Dissimilation and Federation: Irish and Caribbean Modernisms in Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin

Abstract

In this article, Derek Walcott's play The Sea at Dauphin (1954) and John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1903) are discussed in order to address the problem of comparing modernisms that are seen as 'heterogenous' insofar as they exist on the peripheries of traditional transatlantic modernism. Most readings of Walcott's play have assumed that it should be read in terms of a 'comparison' to Synge's Riders to the Sea, the play that it most resembles and which Walcott has claimed as his source. Natalie Melas's theory of 'dissimulation' makes us reconsider the principles of such inter-peripheral comparisons, making it possible to consider cross-cultural readings within the colonial peripheries not in terms of identity but rather as processes of recognition and misrecognition. It is suggested that Walcott's 'dissimilation' of Synge's play is rooted in his transformation of Synge's modernist practice from an (Irish) nationalist to a (Caribbean) federationist aesthetics.