feature of all cultural creation. Human history is a history of human labour, neither the exclusive

property of one people, nor its absence in another. And what seems central to many other subalterns now is the capacity for cross-colony identification and renewed investigation into an occluded or suppressed past that can be restored differentially to recollection and scrutiny by many of the new cultural methods of analysis available universally. All over the world, in as many societies as one can think of, there is a

struggle over the national narrative, what its components are, who its main constituents are, what its shaping forces are, why some elements have been silenced and why others have triumphed, what lessons about the national identity — if there is such a single thing — can be learned. This struggle has taken many forms, some academic and discursive, others collective and

organized. Often, the intellectual is asked to choose between the blandishments of a synthetic whole and the uncertainties of a discontinuous, fraught contest between the powerful and the powerless. In the United States, for example, the patriotic master narrative taught in schools for generations has been disputed by native Americans, women, workers, ethnic ‘minorities’, whose massive contributions to the making of

the United States have simply been left out. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States attempts to rectify the falsified and skewed picture that has long stood for the basically laundered, white, male, and heroic national story which, in his lament for a ‘unified’ history, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among several others, has publicly mourned. But of course, the struggle over a collective, uneven history and monolithic ‘historical standards’ goes on regardless, with the gradually clarified understanding that the royal road to a nation’s identity is its public memory, the official pantheon of heroes, the monuments, holidays, and honorifically designated offices that so often conceal the continuing challenge from ‘below’. Similar disputes over memory and narrative occur nearly everywhere that one looks: in a Europe collectively traumatized by ethnic wars in the Balkans and Chechnya, by the emergence of right-wing parties, the history-wars over the recent past, for example Algeria and Vichy for France, the Third Reich and the Holocaust for Germany, the role of Islam in Spanish history and society, and so on. In many cases, such debates are reflected immediately (as in the United Kingdom) in stringent and even regressive immigration laws, as well as in intercommunal altercations (Islam-bashing, hooliganism, overt displays of racism). Monuments and museums

have

become

occasions

for disputation,

as have

tradition,

language and ‘patrimony’: who owns and is responsible for the collective past? What is deliberately forgotten, what recalled? Neo-liberalism has

Afterword

181

added to and even fuelled the fire over such issues as traditional values, the

attack on welfare, the defence of globalization. A post-apartheid South Africa struggles today over what to teach of its complicated past, how to balance eleven official languages with liberation from apartheid and white supremacy. In the celebrations over a victorious democracy, few outsiders have noticed the often bitter back-and-forth over the deliberations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the adjudication of the past, the relative absence of justice as an element in the hearings,

and so on. In India, Japan, China,

the Islamic world,

Latin

America, Australia, and New Zealand, the hottest issues are those that concern the challenge to a once-plump and self-satisfied authority now incapable of dealing with the contemporary claims of memory, suppressed injustice, and disadvantaged, unequal actors in the national drama. Far from this being what Samuel Huntington in his essentialist and vulgar manner has called the clash of civilizations, it is a wave of conflicting interpretations within cultures, a struggle over resources, political power, and territory that in many places (Iran, former Yugoslavia, Kashmir, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Chile, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Palestine) has evolved into actual armed

struggle. Thus the Irish instance that this book so brilliantly develops takes its real place in the complexities and turbulence of an undecided future, illuminated so extraordinarily by works like Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent which dramatizes the endless struggle over land and property. It would be disingenuous of me here not to say something more about the Palestinian case, for which Ireland has always seemed so interesting and so profoundly meaningful a parallel, even to the debate as to whether the two places were or were not colonies and who was entitled to ownership of the land in the first place. Much attention has been focused recently on the emergence of a new Israeli school of so-called revisionist (in Israel the adjective has a progressive connotation) historians, many of them academics, who have often but not by any means always courageously confronted Israel’s founding myths, conventional narratives, and much advertised self-image with the kind of withering, deconstructive, archival evidence and political assertiveness that has hitherto been absent in Israeli education, public discourse, and policy analysis. Even members of the Western Marxist left, reluctant or squeamish about taking on the battle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism for decades, have finally opened their minds to the new Israeli historians because here at last are, in effect, white

men

demolishing

the national

myths with

considerable

panache and verve. Ironically, however, Palestinian scholars have been saying those things for decades as a result of the common history of dispossession, statelessness, exile, and suffering experienced by every Palestinian; but it was only when a handful of Israelis — fifty years on — started saying them that Western liberals paid attention. In any case, at the core of the mythology was the idea that Zionism was

182 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

a liberation movement for Jews who came to a backward and a mostly ‘empty’ land, fought a war of independence ‘against’ the British Empire (which as everyone now agrees actually facilitated the creation of the new Jewish state), and established the Middle East’s only ‘democracy’. One

might well ask what it is about the Irish and the Palestinians that made them either so repugnant or so invisible to the incoming settlers, and why the very land they lived on seemed like someone else’s. Whereas it was the case that from Theodor Herzl to Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, the Zionists saw and described themselves as a colonizing movement very much in the same pattern as the settler-colonialists who came to Ireland, or Algeria, or the Americas, and who dislodged the natives in order to set up their new republic on the ruins of what they found and yet denied was there. Until today, despite the existence of 7 million stateless and dispossessed

Palestinian

Arabs,

4.5

million

of them

uncompensated

and

unrepatriated refugees since 1948, the Palestinian catastrophe or Nakba has been given no acknowledgement by Israel, neither for what Palestinians lost nor for what has been done to them ever since. I cannot say whether Irish dispossession has exactly parallel features, but the similarities are certainly eye-catching. More to the point has been the fascinating struggle (that eerily recalls the renamings and remappings that are at the heart of Translations) over Palestine’s historical identity as it is reflected in archaeology, often referred to as Israel’s founding science. Yagil Yadin, a leading figure in the struggle to establish Israel as a state and rid it of its native inhabitants, subsequently became chief of staff of the army and, like Moshe Dayan, a fervent archaeologist for whom the history, seminal events, and artefacts of ancient Israel (for example, Masada, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Second Temple, to say nothing of the Old Testament) were first assembled then grounded and, of

course, used to authenticate the soon-to-be-challenged legitimacy of the modern Jewish state in a continuous and instrumentally constructed past stretching back for centuries. Yadin was a legendary figure celebrated by philo-semites like Edmund Wilson and many other Western cultural authorities, including Johns Hopkins professor William Albright, the senior American academic who established the field of biblical archaeology. For Albright, both ancient and modern Israelite conquest simply overrode, literally and metaphorically, the weaker and ultimately less significant Canaanite (and modern Palestinian) tribes who were unfortunately in the way of progress, and were therefore shunted aside. The dialectical countercurrent, however, was not long in developing, since it seems to be one of the laws of colonial history that silenced voices inevitably emerge. I shall leave aside how, with the appearance of a genuine Palestinian resistance movement in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, a new

critical discourse was born that was quickly allied both in theory and practice with similar movements in Europe (and specifically Ireland), Latin

Afterword

183

America, North America, Asia, and Africa - movements for whom anticolonial consciousness, as in part validated by the insights of Marx, Fanon, and Cabral, and fertilized by the Non-Aligned movement born in Bandung, was what also gave Irish postcolonialism its new, distinctive inflections. For the first time in modern Palestinian history, a critical language and, of course, a critical awareness developed that enabled historians, novelists, poets, feminists, sociologists, and demographers to forge an adversarial style that made important inroads against the prevailing but carefully Zionist and exclusivist vision of how Palestine had always been the Jewish national home. Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al Qassem, novelists like Jabra Jabra and Ghassan Kanafani, literary critics like

Ihsam Abbas and Salma al Jayyusi, historians like Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Arif el Arif, Rashid Khalidi, A.L.Tibawi and Nur Masalha — to mention only

a tiny handful of names — articulated what in effect had once been a subverted and blocked area of expression, but which now made its presence felt dramatically. A wider, more inclusive vision of history than the essentially monophonic one with which Zionism had, again literally and metaphorically, occupied the actual geography was gradually and, I believe, irreversibly established. In due course, then, not only did an Arab Palestine reappear, but so too was a complex, polyphonic Islamic, Byzantine, Abbasid, Ummayyad, Ottoman, Christian, Crusader, and Arab past made available for critical and

historical awareness. Far from historical Palestine being seen mainly or exclusively as a Jewish province, it emerged as a place of composite colonial conquests, acculturation, and pluralistic cultures, many of them, like Andalucia in its 700 years of Islamo-Iberian efflorescence, hybrid, diverse,

and coexisting symbiotically with many of the others. In this extraordinary mix, only Zionism claimed priority and exclusivity, and only modern Israel proclaimed itself a privileged state for service (‘return’ and refuge) by what was both in fact and in spirit a new immigrant-settler population determined at all costs to suppress all the others, in history and in quotidian politics. Thus, to give a couple of examples, although Israel’s Arab citizens constitute almost 20 per cent of the total population, they have no collective juridical standing except as ‘non-Jews’; and according to Israel’s Basic Laws (there is no Israeli constitution) only Jews are entitled to ‘return’ (and

not Palestinians who were born there and made refugees in 1948). Moreover, Israel is not the state of its citizens but of the ‘whole Jewish people’ wherever they are, and only Jews are allowed to buy, lease, or sell 92 per cent of the land that is held in trust for the ‘whole Jewish people’. It is to serve this polity that Israeli archaeology seems to have been constructed teleologically, even though, to repeat, Palestine was never exclusively the land of the Jews. The antithetic revision of archaeology was originally stimulated by individual Palestinian scholars like Farid Baramki, but it was soon to be strengthened by the powerful critiques of Glenn

184 — Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

Bowersock, Albert Glock, Keith Whitlam, Philip Davies, and the young Palestinian scholar Nadia abul-Hajj, to mention only a few names. Sceptically re-examining the claims of Yadin and his many nationalist disciples, these non-Israeli writers discovered a much more complex politics of retrospective selectivity, blockage, and occlusion at work in the archaeological archive since the mid-nineteenth century, that is, at roughly the time that Zionism began to be born — most of it tied organically to the Zionist project not only of establishing a state with a resolutely self-fashioned identity, but of providing it with a pedigree including a host of invented traditions — which the new critical archaeology has been in the process of revising. What has emerged to challenge Zionist exclusivism is a characteristically postcolonial rereading of a highly conflicted and many layered history. At the time of the Israelite conquests, Palestine was in fact already a place with a millennial history from the Stone Age to the Mosaic period. In that perspective, Israelite dominance, which culminated in the tenure of the relatively brief Davidic dynasty, was a comparatively small factor, very far indeed from the overwhelmingly powerful, all-conquering, longstanding, and all-subsuming thing portrayed as modern Israel’s archaeological antecedent as the original exclusively Jewish state. Other histories — Canaanite, Moabite, Aramaic, Jebusite, Philistine, Phoenician — have been

suppressed or diminished by Israeli archaeology, and as Bowersock shows so brilliantly, many chapters in Jewish history (that showed, for instance,

the coexistence of a Jewish culture within a larger Arabian kingdom for many centuries) were left purposefully unexplored, the better to give the impression that Palestine always was a Jewish place and, just as important, that without dominance in an all-Jewish state, Jews have always suffered the persecutions and depredations of anti-Semitism. Bowersock cites, for example, the personal archive of a Jewish woman called Babatha, a

contemporary of the celebrated Jewish rebel Bar Kochba who has been much studied by Israeli archaeologists, which reveals not only the existence of a unified kingdom called Arabia but a social coherence that allowed Jews and Arabs to live harmoniously together. This archive actually exists, but at the time of Bowersock’s article ‘Palestine: Ancient History and Modern Politics’ in the mid-1980s," its contents had never been analyzed; for him,

his discovery of such deliberately occluded evidence, he says wryly, is how ‘one constantly stumbles over the obstacles thrown up by the deliberate fragmentation of a fundamentally unified region’? As I write these lines during one of the worst periods of suffering for the Palestinian people, I must make two additional points which this collection of essays on Irish postcolonialism also makes. One is that in the battle over a much-contested territory like Palestine, and of course Ireland, not all the claimants are free of some of nationalism’s besetting problems. There is an Islamic vision of Palestine, for instance, which while understandable

under the horrendously difficult conditions in which Gaza’s enormously

Afterword

185

poor and suffering population lives, is not at all free of a countervailing exclusivism that posits a largely Islamic land as its teleological as well as historical reality. What Kevin Barry in the Irish context calls the return of the native (to say nothing of the importance given to the revival of Gaelic) is similar perhaps. Both Christians and Jews are simply read out of this neo-Islamic scheme, even though I would argue that in the main, Palestinian (and Irish) postcolonial discourse is premised on diversity, the symbiosis of peoples and cultures, and a multicultural future. Second, both Palestine and Ireland have suffered from the same structural break in their history, instituted (with all sorts of differences) in both

instances by the British: a policy of divide-and-quit, or partition, a fate shared also by India/Pakistan, Cyprus, Syria (a formerly French mandate), former Yugoslavia, and of course, Africa as a whole. This has led to unimaginable levels of violence, which have required the visions of a Yeats or a Darwish to give adequate voice to. To my Palestinian eyes, the idea that

partition might resolve political disputes is a disastrously poor one. I have always preferred some version of bi-nationalism in cases where rival communities overlap and must share a smallish territory to the notion that partition and the theory of ethnic, religious, or racial separation will fix everything. I am sure that some of the contributions to this book have similar views about Ireland. In any event, I am convinced that critical reflection on a whole, even if episodic and mutilated, history as exemplified by the Irish meditations in this book is a vastly preferable alternative to carving out smaller and smaller bits of history to fight over. Rational exploration and criticism must always be given precedence over mere solidarity, and in Irish postcolonial discourse we have, I think, the victory of that indispensable idea. This is a

rare occurrence; hence, the singular importance of this outstanding collection of essays. Edward W. Said New York

August 2001

%

prices on ‘ ‘

‘ ‘

¥

’

-

}

>»

7 ~

®

a

%

Oe

.

IP

,

“wy

thi Pty

ee

=

per

Miter:

rieS

wl

“obits

Nerang Oa

(-hitessade

aH

«

ry.

welsh

Gah At

&

ans

we

,

ee

edie

5

¥

Ne

oo

tirmel”

eu rer hae:

Pty

ans 46

epcdoreedggnais:

:

sete

Mote

iy reer apm Wave Syt reel)

+ fe

UR!

ay? etl alee ceed toy

ATO tata alarhoeitesltige

rr Bagh

ae

-

4

coiet i

é

-*

OP Oe

é ‘

Ort

me Le

hy

‘m

Ne

Pe

ul-@

eAwiltorcs

4 pe Swng Otay nesta bit

dite Prsewrbord ssa

eon

ui acu) Aevacard sere

an Touching a

ss

etch rypcrihe et saly th oe

AbadIlyonsneth'tant ® formduoineyei v

7

Notes and References Introduction: The Nation and Postcolonial Theory 1

For a recent excellent critique of modernization theory, see Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press,

2 3

2000), especially pp. 11-27. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 99. Joep Leerssen, ‘1798: The Recurrence of Violence and Two Conceptualizations of History’, The Irish Review, vol. 22 (1998), pp. 37-45, p. 45. Also see Joseph Lennon’s

invocation of this concept in his essay here, as well as Claire Connolly’s endorsement of it in the December 1999 issue of the European Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, devoted to ‘Postcolonial Ireland’, p. 258.

4

See Angus Mitchell, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (London: Anaconda; Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997). I am grateful to Mitchell for sharing with me the introduction to his work in progress, Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents (forthcoming, Irish Manuscripts Commission), in which he explains how and why the so-called ‘Black Diaries’ were forged.

5

David Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, Interventions, vol. 2, no. 2

6

Among those works of postcolonial criticism that have most influenced Irish

(2000), pp. 212-28, p. 220.

cultural studies are: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Culture

and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration

(London: Routledge, 1990); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1988). Among important works on Ireland and postcolonialism, see: Luke Gibbons, ‘Identity without a Centre: Allegory, History, and Irish Nationalism’, Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (October 1992), later published in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996); Seamus Deane (ed.), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota

University Press, 1990); David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the PostColonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press; Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

1993), and Ireland after History (Cork University Press, 1999); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press, 1998); Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press,

2000). Two journals that have contributed whole issues to Ireland and postcolonialism are: Colin Grahan and Willy Maley (eds.), Irish Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 2

(August 1999); and Claire Connolly, ‘Postcolonial Ireland?’, European Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (December 1999).

7

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

8

Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). It is

important to note here that it was Declan Kiberd who first encouraged Edward Said to write about Ireland and postcolonialism when he invited him to speak at

187

188

Notes and References

the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. This later became Said’s now well-known essay ‘Yeats and Decolonization’ in Deane, Nationalism,

Colonialism, and Literature,

reprinted in Said, Culture and Imperialism. Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed., (Cork University Press, 1996); Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and

Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork University Press,

1996). 10

Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism, p. 207.

For a useful examination of the confusion between nation and nation-state, the distinctions among various different types of nationalism — including cultural nationalism, ‘blood and soil nationalism’, constitutional nationalism — and the

1W2

challenges of multiculturalism to nationalism, see Desmond M. Clarke and Charles Jones (eds.), The Rights of Nations: Nations and Nationalism in a Changing World (Cork University Press, 1999), especially the editors’ ‘Introduction: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Self-Determination’, pp. 1-25. This definition of ‘nation’ is taken from Adrian Hastings, The Construction ofNationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 3. For this dominant view, see Anderson, Imagined Communities;

Ernest Gellner,

Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and

Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). For Hastings on Ireland, see The Construction of Nationhood, pp. 80-86. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, p. 4. Lloyd, Ireland after History, p. 36. Frederick

Buell, National

Culture and the New

Global System

(Baltimore

and

London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 10-11. Cf. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Pico lyer, Video Night in Kathmandu (New York: Knopf, 1988), discussed in Buell, National Culture and the New Global System, p. 11.

Stuart Hall, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in Anthony King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Dept of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991), pp. 19-40. Buell, National Culture and the New Global

System, p. 3. 19

Masao Miyoshi, ‘Globalization, Culture, and the University’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 228.

20

For example, this sense of cultural globalization as characterized by hybridity is applied to the analysis of late twentieth-century Irish films: see Nicholas Daly, ‘From Elvis to the Fugitive’, European Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 3

Zi

22

(December 1999), p. 263. Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Author-

ity under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (1985). Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Editors of postcolonial anthologies have considered Ireland as playing only a minor role, if any, in the development of postcolonial criticism. For example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), contains only one essay on Ireland, David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘What Ish my Nation?’, a three-page excerpt from their Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester and

Notes and References

189

New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). See also, Patrick Williams and

Laura Chrisman

(eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994). Australia and Canada but not Ireland are included in the discussion of postcolonialism in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and

Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989). One recent anthology that includes a section on Ireland is Gregory Castle (ed.), Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-Colonialism’, in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse, p. 294. ibid., p. 295. ibid. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Post(-)colonialism?’, in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse, p. 286.

ibid. On the nineteenth-century discourse of racism, see L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); R.N. Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland:

The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979); Luke Gibbons, ‘Race against Time: Racial Discourse and

Irish History’ The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991). See Robbie McVeigh, ‘Is Sectarianism Racism? Theorising the Racism/Sectarianism Interface’,

in David

Miller

(ed.), Rethinking Northern

Ireland

(London

and New York:

Longman, 1998), pp. 179-86. 29

Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’, Social Text, vols. 31-32 (1992), pp. 99-113,

p- 110. 30 31

32

33

ibid. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso,

1992), p. 36. Pheng Cheah, ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism’, in Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 299. Valentine Moghadam, ‘Introduction: Women and Identity Politics in Theoretical and Comparative Perspective’, and Marie Aimée Hélie-Lucas, ‘The Preferential Symbol for Islamic Identity: Women in the Muslim Personal Laws’, inValentine Moghadam (ed.), Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International

34 35 36

Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Carol Coulter, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women, and Nationalism in Ireland (Cork University Press, 1993). Lloyd, Ireland after History, p. 3. Enrique Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, in Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3 (1993),

pp- 65-66. For an important analysis of indigenous languages in postcolonial cultures, both how they are threatened and how that threat can be resisted, see Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), pp. 4-33.

37 38 39)

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972). Edward Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

40

Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism: An Overview’, citing Said, Orientalism.

190

Notes and References

‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies 1

See especially Seamus Deane, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ (1983), and Declan Kiberd, ‘Anglo-Irish Attitudes’ (1985); both reprinted in Seamus Deane

(ed.),

Ireland's Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985). Edward Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Impe-

rialism’, and Terry Eagleton, ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’, later republished in Seamus Deane (ed.), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1990). David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and

Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). Luke Gibbons, ‘Race against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991), pp. 95-113, subsequently republished in Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996); David

Lloyd, ‘Race under Representation’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991), pp. 62-94; Clair Wills, ‘Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991), pp. 20-60. Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London: Routledge, 1992); David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); and Ireland

after History (Cork University Press, 1999); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Seamus Deane,

Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Other book-length contributions include Fintan Cullen,

Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930 (Cork University Press, 1997), and Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press, 1998). For some suggestive overviews on the development of the ‘New British’ and ‘Atlantic’ models of historiography, see the special forum on ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective’, American Historical Review, vol. 104 (April 1999). In his contribution to the American Historical Review forum discussion, David

Armitage argues that: ‘None of the major modes of British historiography in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth had any place for the imperial enterprise. An insular history of English exceptionalism maintained a wilful amnesia about England’s outlying dependencies, whether British, Irish, continental European or ultramarine.’ Armitage also contends that empire is a notable absence in the works of several major English historians of the left such as ‘Christopher Hill, Lawrence Stone, and E.P. Thompson, each of whom has written about the empire only very belatedly in their long careers’. See David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, vol. 104 (April 1999), pp. 427-45, 428-29. Quinn’s works include The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1966) and Ireland and America: Their Early Associations, 1500-1640 (Liverpool University Press, 1991). Among Canny’s numerous publications, see ‘The

Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 1973), pp. 575-98; The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-76 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976); Colonial

Identity in the Atlantic World 1500-1800 (Princeton University Press, 1987); and Kingdom and Colony: Ireland and the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See also the contributions by Canny and others in K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny and P.E.H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise:

Notes and References

191

English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Liverpool Univer-

sity Press, 1978), and in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of British Empire, 1; The Origins of Empire (Oxford University Press, 1998). For some representative critiques, see: T.C. Barnard, ‘Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641-1845’, Past and Present, vol. 127 (May 1990), pp. 39-83; Karl

Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom

and

Colony:

Ireland

in the Westward

Enterprise

1536-1660’, in Andrews, Canny and Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise, op. cit.,

pp. 45-64; Ciaran Brady, ‘The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork University Press, 1989), pp. 25-45; Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, vol. 11, (Winter 1991-92), pp. 50-55; and Steven G. Ellis, ‘Writing Irish History: Revisionism, Colonialism, and the British Isles’, The Irish Review, vol. 27 (Autumn/Winter 1994), pp. 1-21.

10 a

Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534-1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), p. 17. Examples include Denis Donoghue, ‘Fears for Irish Studies in an Age of Identity Politics’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 44 (21 November 1997), pp. B4-B5; David Krause, ‘Review Article: The Reinvention of Ireland’, Irish University Review,

12

13

vol. 27, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1997), pp. 236-44; and Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), pp. 22-44. John Kurt Jacobson, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic: Ideology, Democracy and Dependent Development (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 111, 167. Jim Mac Laughlin, ‘Emigration and the Peripheralization of Ireland in the Global Economy’, Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 243-73, p. 261. As Mac Laugh-

lin notes, these figures exclude the large number of illegal Irish emigrants then living in the United States. 14 Jacobson, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic, op. cit., p. 197. ges, Raymond Crotty, Ireland in Crisis: A Study in Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment (Dingle: Brandon, 1986); Jacobson, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic, op. cit. See also from this period, Denis O’Hearn, “The Irish Case of Dependency: An Exception to the Exceptions?’, American Sociological Review, vol. 54 (1989), pp. 578-96. 16 For a more detailed analysis of modernization theory, see Jorge Larrain, Theories of Development, Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), especially pp. 85-110. For an incisive critique of the limits of modernization theory as a mode of comparative social analysis, see Dean C. Tipps, ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 15 (1973), pp. 199-226. Y For an incisive critique of modernization discourse in the Irish context, a discourse he terms ‘the cultural dominant of the nineties’ and ‘the preferred code of advocacy and dissent’, see Francis Mulhern’s The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics (Cork University Press: 1998), pp. 1-28, p. 20. For another take, see Luke Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation?: The Myth of Modernization in Irish Culture’, in his Transformations in Irish Culture, op. cit., pp. 82-93. 18 Francis Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time, op. cit., p. 20. Mulhern’s critique is drawn on Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). 19 For a leftist overview of Southern Irish society informed by a modernization perspective, see Ellen Hazelkorn and Henry Patterson, ‘The New Politics of the Irish Republic’, New Left Review, vol. 207 (Sept./Oct. 1994), pp. 49-71. According to these authors, Southern Irish irredentist attitudes towards Northern Ireland in the period before integration into the EEC is explained by the fact that: ‘For a nation domi-

192

Notes and References nated by peasants there was a homology between the predominant locus of national aggrandizement — reclaiming the “six lost counties” — and their own mode of production where the dominant form of increasing surplus was the extension of area, not improvement of methods of production.’ A similar view is offered by Tom Nairn, one of the few senior intellectuals in the British New Left to engage with the Northern Irish question, when he observes that: ‘Most such ethnonationalist conflicts [he refers to Northern Ireland, Corsica, the Basque Country, Bosnia-Herze-

govina and Ngorno-Karabakh] seem to go on recurring in predominantly rural situations. Nor are these merely rural in the sense of being agricultural or nonurban - like East Anglia, say, or the Beauce plain in central France. No, they are areas where “rural” tends to mean “peasant” — that is, where a historical pattern of small landholding prevails, or has until recently prevailed, marked by intense heritable rights, rigid morality or faith, cultural exclusivity and an accompanying small-town or village culture ... Whatever else it may have become, today’s Sinn Féin is also the inheritor of Republicanism’s old social ideal: the rural and pious peasant family utopia which inspired the Irish constitution, and regulated most of its strategic development from 1922 until Ireland’s entry into the European Community in 1975. The resultant generational warfare may penetrate or even take over cities, the urban sites to which extended families of land dwellers have moved or (sometimes) been

20

21

expelled. But the violent side of the conflicts appears invariably to have its origin in the peasant or small town world they have left behind.’ Tom Nairn, ‘The Curse of Rurality: The Limits of Modernisation Theory’, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 107-34, 107-8. For both articles, what Nairn calls the ‘curse of rurality’ seems to be the determinant explanation for conservatism and violence in Irish society, and Ireland's entry into the EEC is undialectically conceived in each case as an unequivocal moment of emancipation. Nairn’s thesis that the upsurge of ethnonationalist violence around the globe in recent decades can be traced to the ‘spell of rurality’ displays a remarkable disinterest in issues of imperialism and state oppression in many of these regions. This aspect of the postcolonial studies project is developed most forcefully by David Lloyd in the essays ‘Regarding Ireland in a Postcolonial Frame’ and ‘Outside History: Irish New Histories and the “Subalternity Effect”’, which are collected in Ireland after History, op. cit. For examples of such critique, see Liam Kennedy, ‘Post-Colonial Society or PostColonial Pretensions?’ in his Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1996), pp. 167-81, and

22 29

Longley, The Living Stream, op. cit., pp. 22-44. For a critique from the left, see Francis Mulhern, ‘Postcolonial Melancholy’, in his The Present Lasts a Long Time, op. cit., pp. 158-63. The objection based on ideas of physical propinquity is developed in T.C. Barnard, ‘Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641-1685’, op. cit., p. 43. These objections are succinctly outlined in Tom Bartlett, ‘“What Ish My Nation?”: Themes in Irish History: 1550-1850’, in Tom Bartlett et al. (eds.), Irish Studies: A

24

General Introduction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), pp. 44-59, p. 47. See also Tom Dunne, ‘New Histories, Beyond “Revisionism”’, The Irish Review, vol. 12 (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 1-12. Edna Longley, for instance, suggests that intellectuals who employ a postcolonial perspective ‘deny Ireland's European past because the Republic’s European present, in a materialist EU, casts doubt on the victim-position to which Irish Nationalism has always appealed’. See Longley, The Living Stream, op. cit., p. 30, my emphasis. Irish liberals are also prone to take the victim-position, of course, by constructing

Notes and References

25

193

Irish Nationalism (with a big ‘N’ for emphasis) as a monolith, thereby situating themselves as valiant Davids confronting this unruly Goliath. Roberto Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited with an Introduction by John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 19-32, p. 25. My reading of Schwarz’s essay has been informed by several commentaries. See especially Adriana Johnson’s ‘Reading Roberto Schwarz: Outside Out-of-Place Ideas’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (1999), pp. 21-33, and Neil Larson, ‘Brazilian Critical Theory and the Question of Cultural Studies’, in his

26

Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 205-16. See also the comments by Francis Mulhern in The Present Lasts a Long Time, op. cit., pp. 159-60. For Schwarz: ‘Ideas are in place when they represent abstractions of the process they refer to, and it is a fatal consequence of our cultural dependency that we are always representing our reality with conceptual systems created somewhere else, whose basis lies in other social processes.’ Schwarz, ‘Beware of Alien Ideologies’,

2d

in Misplaced Ideas, op. cit., pp. 33-40, p. 39. Joseph Ruane, ‘Colonialism and the Interpretation of Irish Historical Development’, in M. Silverman and P.H. Gulliver (eds.), Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology through Irish Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 293-323. Ruane’s essay offers a comprehensive overview of the treatment of the colonial theme in Irish Studies across a range of disciplines including history, geography, sociology, economics and political science. For subsequent comments, see also Joseph Ruane, ‘Ireland, European Integration, and the Dialectic of Nationalism and Postnationalism’, Etudes Irlandais, vol. 19, no. 1 (Printemps

28

1994), pp. 183-93, and ‘Colonial Legacies and Cultural Reflexivities’, Etudes Irlandais, vol. 19, no. 2 (Automne 1994), pp. 107-19. The question about whether Ireland should be considered a colony or a small European nation has a great deal to do with the categorization of Irish nationalism. For those who doubt the validity of the colonial model, Irish national struggles are better considered in terms of those of other Western or Central European movements such as Young Italy or Hungarian or Polish nationalism rather than in terms of movements in the Third World. David Lloyd has observed that there are compelling arguments on either side of this debate, but perhaps it is the dichotomy between Europe and the Third World subtending this controversy that must ultimately be queried. David Lloyd, ‘Outside History: Irish New Histories and the “Subalternity Effect”’, Subaltern Studies, vol. 9, Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds.) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 261-80, p. 262. When contemporary scholars of whatever hue discuss colonialism they invariably refer to British, French and Iberian overseas colonies in Asia, Africa and

Latin America. The great Habsburg, Ottoman and Tsarist Russian European land empires that stretched from Siberia across Central Europe to the Middle East until the First World War are routinely passed over in silence in most studies. A lack of comparative research makes it difficult to say whether or how the practices developed by land empires differed from those developed in overseas colonies. Whether or not a territory was geographically contiguous to the dominating power or a distant overseas possession does not seem the decisive issue. From a materialist standpoint, the fact that the Western European maritime empires (England, France, Holland), which eventually displaced the older Iberian empires, were advanced capitalist countries while the Central and East European land empires were much less so seems more important. Were the modern European land empires to be taken into account, then the either/or compartmentalization that structures debates as to whether the nineteenth-century Irish experience was

194

29

Notes and References closer to that of Europe or the so-called ‘Third World’ may be less compelling. The argument that Ireland’s constitutional circumstances make it an ‘anomaly’ is asserted in Brady and Gillespie (eds.), Natives and Newcomers, op. cit., p. 17. The

concept of Ireland as ‘internal colony’ is developed in Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). For a succinct critique of Hechter’s work, see William N. Sloan, ‘Ethnicity or Imperialism? A Review Article’, Comparative Studies

30 cil 32

33 34

in Society and History, vol. 21, no. 1 January 1979), pp. 113-25. Ruane, ‘Colonialism and the Interpretation of Irish Historical Development’, op.

cit., p. 318. Lloyd, Ireland after History, op. cit., p. 7. See Arghiri Emmanuel, ‘White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism’, New Left Review, vol. 73 (May/June 1972), pp. 35-57. Emmanuel does not mention some significant exceptions such as the slave rebellion in Haiti or the Great Indian Mutiny. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, op. cit., p. 17. For Canny’s works, see note 8 above. For a wide range of critical opinions on the period, see also the interesting collections of essays in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland 1541-1641

35

(Dublin:

Four Courts Press, 1999). Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse

of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The interconnections between Ireland and Spanish expansion are much less developed than those between Ireland and the North American colonies, but see Clare Carroll, ‘Irish

and Spanish Cultural Relations in the Work of O’Sullivan Beare’, in Morgan (ed.),

36

Political Ideology in Ireland 1541-1641, op. cit., pp. 229-53. On Spenser, see Anne Fogarty (ed.), ‘Spenser in Ireland: “The Faerie Queene” 1596-1996’, Irish University Review, Special Issue, vol. 26, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter

1996); Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser

and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997). For works that look beyond Spenser, see Brendan Bradshaw et al. (eds.), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of the Conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and the anthology of travel writing edited by Andrew Hadfield and John McVeigh, Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994).

37 38

Scott B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between Ireland and India (New Delhi and London: Sage, 1993). L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); R.N. Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979). See also the collection of essays in Tadhg Foley and Sean Ryder (eds.), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), and in Keith Jeffery (ed.), ‘An Irish Empire?’: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 1996). Other useful analyses of nineteenth-century discourse include: Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London: Pimlico, 1999), and David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘Discourses of Opposition and Resistance in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Text & Context, vol. 2,

no. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 76-84.

Notes and References 39

40

41

195

Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (Cork University Press, 1996). Breandan O Buachalla, Aisling Ghedr: Na Stiobhartaigh agus an t-Aos Léinn, 1703-1788 (Baile Atha Cliath: An Cl6chomhar, 1996). See Robert J. Hind, ’“We have No Colonies” — Similarities within the British

Imperial Experience’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26 (1984), pp. 3-35. David K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey, from the Eighteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), pp. 7-13; George Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), pp. 216-35. My own taxonomy borrows heavily on Fredrickson’s reworking of Fieldhouse’s work. For another attempt at a typology, see Jiirgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley L. Frisch (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers,

1997), pp. 10-12.

42

On the plantation colonies, see Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

43

For overviews

of colonial South America,

see James Lockhart

and Stuart B.

Schwarz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Latin America and Brazil (Cambridge

University Press, 1983), and Mark A. Burkholder

and Lyman L.

Johnson, Colonial Latin America (Oxford University Press, 1994).

4

45

On these issues, see R. Cole Harris, ‘The Simplification of Europe Overseas’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 67, no. 4 (December 1977), pp. 469-83, and R. Cole Harris and Leonard Guelke, ‘Land and Society in Early Canada and South Africa’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 3, no. 2 (1977), pp. 135-53. See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford University Press, 1988). On Palestine, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli—Palestinian Conflict 1882-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

46 47

48

On these continuities, see Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Allen Lane, 1992), pp. 55-75. See William J. Smyth, ‘Ireland a Colony: Settlement Implications of the Revolution in Military-Administrative, Urban and Ecclesiastical Structures, c. 1550 to c. 1730’, in Terry Barry (ed.), A History of Settlement in Ireland (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 158-86. Raymond Crotty has argued that where religion became the index between colonizer and colonized, it has proved more durable as a mode of social differentiation than race. ‘Colonizers and colonized in Ireland were distinguished . . . by their religions. The former were Protestant; the latter were Catholic. The inevitable miscegenation between white colonizers and black or brown colonized produced subclasses of mestizos, mulattos and Eurasians, who occupied the middle ground and eroded in time the sharp distinctions between black/brown and white. But successive generations born in Ireland, whether of mixed parentage or not, were Catholics and Protestants, with no diminution over the centuries of the fine theological distinctions between them.’ Crotty, Ireland in Crisis, op. cit., p. 38. He fails to comment on the ways in which the Catholic Church itself assumed the role of ‘middle-man’ between British rulers and Irish masses for much of the nineteenth century. The subject of religion has received little attention in Irish postcolonial studies. This is also the case in the wider international field of postcolonial cultural

196

Notes and References studies, though Gauri Viswanathan’s Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and

Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998) is a notable exception. 49

Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System, II, Mercantilism and the Consoli-

dation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980) is the classic study of this development. For an alternative account, which seeks to remedy the theoretical weaknesses in Wallerstein’s work and to correct its North European bias, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

50

51 De

Kevin Whelan, ‘Ireland in the World-System 1600-1800’, in Hans-Jirgen Nitz (ed.), The Early-Modern World-System in Geographical Perspective (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993), pp. 204-18, p. 205.

ibid., p. 204.

Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of NeoSmithian

53 54 515) 56

57

Marxism’, New Left Review, vol. 104 (July/August 1977), pp. 63-118.

Quotes from Brenner cited in Eamonn Slater and Terrence McDonough, ‘Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism: The Dynamics of Feudalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, Research in Political Economy, vol. 14 (1994), pp. 63-118, pp. 64-65. My account of these Marxist debates rehearses the account in Slater and McDonough. Slater and McDonough, ‘Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism’, p. 111. See Emmanuel, ‘White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism’, op. cit., pp. 39-40. Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, op. cit., p. 37. Decolonization in this instance obviously refers to the political independence of the European settler peoples. Though inadequately enforced, laws had existed under European imperial rule to protect indigenous peoples, so for the indigenous and slave populations in these regions the severing of links with the metropolitan mother-state usually led only to intensified oppression rather than to emancipation. For this periodization, see Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, op. Cie ps7

58

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 47-65.

po

The literature on this period is vast and interpretations diverse. For some important recent contributions, see: Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Protestant

60 61

Nation 1690-1800’, Eire-Ireland, vol. 26 (Summer 1991), pp. 7-18; James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork University Press, 1992); Daire Keogh, The French Disease: The Catholic Church and Radicalism in Ireland 1790-1800 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993); Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); and Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork University Press, 1996). For a succinct overview of this period in the Spanish colonies, see Burkholder and Johnson, Colonial Latin America, op. cit., chapter 8. This point is made in Peadar Kirby, Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (Dublin: Trocaire and Gill and Macmillan, 1992), pp. 32-33. For a more extended account of the Latin American revolutions, see Lockhart and Schwarz, Early Latin America, op. cit., pp. 405-26.

62

Thomas Bartlett, ‘What Ish My Nation?’, in Bartlett et al., Irish Studies:

63 64

Introduction, op. cit., p. 46. ibid. On O'Connell and Bolivar, see Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O'Connell 1775-1847 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 171. My thanks

A General

Notes and References

197

to Margaret Kelleher for alerting me to this point. The spectre of the South American revolutions can also be detected in some of the Anglo-Irish literature of the period such as Sydney Owenson’s Florence Macarthy in which the hero returns from the Spanish-American revolutions in a ship portentously named ‘Il Librador’. Owenson’s

The Wild Irish Girl also alludes to South America as, for

example, in the long footnote in the third volume of that novel when she refers to Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, the mestizo son of a Spanish father and Inca mother

65

who had written a history of pre-Hispanic Peru which treated the defeated Inca rulers with sympathy and deference. David Roedigar, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Irish Working

66

For other works on the ‘whitening’ of Irish immigrants to the US, see Theodore

Class (London: Verso, 1991). Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

67

L.M. Cullen and T.C. Smout (eds.), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History 1600-1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1978),

p. 4. For a later revised view by the same authors, see L.M. Cullen, T.C. Smout and A. Gibson, ‘Wages and Comparative Development in Ireland and Scotland, 1565-1780’, in Rosalind Mitchinson and Peter Roebuck (eds.), Economy and Society

in Scotland and Ireland,1500-1939 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1988), pp. 105-16. 68

Timothy W. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural

69

Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914 (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 101. Mac Laughlin, ‘Emigration and the Peripheralization of Ireland in the Global Economy’, op. cit., p. 257. Engels, cited in Seamus Deane, ‘The Famine and Young Ireland’, in Seamus Deane

(ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 2 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), pp. 115-21, pp. 118-19. See the collection of writings gathered in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Ireland, ed. R. Dixon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).

Cited in Crotty, Ireland in Crisis, op. cit., p. 221. For a careful comparative analysis of Ireland and Algeria, see Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Larson, Reading North by South, op. cit., pp. 214-15. Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time, op. cit., p. 24. Several works in comparative sociology locate Northern Ireland within a wider colonial-settler context. In addition to Lustick cited in note 73, see Ronald Weitzer,

Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Michael

MacDonald, Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986); Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano (eds.), The Elusive Search for

Peace: South Africa, Israel, Northern Ireland (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Pamela Clayton, Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth Century Ulster (London: Pluto Press, 1996). Some leading political scientists and sociologists of the Northern conflict have also attributed some importance to settler colonialism as a shaping influence on the contemporary period, though the degree of salience they attach to it varies. See Liam O’Dowd, ‘New Introduction’ to Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990); John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary,

Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, The Dynamics of Power in Northern Ireland: Power Conflict and

198

Notes and References Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a related view, which situates Northern Ireland in terms of other ‘ethnic frontiers’ in Europe and elsewhere, see Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987).

After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies 1

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, edited

and with Introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 253-64; epigraph, p. 257. For a more extended elaboration of the concept of the ‘non-modern’, see the Introduction to Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds.), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Thomas Bartlett, ‘“What Ish My Nation?”: Themes in Irish History, 1550-1850’, in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds.), Irish Studies:

A General Introduction (Dublin: Gill and

Macmillan, 1988), pp. 44-59. Liam Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?,’ in his Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1996), pp. 167-81. Bartlett, ‘What Ish My Nation?’, op. cit., p. 46. ibid., p. 47. ibid. ibid.

On ‘rational abstraction’ see Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. $.W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publish-

‘oO VI O CON

ers, 1970), pp. 205-13.

10

Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

11

On growing significance of the notion of ‘national character’ in Ireland, see Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since

12

In opening his essay ‘Modern Ireland’, op. cit., Kennedy ventures a little sarcasm at the expense of Parnell and Pearse, both of whom compared conditions in Ireland to those of slaves in the US. He seems then blithely unaware that this comment had previously been made by Gustave de Beaumont, friend of De Tocqueville and well-respected travel writer, and by no less a figure than Frederick Douglass, who might have had reason to know. One could multiply the list of US and other foreign visitors who made similar comparisons irrespective of their relation to nationalism. Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland’, op. cit., p. 169. ibid. Pace Liam Kennedy, there have been several quite extended analyses of Ireland as a nation that has suffered from, in Andre Gunder Frank’s terms, ‘capitalist underdevelopment’. The most notable of these is to be found in Raymond Crotty’s all too neglected Ireland in Crisis: A Study in Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment (Dingle: Brandon, 1986), chapters 5 and 6. For direct comparison with Latin America, see Colm Regan, ‘Latin American Dependency Theory and Its Relevance to Ireland’, The Crane Bag, vol. 6, no. 2 (1982), pp. 15-20. Carol Coulter’s

1790 (Oxford University Press, 1997).

13 15

Ireland: Between the First and the Third Worlds (Dublin: Attic Press LIP Pamphlet,

1990) develops a more political analysis of Ireland’s resemblances to Latin America.

Notes and References 16

199

Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland’, op. cit., p. 170. On the current ratio of investment to profit outflow in Ireland, see Denis O’Hearn,

18

12 20

‘The Celtic Tiger: The Role of the Multi-nationals’, in Jim Mac Laughlin and Ethel Crowley (eds.), Under the Belly of the Tiger: Class, Race, Identity and Culture in the Global Ireland (Dublin: Irish Reporter Publications, 1997), pp. 21-34. For Ireland’s agricultural ‘undevelopment’ in relation to colonial capitalism, see again Crotty, Ireland in Crisis, op. cit., esp. chapter 4. For a discussion of work of this kind on imperialism by the Marxist Lenin and the liberal J.A. Bobson, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 47-53 and 11-19 respectively. See Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 569. The term ‘imagined communities’ is usually taken from the celebrated book of that title by Benedict Anderson. My usage of that term here is borrowed from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s redefinition of it in ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’, Introduction to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism

Pa

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 4.

The performative is a mode of utterance which inaugurates a new state: ‘“Let there be light!”, and there was light’ being the ultimate instance. Where the divine performative is held to be absolutely inaugural, human utterances derive their power to alter states from an assumed anterior institutional authority: the Church, the state, the university, the discipline: ‘I declare you man and wife’, or ‘I

am President’. J.L. Austin discusses the performative in this sense in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Yet at the same time, the power of the institution is only realised in such utterances and in their acceptance by those affected by them. In this respect, the performative is a consensual fiction that organises a community and its relations of authority. It is no less subject to ‘iteration’, the performative always being a citation of a prior encoded utterance. Accordingly, we can say that it is only in its iteration that the authority of any institution is affirmed, each time anew, so that in fact the insti-

tution depends on its iteration rather than on any actual founding moment. Jacques Derrida analyzes this problematic in ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 307-30. This paradox opens the space for the parodic destabilization of the performative as performance; or for the skewing of official history in its daily reiterations and popular appropriations. For seminal elaborations of the socially destabilizing effects of performativity, in the areas of gender and colonialism respectively, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 145-49, and Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 297-300. One special instance of the performative and its destabilizing effects is the declaration of independence, which constitutes the very people in whose name it claims to speak, while at the same time exposing the arbitrariness of foundation by delegitimating the previously constituted state in power. Though Derrida’s ‘Declarations d’independence’ addresses the American document, the

Irish version of 1916 is itself an interesting variant of the same problematic, which it performs in the very insistence on the provisionality of its authority. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Declarations d’independence’, in Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Editions de Galilee, 1984), pp. 11-32. pH

I refer here to Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967) and The

200

Notes and References Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961) Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall

Apart (New York: Astor-Honer,

1959), or Chandra T. Mohanty’s essay ‘Under

Western Eyes’ in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-

Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). These writings, among some others, have proven to be seminal texts of theoretical work on colonialism. The best anthology of work on colonialism currently is Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). in)io?)

Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10 (Summer 1986), pp. 5-27. On Trevelyan’s career as a colonial administrator, see Scott B. Cooke, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi: Sage, 1993); and for a recent discussion of Trevelyan’s attitudes to the Famine, see Peter Gray, ‘Ideology and the Famine’, in Cathal Porteir (ed.), The

Great Irish Famine (Cork: Mercier, 1995), pp. 86-103. For Brigadier Frank Kitson’s writings, see his Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peace-Keeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971) and Bunch of Five (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), an account of his involvement in several postwar

colonial campaigns, including Kenya, Malaya, Muscat and Oman, and Cyprus. On the general logic of counter-insurgency, also written from the perspective of the military and the state, see Andrew M. Scott, Insurgency (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

26

See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and Kum Kum Sangari, ‘Relating Histoties: Definitions of Literacy, Literature, Gender in Early Nineteenth Century Calcutta and England’, in Srati Joshi (ed.), Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991), pp. 32-123, on the question of education; David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859-1947 (Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1986), and Nasser Hussain, ‘The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in British India’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis,

27

28

University of California, Berkeley, 1993, for studies of policing and the law. Kevin Barry, ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 14 (Spring 1996), pp. 6-7. His argument here is directed principally at Luke Gibbons, ‘Identity without a Centre: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’, in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 134-48, and at my own essay, ‘Violence and the Constitution of the Novel’, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 125-62. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton University Press, 1989); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986); Kum Kum

Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila, 1979); James

Connolly, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel and Roberts, 1922); William Ryan, The Irish Labour Movement (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1919); Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-1923 (Cork University Press, 1988); Timothy P. Foley and Thomas Boylan, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

Notes and References

201

Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals: Translating Civility in Early Modern Ireland 1

Denis Donoghue, ‘Fears for Irish Studies in an Age of Identity Politics’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 44 (21 November 1997), B4—B5.

2

Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and

Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Rout-

ledge, 1995), pp. 34-5. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October, vol. 34 (Winter 1985), pp. 71-8, reprinted in Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 115-16. D. Denoon, Settler Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 27.

Raymond Crotty, Ireland in Crisis: A Study in Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment (Dingle: Brandon, 1987), pp. 37, 40. Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 2 (April 1999), pp. 446-62. D.B.

Quinn, ‘Ireland

and

Sixteenth-Century

European

Expansion’,

Historical

Studies, vol. 1 (1958), pp. 20-32; Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-76 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976); ‘Iden-

tity Formation in Ireland: the Emergence of an Anglo-Irish Identity’, in N. Canny and A. Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (Princeton University

Press, 1987). Two more recent articles comparing English colonialist representations of North America and Ireland include: James E. Doan, ‘“An Island in the

Virginian Sea”: Native Americans and Irish in English Discourse, 1585-1640’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 79-99, and Rolf Loeber, ‘Prelimi-

naries to the Massachusetts

Bay Colony: The Irish Ventures of Emmanuel

Downing and John Winthrop, Sr.’, in T. Barnard, D. O Créinin, and K. Simms

(eds.), ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, vol. 11 (Winter 1991-92),

10

11

12 13

14

15

pp. 50-51. The alliance of the Incas with the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and of the North American Indian tribes with the English and the French during the eighteenth-century French and Indian War would be examples of such alliances. Needless to say, the Amerindians were the tools of European conquest in such alliances, but one could argue that the Irish, too, were pawns in Spain’s rivalry with England. HMC Egmont, i, pt.i, 35, as cited in John McCavitt, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici: Sir John the Conqueror’, paper delivered at the Folger Library, Washington D.C., in September 1995. John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1998), pp. 104-5. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Rocking the Boat: A Response to Hiram Morgan’, The Irish Review, vol. 12 (1992), pp. 15-19. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 332-4. Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), p. 266; Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1603-6, pp. 464-5; Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1608-10, pp. 224-5; Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1608-10, p. 17; HMC Egmont, i, pt.i, p. 35.

Calendar of State Papers Ireland 1608-10, p. 17.

202 16

Notes and References Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland, vol. 1, trans. David Comyn (London: Irish Texts Society, 1902), pp. 65-71. Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Hiber-

WW

niae Compendium, ed. Matthew Kelly (Dublin, 1850), IL.i.viti, p. 68. Enrique Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3 (1993), p.

18

66. John Gillingham, ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 1992), pp. 392-409.

19

20

PA

See D.B. Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 89, no. 4 (1945), pp. 543-6, and ‘Ireland and Sixteenth-Century Expansion’, op. cit. Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (Cork University Press, 1996). See in particular, ‘The Vindication of Irish Civility in the Seventeenth Century’, pp. 254-93, where Leerssen describes the Irish defence of their civility as a ‘counter-claim’ of ‘tradition’ versus ‘the English taunt that Ireland had no civility’ (p. 259). Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Countermemory, Practice, trans.

Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 131-36. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael, op. cit., pp. 34-7. Gerald of Wales, Topography, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

ibid., p. 124.

On ethnography versus history, see Michel de Certeau, ‘Ethnography: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry’, in The Writing of History, trans. Jom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 209-37. Also see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). See Hiram Morgan’s comment in Political Ideology in Ireland 1541-1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press,

1999), p. 24. Gerald of Wales, Topography, p. 31. ibid., pp. 101, 104.

ibid., p. 112. ibid., pp. 72-76. ibid., p. 103. ibid., p. 100. R. Dudley Edwards, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors: The Destruction of HibernoNorman Civilization (London: Croom Helm, 1977). See Kenneth Nichols, ‘Worlds

34

35

Apart? The Ellis Two-Nation Theory of Late Medieval Ireland’, History Ireland, vol. 7,no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 22-26, where he presents a mixed culture, characterized both by the adoption of Irish law, language and custom by the descendants of the Normans and the acceptance by the Gaelic Irish of the authority of the English king, outside whose control both they and their English contemporaries largely existed. David Edwards, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’, History Ireland, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 16-21; Edwards provides even more detailed evidence in ‘Ideology and Experience: Spenser’s View and Martial Law in Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland 1541-1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 127-57. Vincent Carey, ‘John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 123 (May 1999), pp. 305-27. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, chapter 4.

Notes and References

203

John Derricke, The Image of Ireland with a Discoverie ofWoodkarne (1581), ed. David B. Quinn (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985).

ibid., pp. 187-88, for quotations in this paragraph. ibid., p. 193. ibid. ibid., pp. 83, 88, 92. ibid. p. 88. Seamus

Deane, ‘Civilians

and

Barbarians’,

in Ireland’s

Field

Day

(London:

Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 33-42. Richard Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 6 (New York: AMS Press, 1976; rpr. of 1808 ed., London: J. Johnson), p. 67.

ibid., see chapters 3, 5, 6 and 7, which respectively treat ‘Cities’, ‘Lords Spiritual’, ‘Lords Temporall’, and ‘Learned Men and Authors’. ibid., p. 4. For a similar use of ‘savage’ to describe ‘barbarians’, close to home, see James I’s

description of the Highland Scots as ‘suche wild savageis voide of Godis feare and our obedience’ in a letter of 1608, quoted in Jenny Wormald,

Court, Kirk, and

Community, New History of Scotland 4 (University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 108. Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, in Holinshed’s Chronicles, op. cit., pp. 4, 48. Not published until 1633, the text of A View circulated in manuscript in the late

1590s. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 84-85, for all quotations in this paragraph. ibid., p. 63; subsequent quotations in this paragraph, pp. 67-8. ibid., p. 56. For a discussion of these sources, see Andrew Hadfield, Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 102-3. Spenser, A View, op. cit., p. 62.

ibid., p. 104. ibid.

See The Faerie Queene, VI.viii. 35-36.

Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, op. cit., p. 126. For a genealogy of ‘cannibal’ in sixteenth-century European writing, see Frank Lestringant, ‘Le nom des cannibales de Christophe Colombe a Michel de Montaigne’, Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, vols. 17-18 (1984), pp. 51-74. The Diario of Christopher Columbus 1492-1493, trans. Oliver Dunne and James E. Kelly, Jr. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), pp. 329, 133, 217. André Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, t. Il, f. 956 r, as cited in Lestringant, ‘Le nom des cannibales’, op. cit., p. 73. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb,

IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 29-30. Aristotle, Politics, I. ii. In Part 2 of Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance, op. cit., ‘The Colonization of Memory’, he discusses how ‘New World historians . . . were unable to accept that past events could have been recorded without necessarily having letters’ (p. 140). Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, pp. 42-3. ibid., p. 222. ibid. ibid., p. 225. ibid.

204

Notes and References

68 ibid., p. 47. 69 ibid., pp. 54-55. 70 ibid., p. 47. 71

Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 72. Also see

72

Dussel’s ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, op. cit., pp. 65-76. Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, op. cit., p. 33.

73

ibid.

74

David Lloyd, Anomalous States; Irish Writing and (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 127.

75

Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 132.

76

ibid., p. 246, note 14.

80

For a more extended discussion of this text, see my article ‘Irish and Spanish Cultural and Political Relations in the Work of O'Sullivan Beare’, in Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, op. cit., pp. 229-53. Compare Las Casas, ‘Chapter Fifty-Nine: Refutation of Sepulveda’s claim that AlexanderVI approved war against the Indians in his bull Inter Caetera’, in In Defense of the Indians, op. cit., and Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium, op. cit., Il.Liv: ‘The Letters of Pope Adrian are set down’. O'Sullivan Beare, Compendium, op. cit., ILILiii: ‘How Henry, King of England, having fallen into heresy .. . tried to attack the Catholic faith in Ireland’. Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma

the Post-Colonial

Moment

77 ibid., p. 132. 78 ibid., p. 133. 79 ibid., p. 41.

81

82 83

Briffault (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 33-34; Philip

O’Sullivan Beare, Ireland under Elizabeth, being chapters towards a history of Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth being a portion of the history of Catholic Ireland by Don Philip O’Sullivan Beare, trans. and ed. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903), p. 8.

84 85. 86 87

Keating, The History of Ireland, vol. 1, op cit., pp. 43-45. ibid, p. 37: Peter Walsh, A Prospect of the State of Ireland (London, 1682), p. 8. ibid., p. 10.

88

John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, trans. Matthew Kelly (Dublin, 1851-2), vol. 3,

89

xxvii, p. 75. Sir Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery, The Irish Colours Displayed, in a reply of an English Protestant to a late Letter of an Irish Roman Catholique. Both address‘d to . . .

90

As quoted in Breandan O Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: Na Stiobhartaigh agus an t-Aos

the Duke of Ormond (n.p., 1662).

Léinn, 1703-1788 (Baile Atha Cliath: An Cléchomhar, 1996), p. 197.

Towards a Postcolonial Enlightenment: The United Irishmen, Cultural Diversity and the Public Sphere 1

2

3

Cited as epigraph to Henry Louis Gates, Black Literature and Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1984). Paul Gilroy, ‘One Nation Under a Groove’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of a Black’s Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), p. 44. See also The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Unrealized, of course, not necessarily because of the shortcomings of their vision,

Notes and References

205

but because of the brutal suppression of the insurrection of 1798 — as one government official observed, the bloody reprisals perpetrated by government forces were designed to teach the rebels a lesson that they would not forget ‘until the year 2000’. It is perhaps salutary that history has at last caught up with this remark, even if the legacy of British rule in Ireland is still unresolved under the peace process. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776], Book 1, chapter 9 (London: Everyman’s Library, 1991), p. 147.

Charles R. Fay, Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 10. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759, 1790], ed. D.D. Raphael and

A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 223.

Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and PL. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 540-41. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, J.C. Bryce (ed.) (Oxford: Claren-

don Press, 1983), pp. 136-37. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, op. cit., p. 208. ibid., p. 205. ibid. Cited in Thomas Moore, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [1831] (Glasgow: R. and T. Washbourne, n.d.), p. 70. For a vivid recent account of Lord Edward’s exploits in America, see Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998).

See Hamilton Moore’s account of Lord Edward’s journey, in a letter to the Duke of Richmond, in Moore, Life and Death, op. cit., pp. 64-65. Thomas Jefferson to David Baillie Warden, December 29, 1813, Jefferson Papers

(Library of Congress), microfilm.

The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, ed. William H. Drummond [1840] (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), p. 291. John Stuart Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government’ (1861), cited in

Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 5.

Friedrich Engels,’Hungary and Panslavism’ (1849), cited in Ephraim Nimni, ‘Marx, Engels and the National Question’, in Kymlicka, op. cit., pp. 69-70. William Sampson, ‘Speech in Defence of the Journeyman Cordwainers of the City of New York’, in Beauties of the Shamrock, Containing Biography, Eloquence, Essays, and Poetry (Philadelphia, 1812), p. 123. ibid., pp. 123-4. ibid., p. 164. ibid., p. 165. ibid., p. 166. The Northern Star, 16-20 April, 1795, cited in Breandan O Buchalla, | mBeal Feirste Cois Cuain (Dublin: An Clochomhar Tta, 1968), p. 31.

Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial Memory 1

P. Ricoeur, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 5-18.

2

Jean-Pierre Bacot and Christian Coq (eds.), Travail de mémoire 1914-1998. Une necessité dans un siécle de violence, Collection Mémoires, no. 54 (Paris: Autrement, 1999).

206

Notes and References

Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, ‘Remembering, Repeating, Working through’ (1914)

S.E., 12, pp. 147-56; ‘Mourning

and

Melancholia’ (1915),

Papers

on

Metapsychology, S.E., 14, pp. 237-58, ed. and trans. J. Strachy (London: Hogarth, 1957). Hannah

Arendt,

The Human

Condition

(University

of Chicago

Press, 1998),

chapter 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Zohn (ed.), I/]uminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 245-55. Luke Gibbons, ‘Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity’, in Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 953-55. Joe Cleary, ‘“Misplaced Ideas”? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies’, in this volume, pp. 29-43.

David K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires:

A Comparative Survey, from the Eigh-

teenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).

Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 145-49; Gyan Prakesh (ed.), After Colo-

nialism: Imperial Histories and Post-Colonial Displacements (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Samuel Beckett, First Love (London: Calder, 1973), pp. 30-31. Sean O’Faolain, An Irish Journey (London: Longmans, Green 1940), pp. 93-94. Sean O’Faolain, The Irish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 162.

Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: McGill and Sons, 1924).

Thomas B. Macaulay, Prose and Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 729; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1956), p. 181. Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996), p. 3.

Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92); Realms of Memory, vol. 1, ‘Conflicts and Divisions’, trans. A.Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux

de Mémoire’, Representations, vol. 26 (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-25. ibid., pp. 7-25. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso,

1998). William Butler Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to My Work’, in Selected Criticism, ed.

A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 265.

Seamus Deane, ‘Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland’, in this volume, pp. 109-21. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994), p. 193. Charles Juliet, ‘Meeting Beckett’, Triquarterly, vol. 77 (1989-90), p. 10.

D. Lloyd, ‘Violence and the Constitution of the Novel’, in his Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 125-62; J. Kenny, ‘No Such Scene: Tradition and the Contemporary Irish Novel’, in PJ. Mathews (ed.), New Voices in Contemporary Irish Criticism (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 45-52.

25 26

J. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 48. ibid., p. 1. Hélene Cixous, ‘My Algériance, in Other Words to Depart not to Arrive from

Notes and References

207

Algeria’, in her Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1999); Louise Erdrich, ‘Two Languages in Mind but Just One in the Heart’, New York Times, 22 May 2000. Joyce, Portrait, op. cit., p. 220. James Joyce, ‘After the Race’, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 42. Joyce, Portrait, op. cit., p. 181.

Seamus Deane, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 21-36. Joyce, Portrait, op. cit., p. 184.

ibid. ibid., p. 189. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to My Work’, oOprcit, pol,

Joyce, Portrait, op. cit., p. 181. James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, Dubliners (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 223. Joyce, ‘After the Race’, op. cit., p. 30. James Flannery, Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (Nashville, TN: J.S. Sanders, 1997), p. 156. J. Chuto, R. Holzapfel and E. Mangan (eds.), The Collected Works ofJames Clarence Mangan: Poems 1845-1847 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 157.

George 158-59. ibid., p. ibid., p. ibid., p.

Moore, A Drama in Muslin (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986), pp.

171. 203. 98.

James Joyce, Poems and Exiles, ed.J. Mays (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 45.

Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’, in W. Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 98-99. Eavan Boland, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (London: W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 50. Eavan Boland, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic Press LIP Pamphlet, 1989).

Jeff Kelly, ‘Alannah O’Kelly and Frances Hegarty: Lamentations at Post-Colonial Wake’, in Deoraiocht: displacement: Frances Hegarty and Alannah O'Kelly, March 20-May 4, 1917, San Francisco Art Institute Walter/McBean Gallery (San Francisco: The Institute, 1997), pp. 1-12; Jeff Kelly, ‘Re-member, Re-member: Alannah

O'Kelly’, Artforum, vol. 31 (May 1993), pp. 93-94. Interview with Alannah O'Kelly, Irish Times, 5 November 1996. Nuala Ni Dhémhnaill, ‘Na Murtcha a Thriomaigh’, section 3 in Cead Aighnis (An Daingean: An Sagart, 1998), pp. 103-51. Nuala Ni Dhémhnaill, An t-Anam Mothala, video for RTE by Ocean Productions, 1995. Nuala Ni Dhémhnaill, ‘A Ghostly Alhambra’, in T. Hayden (ed.), Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997), pp. 68-69. A. El Sabio, Las Cantigas de Loor, ed. M. Cunningham (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000). These are a subset of the 400 Galician songs in the Cantigas de Santa Maria commissioned by Alfonso the Wise, who reigned from 1252 to 1284. Ni Dhémhnaill, Cead Aighnis, op. cit., pp. 64-5.

Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 24-25.

Ricoeur, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, op. cit., p. 18.

208

Notes and References

Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland 1

See Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), vol. 2, ‘The Famine

and Young Ireland’, pp. 115-208;

Mitchel’s most influential writings on the Famine are The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Dublin: The Irishman Office, 1861); The History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time, 2nd ed. (Glasgow, London, Dublin: James Duffy, 1869). 2 See, for instance, Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 47-51. 3. On Ireland and Algeria, see Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

4

University Press, 1993), pp. 121-48, 303-49. King of the Beggars (London and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1938); The Great O’Neill (London and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1942). His simple and stan-

5

6

7

8

9

10

dard contrast between pragmatism and abstract idealism also governs his earlier biography, The Life Story of Eamon de Valera (Dublin and Cork: Talbot Press, 1933). Cited in R.D. Grillo, Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 86. ‘The Dominance of the English Language in the Nineteenth Century’, in Diarmaid O Muirithe (ed.), The English Language in Ireland (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1977), pp. 70-87, p. 83. ibid., p. 84. See also Sean de Freine’s The Great Silence (Cork: Mercier Press, 1969).

See for much valuable information and for key historical examples, Tony Crowley, The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1999); and his forthcoming The Politics of Language in Ireland 1534-1998. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), Introduction, p. xix. ibid., p. 160. See John Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, ‘The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis’, Modern Philology (February 1977), pp. 289-304; see also Meg Armstrong, ‘The Effects of Blackness: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism,

vol. 54, no. 3 (Summer 1996), pp. 213-36. Armstrong identifies the connections between privation and excess and the achievement of mastery. ‘The sublime is not simply a moment of terror and privation on the way to a recovery of self-possession and mastery (or recognition of oneself within a transcendent symbolic order); rather, the sublime exceeds this drama of identification and marks the sheer

11

12 13

14

ecstasy of the image of foreign bodies’ (p. 214). Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 49. On some of the most prominent discussions of psychoanalysis and colonialism, especially those of Fanon and Bhabha, see Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 152-56. John Forrester, Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 23. See Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916), pp. 8-9. Sigerson, in turn, had dedicated his anthology to Douglas Hyde. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: Printed for A. Millar in

the Strand; Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn and J. Woodyer, 1762), p. 154. Hurd is speaking here of what the Revolution of 1688 gave — ‘good sense’—and what it lost —‘fine fabling’. He is also speaking specifically of Scotland.

Notes and References 15

209

See Beckett’s remark, ‘If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable.’ Cited in J.C.C. Mays (ed.), ‘Samuel Beckett’ (p. 233) in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 233-313.

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism 1 2 3

It is a measure of the British Empire’s confidence that in the 1930s British instructors often gave this text to Indian officer-cadets at the Indian Military Academy as a topic for essays and discussions. Humphrey Evans, Thimayya of India: A Soldier's Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), p. 134. See Prisoner of the British: A Japanese Soldier’s Experiences in Burma (London: Cresset Press, 1962).

4

For more on this I would refer the reader to that remarkable collection of essays by Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993).

Irish Orientalism: An Overview 1

James Clarence Mangan, “To the Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Bool

2

Djenkinzun’ (1846), in The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems: 1845-1847, vol. 3 of 4 vols, Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Patrick eds./Holzapfel and Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 159. W.B.Yeats, Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), in The Vario-

rum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds./ (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 854.

3

While no scholarship has studied Orientalism as a decolonizing strategy for Revivalists, a few recent literary and cultural studies have examined Asian influences

on Irish literature, and a number

of other studies have examined

the

conceptions of Irish identity and nationhood. Several scholarly studies have explored Moore’s, Yeats’s, and Stephens’s interests in Asian forms and cultures (for example, Terence Brown’s essay, “Thomas Moore: A Reputation’, in his Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (Iotowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988); Javed Majeed,

Ungoverned Imaginings; James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Okifumi Komesu, The Double Perspective of Yeats’s Aesthetic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984); Masaru Sekine and Christopher

Murray (eds.), Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990); Sylvia Ellis, ‘Japan, Japonisme and Japonaiserie’, in The Plays of W.B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer, 1995; John Rickard, ‘Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East’, in Susan Shaw Sailer (ed.), Representing Ireland: Gender,

Class, Nationality (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); Mair Pitt, The Maha-Yogi and the Mask; A Study of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats (University of Salzburg Press, 1997); Hilary Pyle, James Stephens; His Work and an Account of His Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965). Other studies have discussed the Western sources and socio-political influences for the imagining of Ireland’s national identity, for example, Norman Vance, Irish Literature, A Social History: Tradition, Identity and Difference (Cambridge: B. Blackwell, 1990); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, (Cork University Press, 1996); Seamus Deane Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Ireland's Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork University

210

Notes and References Press, 2001); Mary Massoud (ed.), Literary Inter-Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996); and Joseph McMinn (ed.), The Interna-

tionalism of Irish Literature and Drama (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992). Furthermore, numerous literary and cultural studies have been done on the role of Orientalism in Europe (mostly France and England) and America, and Joep Leerssen has published a relevant essay on ‘Irish Studies and Orientalism: Ireland and the Orient’, in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen (eds.), Oriental Prospects: Western

Literature and the Lure of the East (Amsterdam: Rudolphi, 1998). But no comprehensive study has examined the role of Orientalism in the formation of national myths of Irishness. In particular, Aubery de Vere’s Antar and Zara (1877), James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Literae Orientales’ (1847), Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), Edmund Pery’s Letters from an Armenian in Ireland (1757), Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’, collected as The Citizen of the World (1764), and Frances Sheridan’s ‘Eastern Tale’,

The History of Nourjahad (1767). Celticists John Home and Hugh Blair) confirmed the validity of MacPherson’s ‘translations’ which later turned out to be concocted (Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760, Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, 1762, Temora, 1763).

In Progress in Medieval Irish Studies (Maynooth: Saint Patrick’s College, 1996), Kim

McCone reports: ‘If the ancient Celts had a myth expressing their common ethnic identity similar to the one ascribed to their Germanic neighbours by Tacitus (Germania 2), this has disappeared without trace and the earliest origin tales of Celtic peoples that have come to us emanate from medieval Welsh and Irish pens imbued with clerical learning. The oldest extant versions of these are in Nennius’ ninth-century A.D. Latin Historia Brittonum . .. [which] must be based upon an early version of the Gabdla Erenn or “Takings of Ireland”. It describes successive invasions leading up to that of the sons of Mil Espaine from Spain, a destination ultimately reached in the aftermath of the expulsion from Egypt of an ancestral Scythian nobleman married to Pharoah’s daughter Scotta shortly after the Israelites had fled across the Red Sea’ (p. 7). McCone continues to explain how biblical stories, in particular the Tower of Babel myth, along with the dubious work of Isidore of Seville, provided medieval Welsh and Irish scholars with sources for the Celtic origin myths (pp. 7-9). Various scholars exposed misreadings of ancient texts on the Celts soon after the ideas were circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (for example, Thomas Wood's Royal Irish Academy pamphlet, ‘On the Mixture of Fable and Fact in the Early Annals of Ireland, and on the Best Mode of Ascertaining

what Degree of Credit these Ancient Documents are Justly Entitled To’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 13 (Dublin, 1818). Sir William Jones, a.k.a. ‘Oriental Jones’, comments on Vallancey’s use of this term in a letter to the 2nd Earl Spencer, in a section dated 10 September 1787, ‘Vallancey begins with stating a fact (which is the only curious part of the book) that the Irish have histories of their country, from the first population of it, in their own language; one of which histories he is translating. Then he insists with great warmth, that those histories could not be invented by modern priests: perhaps not; but what is his reason? Because those priests did not understand Persian, (which he calls Southern Scythian) and the ancient Irish were Persians’ (The Letters of Sir William Jones (ed.) Garland Cannon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 769). Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary

Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork University Press, 1996), p. 72. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford traces the motif of Irish Carthaginians and Irish Scythians in her article ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial

Notes and References

211

metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness’, Publication of the Modern Language Association, vol. 8 (March 1996), pp. 222-39 (revised as a chapter in her Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture, op. cit., pp.

10 ii)

99-131). Cullingford notes that ‘The Rome-Carthage motif operates in complex and variable ways: as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality’ (p. 222). She discusses the imaginative resistance fostered by the link between Ireland and Carthage as far back as the eighteenth century, crediting it with what she calls the development of an ‘oppositional identity for the colonized Irish’. She argues that such a metaphor focused Irish imaginative resistance for the colonized Irish. I agree with Cullingford’s conclusions, but her argument only examines a piece of the discourse of Irish Orientalism. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, op. cit., p. 73.

ibid, p. 71.

Charles Vallancey, An Essay Towards Illustrating the Ancient History of the Britannic Isles; Containing an Explanation of the Names Belgae, Scythae, Celtae, Brittani, Albanich, Etrinnich, Caledonii, Siluri, &c. &c. Intended as a Preface to a Work Entitled,

13 14

AS

16

A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland. By C.V. (Dublin: James Fletcher, 1802), p. 13. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, op. cit., pp. 71-72. After years of rumblings about Petrie’s findings about the origins of the round towers, and after winning a gold medal from the Royal Irish Academy for his research, his study (or at least the first section) was finally published in 1845 as The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, Anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion, Comprising an Essay on the Origin and Use of the Round Towers of Ireland. For a discussion on the various efforts to include Irish in the Indo-European chart, see Kim McCone’s chapter, ‘Prehistoric, Old and Middle Irish’, in Progress in

Medieval Irish Studies, op. cit., pp. 7-53. W. Smith, Historical Explanations of Emblematic Cards; For the Use of Young Persons (Dublin: Marchbank, 1801), p. 57.

L,

18

19 20

The narrator adds to the speculative origins of the Magogian-Scythian-Phoenician-Philistine-Carthaginian-Milesian Celt in the following passage: ‘But when the Sov‘reign Ruler of the sky / Cast on his people a propitious eye, / Brought them from Egypt; and by Joshua’s hand, / Gave them possession of the promis’d land; / The old Philistines, who dwelt there before, / Were forced to migrate to a foreign shore; / With martial force, these landed on your coast, / And, to this day, the name Milesian boast’ (pp. 4-5). One implication of this argument is that the taking of Irish land has historical precedence and theological justification. In a letter dated 17 December 1814 to ‘Messrs. Longman & Company’, Moore proposes the terms of Lalla Rookh: ‘I have taken our conversation of yesterday into consideration, and the following are the terms which I propose: “Upon my giving into your hands a poem of the length of Rokeby, I am to receive from you the sum of 3000f [sic]”’ (Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], p. 406). Quoted in Brown, ‘Thomas Moore: A Reputation’, op. cit., p. 22.

In Howard Mumford Jones’s biography of Moore, The Harp that Once (New York: H. Holt, 1937), he writes of Lalla Rookh’s publication and the Orientalist atmosphere surrounding it in England: ‘The book had appeared at exactly the right time. A score of travel books had whetted the appetite of readers for the glamorous East. Napoleon’s exploits in Egypt and Wellesley’s in India had increased the vogue of Orientalism, as had the tales of nabobs returning from the Orient with liver complaint and riches mysteriously acquired. There were Turkish ornaments above

242

Notes and References

the ionic columns at Carlton House, Mameluke saddles and an effigy of Tippoo Sahib in the armory, and Chinese dresses and a palanquin in another chamber;

zal

there was an Egyptian Hall at the Mansion House; the Rosetta Stone puzzled gaping visitors in the British Museum; and under the innumerable minarets of the Pavilion at Brighton, Chinese mandarins stared at green and pink marble panels on the walls. The fashionable world had yawned over Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama, but The Giaour and The Bride ofAbydos restored passion to the East. James Mill began his History of British India the year of Lalla Rookh, and Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, which became The Revolt of Islam, was completed in September. What matter if to the general imagination India and Egypt, the Turks and the Parsees, the Bosphorus and the Vale of Cashmere were indistinguishable parts of a vague, rich universe of color and dream? “Stick to the East”— it was the only poetical policy. Lalla Rookh was the culminating point in poetical Orientalism’ (pp. 170-71). David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 115.

22 23

ibid.

Translation theory often explores the idea that the translator, in many ways, must create a new text, in a sense, betraying the original text. I use the word ‘traitorous’ to point to this sense of the betrayal of translation. 24 ibid., p. 123. 25 There is not enough space here to explore the history of the concept of the Oriental origins of European cultures. But, notably, in 1788 Sir William Jones (who was familiar with Vallancey’s work) advanced an argument that supplanted Hebrew with Sanskrit as the originary language of European languages. See Bill Ashcroft’s and Pal Ahluwalia’s Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 58, for a brief summary of the significance of this concept for the discipline of Orientalism. 26 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, op. cit., pp. 123-24. Dayf Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, ‘The Challenge of Orientalism, Economy and Society, vol. 14 (1985), pp. 174-92, p. 180. There are many more interesting critiques and commentaries of Said’s Orientalism, including his own, ‘Orientalism Recon-

sidered’ in Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on Sociology of Literature, July 1984, vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), pp. 14-27, and his Afterword in the 1994 edition of Orientalism, as well as many bland and specious ones, for example, Keith Windschuttle, ‘Edward Said’s “Orientalism”

Revisited’ (The New Criterion, vol. 17, no. 5 (January 1999), pp. 30-38). I will not devote space in this essay to critique Said’s argument, except to note that the place of Irish Orientalism differs radically from the Anglo-French Orientalism that Said primarily explores. As Julia Kushigian notes in Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), we should not expect all Orientalisms to ‘do no more than “elaborate” on the” major steps” of the Anglo-French position’ (p. 2). should also note, however, that Aijaz Ahmad (In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London and New York: Verso, 1992), Dennis Porter (‘Orientalism and Its Problems’, in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, (Francis Barker (ed.), Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983), and others make worthy critiques of Said’s use of Foucauldian terminology and concepts. But Ashcroft and Ahluwalia’s (Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, op. cit.) explication of Said’s humanistic critique of Orientalism convincingly argues that Said intentionally alters Foucault's conception of ‘discourse’ to include a sense of agency. Their argument critiques Said’s work according to his own concept of ‘wordlines’.

Notes and References

213

Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, trans. William G.

Hutchinson (London: W. Scott, 1896).

Matthew Amold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in R. H. Super (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: English Literature and Irish Politics, (11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), vol. 2. ibid., p. 343. Quoted in Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, op. cit., p. 143. John Pentland Mahaffy, Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical Conditions (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), p. 243. ibid., pp. 8-9. The 1879 poster calls for an April 20th ‘Great Tenant Right Meeting in Irishtown’. I thank Kevin O'Neill for bringing this poster to my attention. Gauri Viswanathan has written recently about James Cousins in her work Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998). She explores Cousins’s work with Annie Besant and the Theosophical Society: ‘In Cousins’s view the interweaving of Irish and Indian cultures gave racial continuity to their common struggle against British colonialism because Cousins interpreted history through a mystical, theosophical lens, which reinforced some of the ideals of British imperialism, or what would become the British Commonwealth’

36

(p.

207). She also argues forcefully that theosophy enabled the idea of the British Commonwealth to succeed in India. I borrow this term from philosophy (cf. W.V. Quine’s Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960)) where it refers to ‘the status of being somehow accessible to at least two (usually all, in principle) minds or“subjectivities”. It thus implies that there is some sort of communication between those minds; which in turn implies that

each communicating mind is aware not only of the existence of the other but also of its intention to convey information to the other. The idea, for theorists, is that

if subjective processes can be brought into agreement, then perhaps that is as good as the (unattainable?) status of being objective’ (Jan Narveson, ‘Intersub-

if 38 oh)

jective’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)). In the context of this study, I am implying intersubjective communication between colonized individuals differs, however, from the type of communication that occurs between colonizer and colonized because it is two-way and reciprocal. See Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), particularly the ‘Lordship and Bondage’ chapter. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). For example, we can see such identification as early as the late eighteenth century in Dean Mahomed’s autobiographical account of his years in Ireland in his Travels (1794), which subverted the Orientalist accounts of the Orient. See Michael Fisher,

The First Indian Author in English; Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) in India, Ireland, and England (Oxford University Press, 1996). Also, see Charles Stuart, The Travels of

40

Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, (2 vols, London: Longman, 1810), for an account of one of the first Indian visitors to Ireland who concluded that ‘The poverty of peasants or common people in [Ireland] is such that the peasants of India are rich when compared to them’ (p. 47). am indebted to C.A. Bayly for this citation. For more on this, see his ‘freland, India and the Empire: 1780-1914’, which appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (sixth series, vol. 10, 2000), pp. 388-98. For more on this, see my essay ‘James Stephens’s Diminuitive National Narratives’, Comparatist (Spring 1996), pp. 62-81.

214 41

Notes and References

See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989); Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Lloyd, Anomalous States, op. cit., Said, Culture and Imperialism, op. cit.; Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, op. cit.; and Gerry Smyth, Decolo-

42

nization and Criticism:The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press, 1998). In Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage, 1979; rev. ed., 1995), Edward Said writes: ‘The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism

are more or less constant’ (p. 206).

43

James Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950), p.

PS

44 45

46 47

For a non-literary example in Irish culture, Oriental delftware came to Ireland via England, but the centre of production eventually shifted to Ireland. lam using parody in the broad sense that Linda Hutcheon defines it in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985): repetition with difference. Said, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 20.

Letters from an Armenian has been attributed to Robert Hellen, a judge of Common Pleas in Ireland as well as Edmund Pery (see Hamilton Jewett Smith, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926) for a

discussion on ‘pseudo-Oriental letters’). Written on the copy in the British Museum is ‘by Judge H-I-n’ and the catalogue has [By R. Hellen?]. Halknett and Laing (Dictionary of Anonymous Literature, vol. 2, 1883), however, attribute the Letters to Viscount Pery. Also, leading eighteenth-century scholars (such as Kevin Whelan) have expressed the belief that Pery was the author. I will refer to Pery, therefore, as the author.

48 49

50

Said, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 20. See Mary Helen Thuente’s lucid essay, ‘William Sampson, United Irish Satirist and Songwriter’, Eighteenth-Century Life; Ireland, 1798-1998: From Revolution to Revisionism and Beyond, vol. 22, n.s., 3 (November 1998), pp. 19-30. Interestingly, Croker was parodying the longstanding public interest in Lord MacCartney’s embassy to China, which resulted in numerous pamphlets from the Chinese Emperor to George III, themselves based on the mistranslation of an actual letter, for example, the anonymous pamphlet, The Imperial Epistle from Kien Long, Emperor of China, to George the Third, King of Great Britain, &c. &c. &c. in the Year 1794 (Dublin: J. Milliken, 1799). Also, much was made over the fact that

52 54

Do

MacCartney was Irish. Edmund Perry, Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to his Friends at Trebisand, &c. Translated in the Year 1756 (London, 1757), p. 78. ibid., p. 83. ibid., pp. 83-85. Letter xix. Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran would probably disagree. Their Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) works over this tradition (but misses Pery’s text), attempting to establish it as the primary narrative of Irish culture. Said, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 168.

Notes and References 56

yi)

215

Oriental pilgrimages were similar to English travel writers going to Killarney and elsewhere in western Ireland in the nineteenth century, a primary difference being that in Ireland they were not seeking to recover a lost culture. The author perhaps conflated the Persian ambassador to England, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, who did not visit Ireland but was well known in England, thanks to James Morier’s works and the British press, with Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who was

58

one of the first Indians to visit Ireland (see note 39). One example is especially worth relaying: ‘Mirza Abul Hassan Khan is extensively versed in Oriental literature; he can not only read the Arabian Nights Entertainments in their original language, but also the Tooloonamia, or Numia, or the Tales of the Parrot. He is a great admirer of Hafiz, the last and best of the Persian poets, whose sonnets can be compared to nothing but the effusions of our countryman, Moore. On hearing some of the productions of the Irish poet, which were read to him at Bilton’s Hotel, he immediately observed the similarity’ (The History of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, the Persian Ambassador, with Some Account of the Fair Cirassian

by ‘An Irish Officer in the Service of Persia’ (Dublin: Thomas Christopher Clifford, 1819), p. 18). Bo

Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (Buffalo, NY: Derby, 1850), p. x. Jones, The Harp that Once, op. cit., p. 181.

61

Quoted in Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 113. The quote is taken from the Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London and Edinburgh: William Nimmo, 1875), p. 90.

Leask adeptly contextualizes Moore’s oriental tale within British Romanticism and Whig Orientalism (cf. Sir William Jones) but also notes, ‘The political message of Moore’s oriental revolution seems to be most fully intelligible in his native Irish context .. . The poem reworks the love story . . .[of] Byron’s Bride of Abydos in a context allegorical of the predicament of Irish nationalists under the yoke of British domination’ (p. 113). Leask continues his valuable commentary: ‘Moore — a

Whig “orientalist” of the school of Jones rather than a reformer of the school of Mill or Shelley — is sympathetic to the claims of a romantic, organic nationalism which, he implies, must free itself from the imposture of Jacobin cosmopolitanism and French atheism . . [T]he sort of nationalism idealized by Moore in The Fire-

worshipper [advocates] a national independence founded on Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union. At the same time he seeks to “enlighten” his address by recommending “Liberty, benevolence, peace and toleration” to the superstitious but oppressed Irish.’ Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 142. ibid., p. 146. Gibbons is discussing James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in this section and borrows the term ‘double-struggle’ from Joyce. Brown, ‘Thomas Moore: A Reputation’, op. cit., p. 22. A ‘Peri’ is the Islamic equivalent of an angel in Christianity. Moore, Lalla Rookh, op. cit., pp. 117-18. ibid., p. 118. Access to representation is crucial in a colonial relationship, Joep Leerssen, echoing Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Leerssen notes in his essay ‘Irish Studies and Orientalism: Ireland and the Orient’, in Barfoot and D’haen (eds.), Oriental Prospects, op. cit., ‘In a colonial relationship, there are those who represent, and those who are represented; the former wield discourse, the

latter do not’ (p. 173). 69

See Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, op. cit., particularly the interview by the same

title. While Spivak is discussing the role of the postcolonial critic, the idea of

216

Notes and References

working within a system one is ‘obliged to inhabit’ is relevant to the Irish situation (p. 72). Gerry Smyth also makes of these ideas of collusive resistance in an Irish context in his Decolonisation and Criticism, op. cit. 70 71 72. 73 74

75 76 Th

78

WS,

Leerssen, ‘Irish Studies and Orientalism’, op. cit., p. 173. Said, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 228.

Frederick Ryan, ‘The Persian Struggle’, The Irish Review, vol. 1, no. 6 (1911), p. 286. J. Chartres Molony, The Riddle of the Irish (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1970), p. 158. Mansoor had earlier published his MA thesis as an article in Hermathena, ‘Oriental Studies in Ireland, from the Times of St. Patrick to the Rise of Islam’, no. 62

(1943), pp. 40-60. M. Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1944), p. 13. ibid.,

p. 5.

Yeats axa other Revivalists were also fascinated by the fashionable modernist works of French symbolists, who were also interested in ‘Asiatic’ cultures. Like Pound and his ‘ideograms’ many modern artists grossly misunderstood their ‘material’. Yeats was no exception: for his Celtic Noh dramas, he believed he had found an authentically trained Japanese Noh dancer in Michio Ito, a modern dancer trained in Paris; the irony is significant. It is important to note, however, that in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (Essays and Introductions, New York: Macmillan, 1961, p. 175) Yeats is not merely making Celtic-Oriental comparisons, rather he is arguing for recognition of the ‘Celtic element’ in world literature and the importance of national epics for nations, Finnish and ‘Mahomedan’ as well as Irish. Homi Bhabha uses this term in his essay, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Homi K. Bhaba (ed.), Nation and Narration

(London: Routledge, 1990). Bhabha’s use of the term ‘national narrative’ signifies a narrative in the broadest cultural sense, that is, a narrative which permeates a

80

culture, embodying its identity and hegemony. AE adopts this term in his nationalist exploration of Irish identity, The National Being [1916] (New York: Macmillan, 1930). He differentiated the terms: national ideal, national soul, the body or State of the nation, and the national being. On the

last of these he wrote: ‘In the highest civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters into it, and it becomes an oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-citizens,

81 82 83

84

85 86

so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for unity and magnificence of effect’ (pp. 11-13). ‘Brien O’Brien’ is Book III in The Demi-Gods (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 143-223. Pyle, James Stephens, op. cit., p. 128.

Yeats’s Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924) in The Variorum

Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, op. cit., p. 854. The Preface to The Cat and the Moon continues, ‘It cannot be because of the books we have read, for we have all read such different books . . . That is the kind of insoluble problem that makes the best conversation, and if you will come and visit me, I will call the Dublin poets together, and we will discuss it until midnight’ (p. 854). William Butler Yeats, An Indian Monk (London: Macmillan, 1932), p. 8.

In Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), the chronicle of Yeats’s and Pound’s friendship, James Longenbach calls them ‘[Tagore’s] two most devoted readers . . . they put together what Pound would later call “the cleverest boom of our day” in order to promote his work’ (p. 23).

Notes and References

217

87 In Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study, 1990, Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray discuss the context from which Yeats drew. 88 Rabindranath, Tagore [sic], Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali; with an Introduction by W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. xii. 89 Roy F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life: I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 472.

90 In ‘Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East’, op. cit., John Rickard has detailed much ofYeats’s personal relationship with Swami. He also explores what he calls Yeats’s ‘“Indo-Irishness” — his conjunction of Irish and Indian ethnicity and culture — in order to demonstrate some of the ways that “India” functioned as a construct for Yeats in larger historical and ideological struggles’ (p. 97). 91 William Butler Yeats, ‘Commentary on Supernatural Songs’, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, op. cit., p. 837. 92 Discussing Yeats and the ‘Vedic poets’, Tagore writes in his essay, ‘Poet Yeats’, ‘For

all those who look candidly, see similarly’, Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, eds. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 217. 93 For many other personal and artistic similarities between Yeats and Tagore, see Mair Pitt, The Maya-Yogi and the Mask: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats (Salzburg University Press, 1997). 94 Tagore’s family were wealthy zamindars or landowners, and although they counted themselves members of the Brahmo Samaj, they still wore their Brahmin thread. See Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The MyriadMinded Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), for more discussion on this.

95 Tagore even performed the role of the ‘Fakir’ in his play, The Post Office, just as Yeats occasionally took to the stage in the Abbey. 96 Tagore, Gitanjali, op. cit., p. xii. Some of this section is repeated in another essay of mine, included in ‘Writing Across Empire: Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats’, in Rabindranath Tagore: University and Tradition (Patrick Hogan and Lalita Pandit (eds.), forthcoming, AUP 2003).

97 Vaishnavism concerns the worship of Vishnu, particularly during Vishnu’s incarnation as Krishna and Krishna’s passionate and physical love for Radha, especially as described in the Gita Govinda. As Dutta and Robinson note in their biography Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., the blend of ‘physical passion, sensuous imagery and verbal music’, characteristic of the best Vaishnava poetry, can be seen in Gitanjali (p. 41). They further note: ‘There can be no doubt that Vaishnavism was a wellspring of the imagery in Gitanjali that would overwhelm W.B. Yeats in 1912.’ 98 For more on this see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and ‘The Mystic East’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1999). 99 Quoted in Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, op. cit., p. 483.

100 ibid., p. 428. 101 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., pp. 164-65. 102 Quoted in Longenbach, Stone Cottage, op. cit., p. 25. Postcolonial critics may place much ofYeats’s cultural nationalism in the category or mode of ‘liberal decolonisation’ (cf. Gerry Smyth’s Decolonisation and Criticism, op. cit.). Smyth writes: ‘Yeats’s attempt to discover/construct a valid culture to equal metropolitan culture and thus form the basis for an equal political relationship [a hallmark of liberal decolonisation] was disabled at its conceptual moment, because the drive to assert equality in fact reinforced the structure of inequality’ (p. 75). This disablement, however, did not prevent Yeats’s ideas and writings from being widely influential in Irish cultural nationalist circles.

218

Notes and References

103 Quoted in Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, op. cit., p. 471. 104 Gerry Smyth also summarizes the ‘logic of supplementarity through which English colonialist discourse functioned’ in Ireland in Decolonisation and Criticism.

105 ibid., p. 483. 106 Quoted in ibid. In his essay ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, Edward Said discusses

Yeats’s rivalling allegiances and one of his techniques for resolving sectarian and political tensions: ‘For Yeats the overlappings he knew existed between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural heritage that both dominated and empowered him as a writer were bound to cause an overheated tension, and it is the pressure of this urgently political and secular tension that one may speculate caused him to try to resolve it on a“ higher”, that is, nonpolitical level. Thus the deeply eccentric and aestheticized histories he produced . . . are elevations of the tension to an extraworldly Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

level’ (‘Yeats and Decolonization’, (Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 80. 107 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., p. 210.

108 ibid., p. 218. 109 ibid., p. 219.

110 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., p. 225.

111 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., p. 216. 112 Tagore, Gitanjali, op. cit., pp. xvi-xvii. 113 James Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh, 1920), pp. 18-19. Cousins, who had moved to India with his wife Margaret early in the century, often wrote about the similarities between Irish cultural nationalism and Indian cultural nationalism, having participated in cultural revivals in both countries. Much of their lives is recorded in their autobiography, We Two Together (1950). 114 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., p. 225. 115 In As I was Going Down Sackville Street [1937] (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1994)

Gogarty writes: ‘We are suffering from a nightmare culture of imaginary Gaels’ (p. 200). The book also abounds with references to India and China; when two characters discuss how to represent Dublin, one concludes: ‘The only way to treat

this town is the way the Chineses [sic] treat their pictures; eschew perspective’ (p. 58). Later, just after commenting on a queue outside the cinema house — ‘Dubliners willing to buy a dream that will let them escape for an hour from their surroundings’ — the narrator meets Tim Healy, the ‘First Governor-General of the Irish Free State’, and they briefly discuss the book of another governor: ‘a translation of the Chinese of Po-Chu-I when he was Governor-General of Chung-Chouw’ (pp. 92-93), from whom the Irish governor gains inspiration. In Samuel Beckett’s Murphy [1938] (New York: Grove Press, 1959), Miss Counihan,

an Irish exile in London, becomes entranced by an ‘Oriental’ atmosphere in a hotel, just as she and other characters become entranced by a ‘Celtic’ atmosphere thinking of Murphy’s death: ‘Here she cowered, as happy as the night was short, in the midst of Indians, Egyptians, Cyprians, Japanese, Chinese, Siamese and clergymen. Little by little she sucked up to a Hindu polyhistor of dubious caste. He had been writing for many years, still was and trusted he would be granted Prana to finish, a monograph provisionally entitled: The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Kanpendonck’ (pp. 195-96). 116 Indeed, related motifs appear as recently as in the titles of Paul Durcan’s poetry (‘(O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor’) and Colum McCann’s 1998 magical realist story, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, in Bill Henderson (ed.), Best of the Small Presses: The Pushcart Prize 1999 (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1999), in which a Korean soldier finds the ‘place of his youth’ in Ireland (p. 31). Also see Cullingford’s

Notes and References

219

Publications of the Modern Language Association essay on Carthaginian themes in contemporary Irish literature (see note 7). 117 Ryan, ‘The Persian Struggle’, op. cit., p. 286.

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization: James Cousins, the ‘Irish Poet from India’ 1 2

See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917).

‘A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore’, The Crisis, vol. 36, no. 10 (1929).

3

Cousins’s most sustained work on this subject is War: A Theosophical View (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1914). James Cousins, Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies (Madras: Ganesh, 1921), p. 202.

See Tagore’s Nationalism, op.cit., for the poet’s most sustained and impassioned argument against nationalism. James Cousins, Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology (Madras: Ganesh, 1925), p. 61.

Alan Denson, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins: A Bio-Biographical Survey (Kendal: Alan Denson, 1967), p. 14. Benet’s article appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, vol. 8 (4 June 1932), p. 772.

In his 1912 broadside’Gas from a Burner’, Joyce wrote: ‘I printed the table-book of Cousins / Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse / “Twould give you a heartburn in your arse.’ The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 349. John Wilson Foster, ‘The Interpreters: A Handbook to AE and the Irish Revival’, Ariel, vol. 11, no. 3 July 1980), p. 69. Quoted in D.C. Chatterjee, James Henry

10

Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West (Delhi: Sterling, 1985), p. 17. Among the most significant works in Irish Studies that have appeared in recent years are: David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), and Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland:The Litera-

ture of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). All fine critical studies, but none of them

makes any mention of James Cousins. ‘lg Denson, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins, op. cit., p. 14. ibid., p. 16. 13 There were precedents for British apprehensions: Charles Johnston (1867-1931) was a key figure in the Dublin Theosophical Society who came to India as a member of the Indian Civil Service. But he was forced to leave India because of his suspected political sympathies for Indian nationalists. As D.C. Chatterjee notes in James Henry Cousins, op. cit., the Dublin Theosophical Lodge was a primary 14 15

16

channel of Indo-Irish interaction (p. 153). James H. Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950).

Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 613; quoted in Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), , 156. Themost hard-biting of these articles included ‘Patriot Bards and Ballad Makers: A Page from the History of Freedom by an Irish Home Ruler’, New India, 11

220

Notes and References January,

1916, and New

India, 15 January

1916; ‘The

Irish Impasse

and

Its

Lessons’, New India, 29 January 1916; ‘Nationality and Art’, New India, 8 April 1916; ‘The Irish Leaders’, New India, 4 May 1916; ‘The Irish Revolt’, New India, 10

May 1916. James H. Cousins, Collected Poems, 1894-1940 (Madras: Kalakshetra, 1940).

James Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh, 1917), p. 14. Cousins and Cousins, We Two Together, op. cit., p. 217. ibid., p. 218. See Catherine Nash, ‘Geo-centric Education and Anti-imperialism: Theosophy,

Geography, and Citizenship in the Writings of J.H. Cousins’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 22, no. 4 (1996), pp. 399-411, for an illuminating discussion of Cousins’s involvement in geographical education. As Nash points out (p. 400), Cousins’s interest in geography was driven in part by a need to find a common meeting point between local pride and global unity. He saw the study of geography as an excellent way of teaching students to resist Eurocentric values, while avoiding xenophobic nationalism through a discipline that encouraged an imaginative rather than separatist identification with places. Cousins and Cousins, We Two Together, op. cit., p. 49. ibid. ibid., p. 75. ibid. ibid. ibid., p. 216. The role of one country as the site for the working out of problems presented in another underlies the sentiment of interparty head John Costello, who announced in 1948 that Ireland had become a republic: ‘As an Irishman, I have pleasure in recalling that many of my race encouraged and were encouraged by the magnificent efforts of Indians to realise the national aspirations of our own great country.’ Quoted in Sarmila Bose and Eilis Ward, ‘“ India’s Cause is Ireland’s Cause”: Elite Links and Nationalist Politics’, in Michael Holmes and Denis Holmes (eds.), Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts, (Dublin: Folens, 1997), p. 70.

29

It is also the case that Cousins justified the imaginative view of India by saying that the toiling masses had become alienated from their own land not only because of colonialism but also because of colonialism’s effacement of the Idea of India. William A. Dumbleton, James Cousins (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1980), p. 105. Cousins and Cousins, We Two Together, op. cit., p. 68. James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India (Madras: Ganesh, 1918), p. 8.

37 38

ibid. Cf. ‘[Christian Europe] cannot regard a presentation of truth in another land and through other instruments of revelation, together with its resultant culture, as other than outside its own circumference. The impact of eastern thought has to meet the opposition of the old spirit of racial ascendancy, which can only exist on the illusion of the exclusive possession of a universal truth.’ ibid., p. 8. See my Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998) for a discussion of Besant’s deployment of racial rhetoric in her delineation of universal brotherhood and a commonwealth of nations. James H. Cousins, Cultural Unity ofAsia (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922), pp. 7-8. ibid., p. 133. ibid. See Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1922); see also Kojin Karatani, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary

Notes and References

221

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) for a provocative critique of Okakura’s pan-Asianism and its subsequent effects on Japanese modernism. Cousins, Samadarshana, op. cit., p. 7. See also Cousins, Modern English Poetry, op. cit., for an equally devastating critique of the flawed purposes of Irish revivalism. Cousins, Samadarshana, op. cit., p. 9.

Thomas Trautman has demolished this myth in Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

ibid., p. 61. ibid. James H. Cousins, The Path to Peace: An Essay on Cultural Interchange and India’s Contribution Thereto with a Prefatory Note on ‘Modern India’ (Madras: Ganesh,

1928), p. 16. ibid., p. 17.

ibid., p. 18. ibid., p. 19. James H. Cousins, Heathen Essays (Madras: Ganesh, 1925), p. 69. Cousins, Path to Peace, op. cit., p. 19.

James H. Cousins, Bases of Theosophy: A Study in Fundamentals Philosophical, Psychological, Practical (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1913), p. 24. Cf. Tagore: ‘You must know that red tape can never be a common human bond; that official sealing-wax can never provide means of human attachment; that it is a painful ordeal for human beings to have to receive favours from animated pigeon-holes, and condescensions from printed circulars that give notice, but never speak.’ Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 109. 52 53

Cousins, Samadarshana, op. cit., p. 65.

ibid.

Afterword: Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism 1

2

Grand Street, vol. 4 (1984); reprinted in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988). ibid., p.186.

a

‘

as

-

( “

be Sa -—

7

a

i

=

7

.

os

totes

e

,

D

~

>

’

=

“fe

.

te

os

cule

wis

aigtugite an Meh er

» : ani

lil

ee

i

are

en ‘

Oe

ink

ty i oe

GlTeyr

iu eee s Sanesoit

het is We Sate areape

CPE

ae

he wren 7

gl

the

eae eae

tas hee aeeeria were emts -

a

a

ite

oe ia

7

PM

#f 7

hind

*

at st re lias a exarr :

fesse: = ate paren non

ov

/

*

7_

haemds aff im ne eal iam uncer.

Saas a oe ei

met nese : r.

i

.

ae

wou

Wa eae!

”

.

Bibliography Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (New York: Astor-Honer, 1959).

Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992). Aida, Yuji, Prisoner of the British: A Japanese Soldier's Experiences in Burma (London: Cresset Press, 1962). Allen, Theodore, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994).

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Andrews, Kenneth R., Nicholas P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enter-

prise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Liverpool University Press, 1978). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Armitage, David, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, vol. 104 (April 1999). Armstrong, Meg, ‘The Effects of Blackness: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 54, no. 3 (Summer 1996). Arnold, David, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Arnold, Matthew, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold; Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R.H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1973), vol. 9.

Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back

(London: Routledge, 1989). ——, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995). Attridge, Derek and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Bacot, Jean-Pierre and Christian Cog (eds.), Travail de mémoire 1914-1998. Une necessité dans un siécle de violence, Collection Mémoires, no. 54 (Paris: Autrement, 1999).

Barnard, T.C., ‘Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641-1845’, Past and Present, vol. 127 (May 1990). Barnard, T., D. O Croinin, and K. Simms (eds.), ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies in

Manuscripts and Irish Learning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Barry, Kevin, ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 14 (Spring 1996). Barry, Terry (ed.), A History of Settlement in Ireland (London: Routledge, 2000). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Protestant Nation 1690-1800’, Fire-Ireland, vol. 26 (Summer 1991). — et al. (eds.), Irish Studies: A General Introduction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,

1988). Beckett, Samuel, First Love (London: Calder, 1973).

223

224

Bibliography

——,, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994).

——, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1959), first published 1938. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, edited and with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (NewYork: Schocken, 1969). Beverly, John and José Oviedo (eds.), The Postmodern Debate in Latin America: A

Special Issue of Boundary 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

——

(ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).

——,,‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (1985).

Boland, Eavan, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic Press LIP Pamphlet, 1989).

Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (London: Norton, 1991).

Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London: Pimlico, 1999). Boylan, Thomas A. and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London: Routledge, 1992). Bradshaw, Brendan, et al. (eds.), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of the Conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Brady, Ciaran (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994).

—— and Raymond Gillespie, Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534-1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986). Brenner, Robert, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism’, New Left Review, vol. 104 (July/August 1977). Brown, Terence, Ireland's Literature; Selected Essays (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble,

1988). Buell, Frederick, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). Burkholder, Mark A. and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), Cairns, David and Shaun Richards, ‘Discourses of Opposition and Resistance in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Text & Context, vol. 2, no. 1

(Spring 1988). ——,, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988). Canny, Nicholas, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World 1500-1800 (Princeton University Press, 1987). , The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976).

—, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 1973). ——, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland and the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). (ed.), The Oxford History of British Empire, 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Bibliography

225

Carey, Vincent, ‘John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 123 (May 1999). Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working-Class History, Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton University Press, 1989). Chatterjee, D.C., James Henry Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West (Delhi: Sterling, 1985). Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993).

——, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).

Chuto, J., R. Holzapfel and E. Mangan (eds.), The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1845-1847 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997).

Cixous, Helene, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998). Clarke, Desmond M. and Charles Jones (eds.), The Rights of Nations: Nations and

Nationalism in a Changing World (Cork University Press, 1999). Clayton, Pamela, Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth Century Ulster (London: Pluto Press, 1996).

Cohn, John and Thomas H. Miles, ‘The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis’, Modern Philology (February 1977). Columbus, Christopher, The Diario of Christopher Columbus 1492-1493, trans. Oliver Dunne and James E. Kelly, Jr. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

Connolly, Claire ‘Postcolonial Ireland?’, European Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (December 1999). Connolly, James, Labour in Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel and Roberts, 1922).

Cook, Scott B., Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi and London: Sage, 1993).

Corkery, Daniel, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: McGill and Sons, 1924).

Coughlan, Patricia (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork University Press, 1989). Coulter, Carol, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women, and Nationalism in Ireland (Cork University Press, 1993). ——,, Ireland: Between the First and the Third Worlds (Dublin: Attic Press LIP Pamphlet,

1990). Cousins, James H., Bases of Theosophy: A Study in Fundamentals Philosophical, Psychological, Practical (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1913). — , Collected Poems, 1894-1940 (Madras: Kalakshetra, 1940). , Cultural Unity ofAsia (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922). , Heathen Essays (Madras: Ganesh, 1925). Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies (Madras: Ganesh, 1921). a

, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh, 1917). , The Path to Peace: An Essay on Cultural Interchange and India’s Contribution Thereto with a Prefatory Note on ‘Modern India’ (Madras: Ganesh, 1928). 7

The Renaissance in India (Madras: Ganesh, 1918).

, Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology (Madras: Ganesh, 1925). ——, War: A Theosophical View (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1914). —

and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950).

226

Bibliography

[Croker, John Wilson], An Intercepted Letter From J—T—, Esq. Writer at Canton, to His Friend in Dublin, Ireland (Dublin: M.N. Mahon, 1804). Crotty, Raymond, Ireland in Crisis:

A Study in Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment

(Dingle: Brandon, 1986). Crowley, Tony, The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1999). , The Politics of Language in Ireland 1534-1998 (forthcoming). Cullen, Fintan, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930 (Cork University Press, 1997).

Cullen, L.M. and T.C. Smout (eds.), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History 1600-1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1978). Curtin, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Curtis, L. Perry, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Daly, Nicholas, ‘From Elvis to the Fugitive’, European Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (December 1999).

Davies, Sir John, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (Irish University Press: Shannon, 1969). Deane, Seamus (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).

, Ireland's Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985). (ed.), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota

University Press, 1990). ——,, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). de Freine, Sean, The Great Silence (Cork: Mercier Press, 1969).

de Léry, Jean, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Denoon, David, Settler Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 1983). Denson, Alan, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins: A Bio-Biographical Survey (Kendal: Alan Denson, 1967).

Derricke, John, The Image of Ireland with A Discoverie of Woodkarne [1581], ed. David B. Quinn (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985).

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982). ——, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). ——, Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Editions de Galilee, 1984). Dillon, William, Life ofJohn Mitchel, 2 vols (London: K. Paul Trench, 1888). Doan, James E., ‘“An Island in the Virginian Sea”: Native Americans and Irish in

English Discourse, 1585-1640’, New Hibernia Review vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987). Donoghue, Denis, ‘Fears for Irish Studies in an Age of Identity Politics’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 44 (21 November 1997). Dumbleton, William A., James Cousins (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1980). Dunne, Tom, ‘New

Histories, Beyond “Revisionism”’,

The Irish Review, vol. 12

Bibliography

227

(Spring/Summer 1992). Dussel, Enrique, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3 (1993).

——, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995).

Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). Edwards, David, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’,

History Ireland, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 1997). Edwards, R. Dudley, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors: The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilization (London: Croom Helm, 1977).

Ellis, Steven G., ‘Writing Irish History: Revisionism, Colonialism, and the British Isles’, The Irish Review, vol. 27 (Autumn/Winter 1994).

El Sabio, A., Las Cantigas de Loor, ed. M. Cunningham (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000).

Emmanuel, Arghiri, ‘White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism’, New Left Review, vol. 73 (May/June 1972). Erdrich, Louise, “Two Languages in Mind but Just One in the Heart’, New York Times, 22 May 2000. Evans, Humphrey, Thimayya ofIndia: A Soldier's Life (NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1960). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

——, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). Fay, Charles R., Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge University Press,

1956). Fieldhouse, David K., The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey, from the Eighteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). Flannery, James, Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (Nashville, TN: J.S Sanders, 1997). Fogarty, Anne (ed.), ‘Spenser in Ireland: “The Faerie Queene” 1596-1996’, Irish University Review, Special Issue, vol. 26, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter, 1996). Foley, Tadhg and Sean Ryder (eds.), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998). Foley, Timothy P. and Thomas Boylan, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Forrester, John, Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Foster, Roy F., W.B. Yeats: A Life: I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Foucault, Michel, Language, Countermemory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

Fredrickson, George, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). ——, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford University Press, 1988).

Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology [1914], S.E., 14, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957). Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland (London: Penguin, 1982).

228

Bibliography

Gibbons, Luke, ‘Race against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991).

——, Transformations in Irish Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996; Cork University Press, 1996). Giliomee, Hermann and Jannie Gagiano (eds.), The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel, Northern Ireland (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Gillingham, John, ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 4, no. 4 (December 1992). Gledson, John (ed.), Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso,

1992). Goffman, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963). Gogarty, Oliver St John, As I was Going down Sackville Street (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1994), First published 1937. Goldring, Maurice, Pleasant the Scholar's Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction of the Nation State (London: Serif, 1993). Grahan, Colin and Willy Maley (eds.), Irish Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (August 1999).

Grillo, R.D., Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Guha, Ranit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Guinnane, Timothy W., The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914 (Princeton University Press, 1997). Hadfield, Andrew, Edmund Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

——, ‘Rocking the Boat: (1992).

A Response to Hiram Morgan’, The Irish Review, vol. 12

, and John McVeigh (eds.), Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland

from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994). Hall, John A. (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Hall, Stuart, ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10 (Summer 1986). ——, ‘The Loeal and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in Anthony King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Dept of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991). Harris, R. Cole, ‘The Simplification of Europe Overseas’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 67, no. 4 (December 1977). and Leonard Guelke, ‘Land and Society in Early Canada and South Africa’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 3, no. 2 (1977). Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hayden, Tom (ed.), Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997). Hazelkorn, Ellen and Henry Patterson, ‘The New Politics of the Irish Republic’, New Left Review, vol. 207, (September/October, 1994). Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

Bibliography

229

Hibernize Lachryme; or the Tears of Ireland, A Poem (Dublin, 1799).

Highley, Christopher, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Hind, Robert J., ‘We have No Colonies” — Similarities within the British Imperial Experience’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26 (1984). Hobsbawm, E.J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Holmes, Michael and Dennis Holmes (eds.), Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin: Folens, 1997). Howes, Marjorie and Derek Attridge (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hurd, Richard, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: Printed for A. Millar in the

Strand; Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn and J. Woodyer, 1762). Hussain, Nasser, ‘The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in British India’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1993.

Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Ileto, Reynaldo, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements

in the Philippines,

1840-1910 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila, 1979). Iyer, Pico, Video Night in Kathmandu (New York: Knopf, 1988).

Jacobson, John Kurt, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic: Ideology, Democracy and Dependent Development (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Jeffery, Keith (ed.),’An Irish Empire?’: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 1996). Johnson, Adriana, ‘Reading Roberto Schwarz: Outside Out-of-Place Ideas’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (1999). Joshi, Srati (ed.), Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History (New

Delhi: Trianka, 1991). Joyce, James, Dubliners (London: Penguin Books, 1976). ——,, The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1963). ——, Poems and Exiles, ed. J. Mays (London: Penguin Books, 1992).

_ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1956). Juliet, Charles, ‘Meeting Beckett’, Triquarterly, vol. 77 (1989-90). Karatani, Kojin, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Kearney, Richard and Mark Dooley (eds.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999). Keating, Geoffrey, The History of Ireland, vol. 1, trans. David Comyn (London: Irish Texts Society, 1902). Kelly, James, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (CorkUniversity Press,

1992). Kelly, Jeff, ‘Alannah O'Kelly and Frances Hegarty: Lamentations at Post-Colonial Wake’, in Deoraiocht: displacement: Francis Hegarty and Alannah O'Kelly: March 20-—May 4, 1917, San Francisco Art Institute Walter/McBean Gallery (San Francisco: The Institute, 1997).

——,’Re-member, Re-member: Alannah O'Kelly’, Artforum, vol. 31 (May 1993). ——,

Kennedy,

Liam, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism

in Ireland (Belfast:

Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1996). Keogh, Daire, The French Disease: The Catholic Church and Radicalism in Ireland 1790-1800 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993).

230

Bibliography

Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern

Nation

(London:

Jonathan Cape, 1995). Kirby, Peadar, Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (Dublin: Trécaire and Gill and Macmillan, 1992). Kitson, Frank, Bunch of Five (London: Faber and Faber, 1977).

——, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peace-Keeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Krause, David, ‘Review Article: The Reinvention of Ireland’, Irish University Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1997).

Kushigian, Julia A., Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). Larrain, Jorge, Theories of Development, Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989). Larson, Neil, Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Las Casas, Bartolemé de, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992). Lebow, R.N., White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979). Leerssen, Joep, ‘1798: The Recurrence of Violence and Two Conceptualizations of History’, The Irish Review, vol. 22 (1998). , ‘Irish Studies and Orientalism; Ireland and the Orient’, in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen (eds.), Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East (Amsterdam: Rudolphi, 1998).

——, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (Cork University Press, 1996).

——, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork University Press, 1996; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press and Derry: Field Day, 1997). Lestringant, Frank, ‘Le nom des cannibales de Christophe Colomb 4 Michel de Montaigne,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 17-18 (1984). Lloyd, David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press and Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993). ——

‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, Interventions, vol. 2, no. 2 (2000).

, Ireland after History (Cork University Press, 1999). , Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Trish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). —— ‘Outside History: Irish New Histories and the “Subalternity Effect”’, Subaltern Studies, vol. 9, Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds.) (Delhi: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1996). —— ‘Race under Representation’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991). Lockhart, James and Stuart B. Schwarz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Latin America and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Longenbach, James, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Bibliography

231

Longley, Edna, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994). Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd (eds.), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

Lustick, Ian, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Lynch, John, Cambrensis Eversus, trans. Matthew Kelly (Dublin: The Celtic Society, 1851-2). McCann, Colum, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, in Bill Henderson (ed.), Best of the Small Presses; The Pushcart Prize 1999 XXIII (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1999). McCarthy, Conor, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).

Macaulay, Thomas B., Prose and Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). McCavitt, John, Sir Arthur Chichester (Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1998). McCone, Kim, ‘Prehistoric, Old and Middle Irish’, in Kim McCone and Katharine

Simms (eds.), Progress in Medieval Irish Studies (Maynooth: Saint Patrick’s College, 1996). MacDonagh, Oliver, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell 1775-1847 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).

MacDonagh, Thomas, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916). MacDonald, Michael, Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986).

McGarry, John and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Mac Laughlin, Jim, ‘Emigration and the Peripheralization of Ireland in the Global Economy’, Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994). —— and Ethel Crowley (eds.), Under the Belly of the Tiger: Class, Race, Identity and Culture in the Global Ireland (Dublin: Irish Reporter Publications, 1997). Mahaffy, John Pentland, Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical Conditions (delivered at Alexandra College) (London: Longmans, Green, 1869).

Maley, Willy, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997): Mangan, James Clarence, The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, vol. 3, 1845-1847, ed. Jacques Chuto (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996). Mani, Lata and Ruth Frankenberg, ‘The Challenge of Orientalism’, Economy and Society, vol. 14 (1985).

Mansoor, M., The Story of Irish Orientalism (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1944). Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970). ——,, and Friedrich Engels, On Ireland (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). Mathews, PJ. (ed.), New Voices in Contemporary Irish Criticism (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000). Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990). Mignolo, Walter, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

232

Bibliography

Miller, David (ed.), Rethinking Northern Ireland (London and New York: Longman, 1998). Miller, Kerby, Emigrants and Exiles (Oxford University Press, 1985). Mitchell, Angus (ed.), The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (London: Anaconda; Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997).

Mitchinson, Rosalind and Peter Roebuck (eds.), Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500-1939 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1988). Miyoshi, Masao, ‘Globalization, Culture, and the University,’ in Fredric Jameson and

Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC, and London:

Duke University Press, 1998). Moghadam, Valentine (ed.), Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Women

and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). Molony, J. Chartres, The Riddle of the Irish (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1970), first published 1927. Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Theories of Imperialism, trans. P.S. Falla (New York: Random House, 1980). Moore, George, A Drama in Muslin (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986).

Moore, Thomas, Lalla Rookh; An Oriental Romance (Buffalo, NY: Derby, 1850). , The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). , The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [1831] (Glasgow: R. and T. Washbourne, n.d). Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998).

Morgan, Hiram, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, vol. 11 (Winter 1991-92). ——

(ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland 1541-1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).

Mulhern, Francis, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics (Cork University Press, 1998). Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Narveson, Jan, ‘Intersubjective’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Nash, Catherine, ‘Geo-centric Education and Anti-imperialism: Theosophy, Geography, and Citizenship in the Writings of J.H. Cousins’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 22, no. 4 (1996). Nichols, Kenneth, ‘Worlds Apart? The Ellis Two-Nation Theory of Late Medieval Ireland’, History Ireland, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 1999).

Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala, Cead Aighnis (An Daingean: An Sagart, 1998). Nitz, Hans-Jirgen (ed.), The Early-Modern World-System in Geographical Perspective (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993). Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations,

no. 26 (Spring 1989). (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92).

, Realms of Memory, 3 vols, trans. A. Goldhammer (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1996). O Buachalla,

Breandan,

Aisling Ghedr:

Na

Stiobhartaigh

agus an

t-Aos

Léinn,

1703-1788 (Baile Atha Cliath: An Cléchomhar, 1996). O’Connor, Emmet, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-1923 (Cork University Press, 1988). O’Faolain, Sean, The Great O'Neill (London and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1942).

Bibliography

233

——,, The Irish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). ——, An Irish Journey (London: Longmans, Green, 1940).

, King of the Beggars (London and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1938). ——,, The Life Story of Eamon de Valera (Dublin and Cork: Talbot Press, 1933). O’Hearn, Denis, ‘The Irish Case of Dependency: An Exception to the Exceptions?’ American Sociological Review, vol. 54 (1989). Okakura, Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1922).

Olmeyher, Jane H., ‘Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 2 (April 1999).

(ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

O Muirithe, Diarmaid (ed.), The English Language in Ireland (Dublin: Mercier Press,

1977).

Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, #995). Osterhammel, Jurgen, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley L. Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997). O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium, ed. Matthew

Kelly (Dublin, 1850).

, Ireland under Elizabeth, being chapters towards a history of Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth being a portion of the history of Catholic Ireland by Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare, trans. and ed. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903). [Pery, Edmund.] T.O., Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to his Friends at Trebisond, &c. Translated in the Year 1756 (London: Printed for W. Owen, 1757). Phillips, Adam, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber and Faber, 1998).

Porteir, Cathal (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Cork: Mercier, 1995). Prakash, Gyan (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Post-Colonial Displacements (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Pyle, Hilary, James Stephens; His Work and an Account of His Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965). Quinn, David Beers, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).

——,, Ireland and America: Their Early Associations, 1500-1640 (Liverpool University Press, 1991). , Ireland and Sixteenth-Century European Expansion’, Historical Studies, vol. 1

(1958). ——,, ‘Sir Thomas Smith and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 89, no. 4 (1945). Regan, Colm, ‘Latin American Dependency Theory and Its Relevance to Ireland’, The Crane Bag, vol. 6, no. 2 (1982).

Renan, Ernest, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, trans. William G. Hutchinson (London: W. Scott, 1896). Rickard, John, ‘Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East’, in Susan

Shaw Sailer (ed.), Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). Robbins, Bruce and Pheng Cheah (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Roedigar, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Irish Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

234

Bibliography

Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, ed. William H. Drummond [1840] (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972).

Ruane, Joseph, ‘Colonial Legacies and Cultural Reflexivities,’ Etudes Irlandais, vol. 19, no. 2 (Automne 1994).

, ‘Ireland, European Integration, and the Dialectic of Nationalism and Postnationalism,’ Etudes Irlandais, vol. 19, no. 1 (Printemps 1994).

—— and Jennifer Todd, The Dynamics of Power in Northern Ireland: Power Conflict and Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Russell, George (AE), The National Being (New York: Macmillan, 1930), first published

1916. Ryan, Frederick, ‘The Persian Struggle’, The Irish Review, vol. 1, no. 6 (1911). Ryan, William, The Irish Labour Movement (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1919). Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). —,, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

and Christopher Hitchens, (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988).

Sangari, Kum Kum and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Schwarz, Roberto, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992). Scott, Andrew M., Insurgency (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1970). Shafir, Gershon,

Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli—Palestinian

Conflict

1882-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Shaw, George Bernard, John Bull’s Other Island (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), first

published 1907. Shohat, Ella,“Notes on the Post-Colonial’, Social Text, vols. 31-32 (1992).

Silverman, M. and P.H. Gulliver (eds.), Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology through Irish Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Slater, Eamonn and Terrence McDonough, ‘Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism: The Dynamics of Feudalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, Research in Political Economy, vol. 14 (1994). Sloan, William N., ‘Ethnicity or Imperialism? A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 21, no. 1 (january 1979). Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and PLL. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). ——,, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1983). ——, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759, 1790], eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). ——, The Wealth of Nations [1776] (London: Everyman’s Library, 1991).

S[mith], W., Historical Explanations of Emblematic Cards; For the Use of Young Persons (Dublin: Marchbank, 1801). Smyth,

Gerry, Decolonisation

and Criticism: The Construction

of Irish Literature

(London: Pluto Press, 1998).

Smyth, Jim, The Men ofNo Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Bibliography

235

Stanihurst, Richard, ‘Description of Ireland’, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 6 (New York: AMS Press, 1976); rpr. of 1808 ed. (London: J. Johnson). Stephens, James, The Demi-Gods (London: Macmillan, 1914).

Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Tagore, Rabindranath, ‘A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore’, The Crisis, vol. 36, no. 10 (1929). ——, Creative Unity (London: Macmillan, 1922).

——,, Gitanjali (Song Offerings: A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali; with an Introduction by W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan,

1914).

, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917).

——,, Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, eds. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).

Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa, Decolonising the Mind (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986). Tillyard, Stella, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998).

Tipps, Dean C., ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 15 (1973). Tomlinson, John, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1991).

Trautman, Thomas, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). [Vallancey, General Charles], An Essay Towards Illustrating the Ancient History of the Britannic Isles; Containing an Explanation of the Names Belgae, Scythae, Celtae, Brittani, Albanich, Eirinnich, Caledonii, Siluri, &c. &c. Intended as a Preface to a Work Entitled, A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland. By C.V. (London: John Nichols, 1786).

‘Vindex, Julius’, Vindication of the Irish Nation, and Particularly of the Roman Catholics, against the Calumnies of Libellers, Part IV (Dublin: James Fletcher, 1802).

Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). , Outside the Fold; Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998). Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System, II, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Walsh, Peter, A Prospect of the State of Ireland (London, 1682). Watts, David, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Weitzer, Ronald, Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Whelan, Kevin, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork University Press, 1996). ; Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Williams, Robert A., Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Williamson, Edwin, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Allen Lane, 1992). Wills, Clair, ‘Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence’, The Oxford Literary

236

Bibliography

Review, vol. 13, nos. 1-2 (1991). Wormald, Jenny, Court, Kirk, and Community, New History of Scotland 4 (University

of Toronto Press, 1981).

Wright, Frank, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,

1987).

Yeats, William Butler, Selected Criticism, ed. A.

Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan,

1976). ——., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957). Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Zinsser, William (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft ofMemoir (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Index Abbas, Ihsam, 183

barbarism, 63-80, 83, 86

Abbey Theatre, 94

Amerindians

abul-Hajj, Nadia, 184

cannibalism, 73-4, 76-7

Abul Hassan Khan, Mirza, 143-4 Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, 183 Abu Taleb Khan, Mirza, 215 Act of Union (1801), 3-4, 25, 40, 134 Adams, Gerry, 49 Aden, 60 administrative colonialism, 29-30, 36, 52,

compared to Europeans, 74-7 compared to Irish, 64, 66-7 cannibalism, 73-5

Amerindian, 73-4, 76-7 European, 74, 76-7 Irish representations, 65, 68-9, 70-3, 77,

79

60, 94 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia, 108 AE (George Russell), 129, 138, 149, 165, 166, 169, 171

as cannibals, 73 compared to Amerindians, 64, 66-7 violence during colonization, 48-9,

69-70, 76-7, 78

agrarian movements, 60-1, 145 Ahluwalia, Pal, 212

see also primitivism Bards of the Gael and the Gall, 119

Ahmad, Aijaz, 9

Bar Kochba, Simon, 184

Aida, Yuji, 124

Barry, Kevin, 60, 185

Albright, William, 182 Algeria, 36, 43, 44, 52, 54, 94, 111, 177, 179, 180

Bartlett, Thomas, 23, 38, 60 ‘What Ish My Nation?”’, 49, 50-1

Beckett, Samuel, 6, 95, 99, 100, 102, 114

Ali, Mohammed, 144

All that Fall, 119

Amerindians, 12, 78

Murphy, 218 Orientalism and, 155-6

cannibalism, 73—4, 76-7

Belgium, 54

compared to Europeans, 74—7

compared to Irish, 64, 66-7 amnesty and amnesia, 93

Benet, William Rose, 160

Amritsar massacre (1919), 123, 148, 153

Benjamin, Walter, 99

Ben Gurion, David, 182

‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’,

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communi-

46 Besant, Annie, 150, 159, 162, 165-6, 169, 213

ties, 5, 37,199 antiquarianism, 130-3, 142, 143

Arabi Pasha, 144 Arendt, Hannah, 93

Betham, Sir William, 130

Etruria — Celtica..., 132

Argentina, 37 Arif, Arif el, 183 Aristotle, 74, 76 Armitage, David, 190 Armstrong, Meg, 208

Bhabha, Homi, 7, 10, 63, 149

Black and Tans, 148 Blackstone, Sir William, 89

Blavatsky, Madame, 150 Boland, Eavan, 105-6 Bolivar, Simon, 39

Amold, Edwin, 169

Amold, Matthew, 149, 175

Book of Invasions (Leabhar gabhala), 67, 73

On the Study of Celtic Literature, 136

Boucicault, Dion, 114 Bowen, Elizabeth, 114 Bowersock, Glenn, 183-4

art, and samadarshana, 170 Ashcroft, Bill, 212

‘Atlantic archipelago’ model, 17, 21

Boylan, Thomas, 61 Political Economy and Colonial Ireland, 16 Boyle, Roger, 79-80 Bradlaugh, Charles, 166

Australia, 8, 31, 37, 51, 94, 181 Baramki, Farid, 183

Baran, Paul, 34

237

238

Index

Brazil, 23-4, 33

de Léry on, 76-7 Brecht, Bertolt, 100 Brehon law, 65, 90, 169 Brenner, Robert, 34 Brown, Terence, 145, 147 Buell, Fred, 7

character of Irish see Irish character and

representations Chatterjee, D.C., 219 Chatterjee, Mohini, 150-1 Chatterjee, Partha, 61 Cheah, Pheng, 9-11 Chechnya, 180

Bunting, Edward, 91

China, 172, 181, 214

Burke,

civil rights movement, 18, 44 Cixous, Héléne, 100

Edmund, 6, 96, 108, 114, 115, 116-17, 118, 179

The Sublime and the Beautiful, 116 Burma, 1, 126 Butt, Isaac, 42 Byron, Lord

Cleary, Joe, 11, 15, 178 Clifford, James, 10 Coke, Sir Edward, 89

colonialism

Bride ofAbydos, 215

colonial

The Corsair, 134

63-4 colonial feudalism, 35 decolonization see

Cabral, Amikar, 183 Cairns, David, Writing Ireland, 16 Calvinism, 70 Canada, 8, 22, 31, 37, 94 cannibalism, 73-5 Amerindian, 73-4, 76-7 European, 74, 76-7 Canny, Nicholas, 17, 28, 64 caoineadh, 142-3 capitalism, 32-5, 59 colonial, 43-5, 48-9, 59, 63-4

de Léry on, 76 industrial, 33 merchant, 32-3

Carlton House, 212 Carlyle, Thomas, 94 Carpenter, Edward, 171 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 12, 66, 73, 74-6,

77-8, 79

Argumentum apologiae, or Defense of the Indians, 74 Brevissima relacion, 75 Casement, Roger, 4, 139, 178 Catholic Church, 1, 94, 110 Catholic Emancipation, 3, 39 Céitinn, Séathrin, 65, 80

Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, 78-9, 94 Celticism and Orientalism see Orientalism

Celtic origins, 130-3, 169, 210-11

Celtic Revival, 129, 142, 149-57 ‘Celtic Tiger’, 44-5

Cenn Faeladh, 133

capitalism,

43-5,

48-9,

59,

decolonization;

independence effects of, 47, 125, 127-8, 154, 179 in Ireland, 2-4, 44, 111-12, 177 in N. Ireland, 1-2, 4, 7, 8-9, 18, 44, 48, 58, 94

fascism, progenitor of, 126, 127 forged concept, 51-2 Ireland, colonization, 7-8, 25, 32-3, 182

early modern, 63-80 locating Ireland, 17-29, 44, 94

plantation, 32, 64, 65, 69, 175 settlement category, 35-7 training ground for America, 3 Irish as colonizers, 22—3, 50-1, 122, 125,

138 language and identity, 112-21, 124, 178,

183 see also Irish language language of, 22, 26-7 memory see memory oppositional, 8-9

policing, 60-1 postcolonial

theory, 1-11, 20-1, 177,

179-80

interpretations and methodologies, 49-59

study of imperialism and, 55 types of, 8, 29-31 administrative, 29-30, 36, 52, 60, 94

plantation, 30, 31, 32 settlement, 8, 30-2, 35-7, 51, 94 violence, 48-9, 69-70, 76-7, 78 Colum, Padraic, 160, 161

Césaire, Aimé, 14

Columbus, Christopher, Diario, 73

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 61

common law, 65-6, 90

Index Congo, 139, 177, 178

Deane, Seamus, 13, 99, 124, 179 ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, 71 Strange Country, 6, 17 de Beaumont, Gustave, 198 Declaration of Independence (US), 87, 199 decolonization, 5, 6, 37, 82, 147-8, 159, 178 cross-colony identification and, 138-9,

Connolly, James, 55 Cook, Scott B., Imperial Affinities, 28 Corkery, Daniei, 94

The Hidden Ireland, 96

Cosby, Francis, 69 Cousins, James, 14, 138, 149, 159-76

accomplishments and interests, 160-1 “Etain the Beloved’, 165

The Geography of Ireland, 165 ‘In Memory of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’, 163 internationalism

151-6, 180 India, 43, 54,171 Ireland, 43, 49, 54,94, 111, 145, 154, 199

see also independence de Freine, Sean, 112

and,

159-60,

170,

171-6

de Léry, Jean, 12, 66, 73, 74

Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du

Joyce sneers at, 161

Brésil, 76-7 Denson, Alan, 161 Derricke, John, Image of Ireland, 68-71, 72,

The King’s Wife, 167 marginalization, 160, 161-4

nationalism and Easter Rising, 162-4 New Ways in English Literature, 155 ‘The Racing Lug’, 166-7 Samadarshana, 171-2

‘The Sleep of the King’, 166 spirituality and race, 169-72 theosophy, 162, 164, 166-9, 174 ‘To Ireland, Before the Treaty...’, 163

We Two Together, 139 The Wisdom of the West, 169

76 Derrida, Jacques, 99-100 de Valera, Eamon, 96 de Vere, Aubery, 129 Devlin McAliskey, Bernadette, 48-9 diaspora, 3, 4, 57, 83, 156 see also emigration Diderot, Denis, 143 differentiation, 47-8, 58-9, 60-1 dominions, 37, 44

Cousins, Margaret E., 161, 162

Donoghue, Denis, 63

Creoles, 27, 37, 38, 39

Douglass, Frederick, 198 Drake, Francis, 64

Crisis, The (periodical), 158 Croker,

299

John Wilson, Letter..., 141-2

An

Intercepted

Croker, Thomas Crofton, 114

Dublin University Magazine, 135 Du Bois, W.E.B., 81, 158, 159

Cromwellian conquest, 80

Durcan, Paul, 218 Dussel, Enrique, 12, 66, 75

cross-colony identification, 138-9, 151-6, 180

Eagleton, Terry, 16

Crotty, Raymond, Ireland in Crisis, 18-19,

Easter Rising (1916), 139, 162—4

195 Cu Chulainn, 96, 150, 168 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 210-11 Curran, Sarah, 144

East India Company, 52, 139, 140, 175 economy of Ireland, 18-19, 20-1, 34, 40, 54-6, 179

Curtis, L. Perry, 28 Cusack, Michael, 94

analogy with Algeria, 54, 111 ‘Celtic Tiger’, 44-5 comparisons at independence, 54-6

Cyprus, 60, 185

Edgeworth, Maria, 114

Darwish, Mahmoud, 183 Daumier, Honoré, 178 Davies, Sir John, 65-6, 73

Edinburgh Review, 134 Edwards, David, 69

Davies, Philip, 184

Egypt, 144, 148 Egyptian Standard, 139

Castle Rackrent, 114, 181

Davis, Thomas, 42 Dayal, Har, 128

Dayan, Moshe, 182

Edwards, Ruth Dudley, 97

Elizabethan conquest, 63-4, 68-70, 77-8, 79 emigration, 18-19, 22-3, 50

240

Index

diaspora, 3, 4, 57, 83, 156 during Great Famine, 4, 40-1 effects of, 56-7

Frank, Andre Gunder, 34, 54 Frankenberg, Ruth, 136 Fredrickson, George, 29-30

immigrants in America, 39-40

Freud, Sigmund, 97

Irish as colonizers, 22—3, 50-1, 122, 138

statistics (1871-1910), 57 Emmanuel, Arghiri, 194 Emmet, Robert, 91, 144 Engels, Friedrich, 41, 42, 88-9

English language, 112-20 Enlightenment, 81, 87, 90, 91, 108, 173

Scottish, 82-3, 84 Essex, Walter Devereux, Earl of, 69

Eyre controversy (1860), 178

Metapsychology, 92 Friel, Brian, Translations,

13, 16, 120-1,

178, 182 Gaelic Athletic Association

(GAA), 94, 101 Gaelic culture, 83-6, 91, 99, 112, 115 caoineadh, 142-3

see also Irish language Gaelic League, 94, 101, 120

Gaelic Society, 120 Fabian, Johannes, 67

Famine, Great, 3, 4, 12-13, 40-1, 110, 112, 177

administration during, 60 genocide policy, 109-10 memory and, 98-107, 119-20 Irish Folklore Commission, 109-10, 112 modernism, 98-100 rememoration, 105-7 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 14, 179, 183

The Wretched of the Earth, 49 Farquhar, George, 114 fascism, 126, 127, 180 Fay, C.R., 84-5

Gerald of Wales

Expugnatio Hibernica, 67 Topographia Hiberniae, 63, 66, 67-9, 70, TLG9

Ghadar Party, 14, 123, 128 Ghana, 54,55 Ghosh, Amitav, 1, 2, 13-14 Gibbons, Luke, 5, 12, 15, 16, 28, 97, 145

Gilbert, Humphrey, 64 Gillingham, John, 66 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic, 82 globalization, 5, 7, 48, 49, 96, 181 Glock, Albert, 184

Gogarty, Oliver St John, 155

feminism and nationalism, 11

Goldsmith, Oliver, 96, 114, 129, 179

Fenollosa, Ernest, 151 Ferguson, Adam, 88 Ferguson, Samuel, 165 Fichte, Johann, 10

Good Friday Agreement (1998), 1, 9 Gosse, Edmund, 153 Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 48, 59

Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 179 Field Day Theatre Company, 16 Fieldhouse, David, 11, 29, 94 First World War, 173-4 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 12, 87, 88 Fitzwilliam, Sir William, 69

Foley, Timothy P., 61 Political Economy and Colonial Ireland, 16 Folklore Commission, 109-10, 112 Forrester, John, 118 Foster, Roy, 96, 151, 153 Foucault, Michel, 67, 82, 96, 212 France

The Citizen of the World, 141

Grattan, Henry, 96 Gregory, Lady, 150, 151, 153, 162 ‘Arabi and His Household’, 144 Griffith, Arthur, 27

Gwynn, R.M., 149 Hadfield, Andrew, 65 Hafiz, 215 Haiti, 82, 83

Hall, Anna Maria (Mrs), 114 Hall, Stuart, 7,59

Harper's Festival (1792), 89 Hastings, Adrian, 6

colonialism, 59, 111 see also Algeria

Hazelkorn, Ellen, 191-2

French Revolution, 172-3

Healy, Tim, 218

minority languages, 87-8

Hearn, Lafcadio, 148

St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 77

Hegel, Georg, 10, 93, 138

Vichy, 180

Hélie-Lucas, Marie Aimée, 11

Index

Hellen, Robert, 141 Henry IL, 67, 68 Henry VIII, 63, 78 Herder, Johann, 10 Herzl, Theodor, 182

Hiberniz Lachryme; or, The Tears of Ireland, 133 History of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, 143-4 Hobbes, Thomas, 84 Hodge, Bob, 8

Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 71 Home Rule, 37, 43, 158, 163, 166 Howe, Stephen, 179 Hume, David, 82 Huntington, Samuel, 181 Hurd, Richard, 208

Husserl, Edmund, 81 hybridity, 7, 9, 63 Hyde, Douglas, 42, 94, 165

241

spirituality, 166, 168, 169-71 Thuggee, 136-7 Indian National Liberation Army, 14, 124,

125-7 Indian Subaltern Studies, 6, 21, 179-80 internationalism, 158-60, 170, 171-6

IRA, 1, 18 Irish as colonizers, 22-3, 50-1, 122, 138

Irish character and representations barbarism, 65, 68-9, 70-3, 77, 79 cannibalism, 73

compared to Amerindians, 64, 66-7 caoineadh, 142-3

contrast with British, 110 potatoes

and carnality, 83 social significance of, 84-5

primitivism, 85-6, 136-7, 142-3, 179 racialized, 8, 52

spirituality, 110-11 Irish Folklore Commission, 109-10, 112

identity, 177 language and, 112-21, 124 memory and, 92, 93, 180 in Ireland, 93-9 national narrative, 149, 178, 180

Orientalism and, 129, 137-8, 147-8 Ileto, Reynaldo, 61 indentured servants, 4

independence, 51 comparative economies at, 54, 55 declarations of, 87, 199 India, 43, 54,55, 171

Ireland, 43, 54, 111, 199 USA, 38, 39, 87, 199 see also decolonization India analogies with Ireland, 28, 41-2, 43, 125, 154-5, 168, 213

literary renaissance, 171-2, 175

Irish language antiquity and Orientalism, 131-3 barrier to civilization, 112-13 importance of, 78-9, 90-1 marginalization, 3, 5, 8, 13, 41, 98-9, ait5

English and, 112-21 revival, 101, 120 Trish Review, 64, 148, 156 Iroquois nation, 86-7 Israel, 181-4 Ito, Michio, 216 Jabra, Jabra, 183

Jacobite movement, 60-1, 85

Jacobson, John Kurt, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic, 18-19 James I, 63, 77, 203

Jameson, Fredric, 16

British education, 59-60

Japan, 162, 181

cross-colony identification, 138-9 East India Company, 52, 139, 140, 175 independence, 43, 171

Jayyusi, Salma al, 183

economy at, 54, 55

mutiny and servility, 13, 122-8 1857 revolt, 122, 124 Amritsar massacre (1919), 123, 148, 153 nationalism, 13-14, 122-8, 158-60, 167-9, 171, 181 samadarshana, 170, 171-2

Jefferson, Thomas, 87 Jeffrey, Francis, 134

Johnston, Charles, 219 Jones, Howard Mumford, 144, 211-12 Jones, Sir William, 131, 212, 215 Joyce, James, 96-100 passim, 114, 179 ‘Araby’, 155

‘The Dead’, 13, 100, 101, 102-5 Dubliners, 101, 104 the Famine and modernism, 100-5, 110

PAD

Index

Orientalism and, 155

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 13, 101-2, 118, 119 ‘She Weeps over Rahoon’, 105 sneers at Cousins, 161

juries, punishment of, 64, 65

Literary Revival, 5, 94, 110, 118, 119-20, 160, 169, 170, 175 analogy with India, 171-2

Lloyd, David, 4, 11-12, 16, 26, 76, 179-80, 193 Anomalous States, 5-6, 16

Ireland After History, 17 Kanafani, Ghassan, 183

Kant, Immanuel, Critique ofJudgment, 117 Keating, Geoffrey see Céitinn, Séathrun Kee, Robert, 97-8 Kelleher, Margaret, 105, 197 Kennedy, Liam, ‘Modern Ireland’, 49-50,

53-7, 60 Kenya, 36, 60 Khalidi, Rashid, 183 Kiberd, Declan, 187 Inventing Ireland, 5, 17

Kimberley, Lord, 42 Kinealy, Christine, 105 Kipling, Rudyard, 149, 155

Nationalism and Minor Literature, 135 Locke, John, 84

Longenbach, James, 216 Longley, Edna, 192 Luddism, 60, 61 Lumumba, Patrice, 179 Lustick, Ian, 52 Lynch, John, Cambrensis Eversus, 79 Lyons, F.S.L., 98 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 82, 98 Lyttleton, George, 142 Letters from a Persian in England..., 141

McAliskey, Bernadette Devlin, 48-9

Kitson, Brigadier Frank, 60 Koume, Tami, 162 Kushigian, Julia, 212

Macauley, Thomas B., 97 McCann, Colum, 218

Laclau, Emesto, 34

McCavitt, John, 66 McClintock, Anne, 7-8 McCone, Kim, 210

Land League, 137

language, 112-21, 124, 178, 183

McCarthy, Sean, 97 MacCartney, Lord, 214

of colonialism, 22, 26-7

McCracken, Henry Joy, 89

see also Irish language

MacDonagh, Thomas, Literature in Ireland,

Larsen, Neil, 44 Laudabiliter, 67, 68, 78 law, 65-6

Brehon, 65, 90, 169 British, 89-90

common law, 65-6, 90 juries, punishment of, 64, 65 martial, 64, 69 Vedic, 169 Lawrence, T.E., 148

Leabhar gabhdala (Book of Invasions), 67, 73

Leahy, A.H., Heroic Romances of Ireland, 164 Leask, Nigel, 134, 215 Lebow, R.N., 28

Leerssen, Joep, 3, 5, 132, 133, 147, 215 Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael, 28, 67 Remembrance and Imagination, 131

Lennon, Joseph, 14, 15, 178 Leonard, Hugh, 96

Letters from an Armenian in Ireland..., 141, 142-3

119 McDonough, Terrence, 35

Mac Laughlin, Jim, 40-1 Macpherson, James, 130 Madden, Richard, 144 Maginn, William, 114, 140 Mahaffy, John Pentland, Twelve Lectures on

Primitive Civilizations..., 137 Mahomed, Dean, 213

Maine, Henry, Ancient Institutions, 169 Malaya, 60, 125 Mangan, James Clarence, 99, 114 ‘Literae Orientales’, 135, 140

Orientalism and, 129, 135-6, 137, 140, 141, 149 ‘Siberia’, 104

“To the Ingleezee Khafir...’, 129, 135 Mani, Lata, 136 Mansion House, 212 Mansoor, M., 148-9

Marana, Giovanni, Letters writ by a Turkish Spy, 141

Index martial law, 64, 69 Martire, Pietro, De Orbe Novo Decades, 73-4 Marx, Karl, 10, 41, 52, 183, 215

Marxism, 34, 35, 59, 181 Masalha, Nur, 183 mass media, 5, 7 memory, 92-108, 180, 181 amnesty and amnesia, 93

the Famine and, 98-107 Irish Folklore Commission, 109-10

243

Morier, James, Adventures of Hajii Baba...,

144, 215 Morrison, Toni, 105 Mulhern, Francis, 19, 44

Mullaghmast massacre (1578), 69, 78 Munro, General, 122 mutiny in India, 122-8 Myanmar, 1 mysticism, 111, 166-8

myth, 96, 129, 149-50, 164, 166-8

Joyce, 100-5

modernism, 98-100

Nairn, Tom, 192

rememoration, 105—7

Nakba, 177, 182

filiation and affiliation, 107-8 Irish identity and, 93-9 levels of, 92-8 mercantilism, 32-3, 52, 54 Mignolo, Walter, 65, 74, 79 Mill, James, 212 Mill, John Stuart, 88, 89 Millar, John, 82

Mirabai, 167 Mishra, Vijay, 8 missionaries, 3, 23, 156

Mitchel, John, 27, 42, 109-10 Mitchell, Angus, 187 modernism and the Famine, 98-105

Joyce and, 100-5 modernity, 52-3, 110

English as language of, 112-20 ‘myth of modernity’, 66 modernization theory, 2, 11, 19-20, 25 Moghadam, Valentine, 11

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 199 Molony, J.Chartres, The Riddle ofthe Irish, 148 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 73 Montesquieu, Charles, 84, 142, 143 Les Lettres Persanes, 141 Moore, George, 114, 119 A Drama in Muslin, 104-5 Moore, Thomas, 91, 98, 101, 114, 153

‘The Fire-Worshippers’, 144-5 Trish Melodies, 134, 144 Lallah Rookh, 134-5, 140, 144, 145 ‘OhYe Dead’, 103 Orientalism, 129, 134-5, 140, 144-7, 149, 215 ‘Paradise and the Peri’, 145-6 Moors, 32, 75, 180, 183 analogy with Irish, 76, 77

Morgan, Hiriam, 64-5 Morgan, Lady, 114

Nandy, Ashis, 2, 5 Nash, Catherine, 220

Nation, The, 22, 113 national character see Irish character and representations nationalism, 1-11, 41-3, 52, 193

cultural, 41, 94-6, 110 and Orientalism, 129, 134, 135, 138-9, 145, 150, 153-6 feminism and, 11 internationalism, 158-60, 170, 171-6

language of, 22, 26-7 national narrative, 149, 178, 180

nation and nation-state, 6, 10-11

popular, 10 Protestant, 37-9, 42

rhetoric (Land League poster), 137 spirituality of Irish, 110-11 state, 5-6, 94-6 types of, 6

Nazism, 126, 127, 180 ‘New British’ model, 17, 21

New India (newspaper), 159, 162, 163 New Zealand, 37, 181 Nicholls, Kenneth, 202

Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 8, 105 ‘Ceol’, 107

‘Na Murtha a Thriomaigh’, 106-7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96, 102 Nine Years War, 72, 77 Non-Aligned Movement, 125, 183 Nora, Pierre, 97-8

Norman conquest, 63, 69, 79 Northern Ireland

civil rights movement, 18 industrial proletariat, 55 nationalism, 8-9, 10

peace process, 1, 9, 44, 48, 205 plantation, 64, 65

244

Index

policing and counter-insurgency, 60 postcolonial effects, 1-2, 4, 7, 8-9, 18, 44 48,58, 94 sectarianism, 1, 8, 19, 20 unionism, 4, 10, 42, 94

O'Toole, Fintan, 96, 97 OQuetaca, 77

Owenson, Sydney, 197 Oxford Literary Review, 16 Ozell, John, 141

Northern Star, 91 Nuguchi, 162

Palestine, 31, 36, 44, 94, 177, 181-5 analogy with Ireland, 181-2, 185

O’Brian, O’Brien, O’Brien, O’Brien,

Donchadh, Earl of Thomond, 79 Conor Cruise, 96 Flann, 99 Henry, 130

O Buachalla, Breandan, Aisling Ghedr, 28, 204

Nakba, 177, 182 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 42, 198 Pater, Walter, 170 Patterson, Henry, 191-2 Pearse, Patrick, 94, 96, 198

Persia, 131, 143-4, 148, 156

O’Casey, Sean, 102 O Conaire, Padraic, 156

Pery, Edmund, 129 Letters from an Armenian

O’Connell, Daniel, 39, 112, 144

in Ireland...,

141, 142-3

O’Connor, Emmet, 61 O’Connor, Sinéad, 105

Ohlmeyer, Jane, 64

Petrie, George, 133 Phillips, Adam, 116, 117 Pioneer, The (newspaper), 163

Okakura, Kakuzo, 162 The Ideals of the East, 171

plantations, 17, 30, 31, 32, 64, 65, 69 Po-Chu-I, 218

O'Kelly, Alannah, 13, 105

policing, 60-1

O’Faolain, Sean, 95, 112, 121

Deoratocht, 106 works and Famine emphasis, 106

Old English, 71-3, 78 O’More, Rory Og, 69-70

emergence of, 16-17, 21 interpretations and methodologies, 49-59 oppositional, 8-9

O’Neill, Hugh, 72, 112 O'Neill, Shane, 73 O’Neills, Clandeboye, 69 oppositional colonialism, 8-9 Orientalism, 14, 129-57, 177-8

poststructuralist, 9

see also colonialism potatoes

18th century, 131-3

and carnality, 83 social significance of, 84-5

letters genre, 141-3

19th century, 133-40, 143-7 20th century, 148-57 Anglo-French, 133, 135-6,

Pound, Ezra, 100, 102, 151 140, 141,

143, 145, 157 antiquarianism, 130-3, 142, 143

cross-colony identification, 138-9, 151-6,

180 identity and, 129, 137-8, 147-8 Irish, 148-9, 156-7 latent, 139 origins of the Celts, 130-3, 169, 210-11 round tower debate, 131-2, 211

Yeats and Tagore, 150, 151, 152-5 Osterhammel, Jiirgen, 37 O'Sullivan, Revd Samuel, 136-7

O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, 65 Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium, 77-8

Portugal, 32 postcolonial theory, 1-11, 20-1, 177, 179-80 critics and debate, 7-11, 49-59

Prichard, James Cowles, 133 primitivism, 83, 84, 87, 88-9, 136-7 of Irish, 85-6, 136-7, 142-3, 179 see also barbarism Protestant nationalism, 37-9, 42 Qassem, Samih al, 183 Quinn, David Beers, 17, 64, 66 racism, 158-9, 180 see also Irish character

and representations Raleigh, Walter, 64, 71 Rathlin Island, 69 rebellion of 1798, 4, 37, 38, 81, 87, 91 Reformation, 66 Renan, Emest, 175

‘The Poetry of the Celtic Races’, 136, 137

Index

245

representations of Irish see Irish character and representations

Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 163 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 212

revisionism, 20, 52, 96, 97-8, 110, 112, 181 Rhodesia, 36, 94 Ribbonism, 136 Richard, Paul, 162, 171 Richards, Shaun, Writing Ireland, 16

Sheridan, Frances, 129

Rickard, John, 217

Sinn Féin, 1, 153, 192

Ricoeur, Paul, 92, 108

Slater, Eamonn, 35

Rights of Man, 82, 87, 88 Robertson, Revd Frederick, 166

Smith, Adam, 82, 83-6, 88, 90 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 85, 86

Robertson, William, 88

Smith, Stanley Lane-Poole, 148

Robinson, Mary, 105

Smith,

Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness,

Emblematic Cards, 133 Smyth, Gerry, 6, 216, 217, 218 Smyth, William J., 32 Somerville, Edith and Ross, Martin, 114

39-40 Rogers, Samuel, 134 Rolland, Romain, 171 Romanticism, 82, 90, 130, 166, 170-6 Rothenstein, William, 151, 154 round tower debate, 131-2, 211

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 84 Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, 88

Royal Irish Academy, 132, 142 Royal Irish Constabulary, 60 Royal Society of Literature, 153 Ruane, Joseph, 25, 26 Russell, George (AE), 129, 138, 149, 165,

166, 169, 171 Ryan, Frederick, 139, 148, 156 Ryan, William, 61

Shohat, Ella, 9

Sidney, Sir Henry, 68, 69-70, 73 Sigerson, George, 119 Singapore mutiny (1918), 122, 124

W.,

Historical

Explanations

of

South Africa, 22, 31, 36, 44, 94, 181 concentration camps, 127

South America, 4, 17, 23-4, 32, 33, 36, 78 see also Amerindians Soviet Union, breakdown of, 7 Spain colonialism, 27, 28, 32, 66, 76—7, 78, 79 decline of empire, 37-8, 39, 59

Moors, 32, 75, 76, 77, 180, 183 Spenser, Edmund, 28, 76 The Faerie Queene, 73

A View of the Present State of Ireland, 72-3, 131

spirituality, 110-11 Said, Edward, 16, 108, 187-8, 218 influence of, 5, 14-15, 16, 21 Orientalism, 6, 7, 14, 16, 136, 139, 140, 141, 143

critiques of, 212 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), is

and India, 166, 169-71 and Irish character, 110 Spivak, Gayatri, 147 Stanihurst, Richard, ‘Description Ireland’, 71-2, 78-9 Statesman, The, 126

Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), 69

Shakespeare, William, 71

Steele, Sir Richard, 114 Stephens, James, 129, 139 The Demi-Gods, 150 In the Land of Youth, 149 Tain Bo Ciiailnge (version), 150 Stuart, Charles, 213 Subramaniam, Diwan Bahadur N., 148 Suleri, Sara, 7 Swami, Shri Purohit, 150, 151-2 The Holy Mountain, 151 An Indian Monk, 150, 151 Ten Principal Upanishads, 151

Shaw, George Bernard, 98, 102, 110, 114

Swift, Jonathan, 112, 114, 115-16

samadarshana, 170, 171-2

Sampson, William, 89-90 ‘Chinese Journals’, 141 Sangari, Kum, 61 Saturday Review of Literature, 160 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 180 Schwarz, Roberto, 23-4 Scott, Sir Walter, 91 Scottish Enlightenment, 82-3, 84 sectarianism, 1, 8, 19, 20

settlement colonies, 30-2, 35-7, 51

John Bull's Other Island, 148

A Tale of a Tub, 115

of

246 ~— Index Synge, John Millington, 98, 110, 114, 119

Playboy of the Western World, 13, 118 synthetic

vision

(samadarshana),

170,

171-2 Syria, 185

Vallencey, Charles, 14, 130, 132-3, 135, 210

Essay on

the Antiquity

of the Irish

Language, 131, 132

A Vindication of the Ancient History of Treland, 132-3

Tagore, Rabindranath, 138, 152-5, 158-9, 160, 168 ‘East and West’, 154 Gitanjali, 150, 151 Gora, 149, 155

The Home and the World, 155 internationalism, 158-9, 174 ‘Poet Yeats’, 154 The Post Office, 151, 217

Yeats and, 150, 151, 152-5

Tain Bo Cuailnge, 150 Theosophical Society, 162, 169, 213

Vedic laws, 169

Vedic poets, 152 ‘Vindex, Julius’, 134 Viswanathan, Gauri, 14, 213 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34, 196 Walsh, Peter, 79 Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 189

Weizmann, Chaim, 182 West Indies, 30, 33, 37, 79 indentured servants, 4 Whelan, Kevin, 12-13, 15, 33

theosophy, 159, 162, 164, 166-9, 174, 213

Whiteboys, 145

Thevet, André, Cosmographie Universelle,

Whitlam, Keith, 184 Wild Geese, 103

74 Thomond, Donchadh O’Brian, Earl of, 79 Thompson, Francis, 173

Thuggee, 136-7 Tibawi, A.L., 183 Tdibin, Colm, 96, 97 Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 4, 96 Topographia Hiberniae, 63, 66, 67-9, 70, 71,

79 Trevelyan, Charles, 59-60

Tristram Shandy, 99 Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 181

Tupinamba, 76-7 unemployment, 18, 19 union with Britain, 3-4, 39, 40, 42 United Irishmen, 4, 12, 81, 82, 83, 86-91,

103, 141, 179 United Nations, 125 United States

Wilde, Oscar, 98, 102, 114, 179 William of Malmesbury, 66 Williams, Robert A., Jnr, The American

Indian in Western Legal Thought, 28 Wills, Clair, 16 Wilson, Edmund, 182

women feminism and nationalism, 11 rememoration and the Famine, 105—7 Woolf, Virginia, 170 Wordsworth, William, 87 World War I, 173-4 Yadin, Yigael, 182, 184 Yeats, W.B., 14, 42, 94, 96, 98, 102, 111, 114, 119, 161, 165, 166, 179 The Cat and the Moon..., 129, 150 ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, 149

Easter Rising and, 162-3

as a colonizer, 59

Noh dramas, 150, 151, 216

colonization of, 30, 31, 33, 51, 94 globalization and, 5, 7 independence, 38, 39 Declaration of Independence, 87, 199

Orientalism and, 129, 138, 149, 150-5, 169, 216

Tagore and, 150, 151, 152-5

Irish immigrants, 39-40

Ten Principal Upanishads, 151 Young, Robert, 7

Iroquois nation, 86—7

Yugoslavia, 180, 185

national narrative challenged, 178, 180 Vaid, Sudesh, 61 Vaishnavism, 152, 153

Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States, 180 Zionism, 181—4

.

_

\

é

a

, .

a

; _

5

q

ae

f=

poe et evs

-

7

each, a, ak Sie iti

a

7

esAtiedora ere OL: S —

a

ot

‘

ee

; fone im toe. Pa

J

7

as

:

=

-_

Clare Carroll is Professor of Literature at the City University in New York. Patricia King is a Lecturer and Administrator at New York University.

ISBN 0-268-02286-0

8 9 "780268!'022860

=