Another lost cause? Pan-Celticism, race and language

Abstract

Taking its lead from Slavoj Zizek's recent work, this article suggests that revisiting the ‘lost cause’ of Pan-Celticism may lead us to consider some of the unthinking assumptions involved in the contemporary liberal embrace of a multicultural, ‘civic’, nationalism. This article thus revisits what the historian R. F. Foster describes as a ‘forgotten aspect’ of the Irish literary revival of the 1890s: the Pan-Celtic movement. The late 1880s and 1890s was a time when, despite considerable historical, social and cultural differences, the national question in Ireland, Wales and Scotland had a simultaneous impact on the political and cultural life of Britain. Having traced the uneasy relationship between ‘race’ and ‘language’ manifested in much recent literary criticism back, via Paul Gilroy, Raymond Williams and Hannah Arendt, to the Pan-Celtic debates of the nineteenth century, I conclude by arguing that a genuine multiculturalism in the contemporary nations of the British Isles must register the reality of multilingualism. John Koch notes that it is ‘the scientific fact of a Celtic family of languages that has weathered unscathed the Celtosceptic controversy’. This article's return to the lost cause of Pan-Celticism is an attempt to place the question of linguistic difference at the heart of contemporary cultural debate in order to exposes the intolerance of Anglophone multiculturalism.