Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 by Colleen Taylor

Other| September 01 1994 Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in Colonial Ireland Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley London: Routledge, 1992. 160 pp. $68.50. W. D. Sockwell W. D. Sockwell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1994) 26 (3): 521–523. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-26-3-521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation W. D. Sockwell; Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in Colonial Ireland. History of Political Economy 1 September 1994; 26 (3): 521–523. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-26-3-521 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of Political Economy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1994 by Duke University Press1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley. Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. 1992. Pp. xiv, 208. $68.50. - Volume 25 Issue 2

Colonial Ireland, 1169-1369. By Robin Frame. Pp x, 149. Dublin: Helicon. 1981. IR£3.65 paperback, IR£6.70 hardback. (Helicon History of Ireland) - Late medieval Ireland, 1370-1541. By Art Cosgrove. Pp vii, 134. Dublin: Helicon. 1981. IR£3.65 paperback, IR£6.70 hardback. (Helicon History of Ireland) - The catholic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Patrick J. Corish. Pp vii, 156. Dublin: Helicon. 1981. IR£3.65 paperback, IR£6.70 hardback. (Helicon History of Ireland) - Volume 24 Issue 94

Robin Frame. Colonial Ireland, 1169-1369. (The Helicon History of Ireland) Dublin: Helicon Limited; distributed by Longwood Publishing Group, Inc., Dover, N. H. 1981. Pp. x, 149. 6.95 paper. - Volume 18 Issue 3

William J. Smyth.<i>Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750</i>.:Map‐Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750.<i>(Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs, number 16.)</i>

Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland by Sean O. Moore

Kilmainham Gaol (1796–1924) became the de facto holding center for political prisoners in Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century. Officially closing in 1910, it reopened a number of times for “emergencies” before its final closure after the Irish Civil War (1922–23). After 1924 it lay abandoned until reopening as a heritage attraction in the early 1960s. It was taken into state protection in 1986. Using a range of graffiti assemblages predominantly dating from 1910 onwards this paper will explore the “imperial debris” of contested narratives of meaning, ownership, and identity that the prison walls continue to materialize.

A few lines from Moya Cannon’s poem Our Words distil some of the essence of the evolution of new varieties of English in Ireland: (1) as the language of conquest grows cold in statute books, elsewhere, its words are subsumed into the grammars of the conquered I be, you be, he bees. (Cannon 2007: 16) As new Englishes developed over the last five centuries — an important outcome of English, later British, conquest and colonisation — their speakers took the English language and made it their own, creating new grammars in the process. One new grammatical feature that emerged in Irish English (IrE) is the habitual aspect of the declension rattled off by the poet. The interaction in speakers’ minds of English/Scots verb forms and an Irish grammatical category resulted in an IrE distinction between indicative and habitual be: She bees early means something different from She’s early. This habitual reflects a category that was (and is) present in the Irish language but not in most of the English and Scots varieties that contributed to the feature pool from which IrE emerged. The exception in British English (BrE) is the south-western dialects of England, which did contribute to the mix in colonial Ireland, though the habitual in south-west England is invariant be, rather than the conjugated form found in parts of Ireland (see the overview in Hickey 2007: 226–8).

The blind stripling in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has long been a figure of great interest to Joycean scholarship. His visual impairment has been allied autobiographically to Joyce’s own eye troubles, and his character has been said to represent the critical symbolic link between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. This essay follows recent scholarship on embodiment and disability to investigate the further import of the stripling in Joyce’s “epic of the body.” In particular, this essay argues that when read in a disability studies context the stripling adds to an understanding of the novel’s formal characteristics and the ways Joyce links physical disfigurement and racial oppression in colonial Ireland. Reading the stripling in two different episodes draws attention to how narrative structure shapes representations of one of Ulysses’s most notable disabled characters. The stripling’s central and highly visual appearance in Ulysses’s “Lestrygonians” episode rehearses racializing rhetorics that work to “other” disabled people not unlike those historically levied against the Irish themselves; here, the stripling is notably subject of and to Bloom’s ableist gaze. In contrast, his largely peripheral and uniquely aural representation in the “Sirens” episode complicates his earlier depiction in “Lestrygonians.” In “Sirens,” the stripling’s peripheral location paradoxically centralizes him in a position of power in the chapter’s narrative matrix; here, the stripling is maestro and metronome of “Sirens’” orchestral cacophony. At once a tightly surveilled object and elusive subject, the stripling draws attention to the body and its modes of being in the world and the novel alike; his presence in the novel destabilizes our understanding of normative bodies and narrative form and shows how the pathologized body as ostensible aberration is both a disruptive and generative force in Joyce’s work.

Studies over the last couple of decades of human zoonotic (animal reservoir initiated) epidemics reveal that vulnerability-factors for such epidemics include high population densities, human-induced changes in the biological makeup of ecological systems, and the distinct human interactions within these new ecosystems, intensive farming practices, malnutrition, and prior ill-health. The recent DNA evidence of Yersinia pestis, known to be responsible for the bubonic plague, forces a re-evaluation of basic assumptions of the Black Death that almost all historical narratives have made. A monomorphic pathogen, Y. pestis, has been remarkable in how little it has changed since the Black Death, and there is no evidence to show that the 14th-century plague was more virulent or contagious than modern outbreaks.Contemporary medieval documentation reveals a perception that the Gaelic-Irish were not suffering from the Black Death as much as the colonists. However, if the genetic disposition between the national groups was a significant factor, then why is there no noteworthy difference noted in subsequent epidemics? This paper uses vulnerability factors for a zoonotic epidemic to assess regional ecological risk in Gaelic and colonial Ireland. Since the ecological change of the period has been largely attributed to human activity, socio-economic and knowledge systems and institutions role in promoting certain activity that altered the landscape is an important part of this inquiry. Pollen evidence is used in conjunction with historic and archaeological data to note regional differences, and to document how they became especially apparent during the Bruce Invasion of 1315–1318. The evidence suggests that vulnerability to epidemic disease was greater in the south-east and midlands of Ireland than in northern parts of the island, and that this paved the way for contrasting responses to the Black Death.

Review: Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century

Toward a Colonial Ireland?

This article intends to analyse the specific strategies which were pursued in later medieval Ireland for the purpose of delegitimising the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. After a brief sketch of the conquest in the 12th century, it will be argued that this process cannot be accurately captured in terms of a dichotomy of the ‚conquerors‘ and the ‚conquered‘, insofar as political conflicts and alliances are concerned. Nevertheless, the Irish sources strictly distinguished between the ‚English‘ and the ‚Irish‘ in their description of group identities in colonial Ireland. As will be shown, it was this construction of identities which played a key role in strategies that emphatically referred to the fundamental differences between the groups in order to delegitimise English presence in Ireland. The article examines the heterogeneous elements which were used and combined in these strategies. Firstly, it illustrates how the Irish Annals claimed a punishment of the Anglo-Normans by Irish Saints and relied on the tradition of Irish High Kingship in order to justify Irish opposition. Secondly, special attention is given to the ‚Remonstrance of the Irish Princes‘ of 1317, thereby demonstrating how the ‚Remonstrance‘ adapted different concepts of contemporary discourses, like the concepts of natural law and hypocrisy, for the purpose of producing evidence for the illegitimacy of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. By doing so, the ‚Remonstrance‘ will be reinterpreted against the background of political and religious discourses of the early 14th century.

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier according to the Irish peasantry’s subversive entanglement with nonhuman materiality. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object’s unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression. Coins helped to reformulate post-Union nationalist subjectivity around the endurance of material memory. Flax facilitated a paternalistic model of an Irish character that was feminine and capable of whitening. Spinning wheels engineered the idea of an active, turning, resistant mind inside an ostensibly compliant Irish tenant. Mud cabins articulate an Irish creative response to a destroyed, deforested landscape. Pigs afforded Irish writers a nonhuman language of national loss and colonial resistance. The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Irish Materialisms proves that new materialism holds powerful postcolonial potential. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, this book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has previously been recognized.

James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is an insatiable reader of the cultural texts that comprise turn-of-the-century Dublin. Critics such as R. B. Kershner rightly have noted the ways in which the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man romantically reenacts Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and Bulwer-Lytton's Lady of Lyons in order to escape the ever-downward spiral of life in the Dedalus household,(1) but I believe the themes of these works have even broader implications in the political development of the young artist. They also reflect and solidify the sense of betrayal that Stephen comes to recognize as a pivotal motif in Irish colonial politics. Both works depict estranged lovers separated by treachery, but this important theme is also encoded with the signifiers of self betrayal. The protagonists of these stories are deceived not from without, but from within: Edmond Dantes and Claude Melnotte are betrayed by ill-chosen friends, and to a lesser degree, by the women they love. The implications of this self-deception for both Stephen Dedalus and colonial Ireland become clear as we follow Stephen's reading of the Irish political scene and note his inescapable conclusion: It is not England that is Ireland's chief betrayer; it is Ireland itself. Vincent J. Cheng and Enda Duffy recently have argued forcefully for Joyce's position as a subaltern writer concerned with representing the divisive and devastating effects of colonial oppression in Ireland. Both Cheng and Duffy suggest Joyce depicts an Ireland that, in its attempts to throw off the mantle of British imperialism, devises a nationalism that mimics the very structures of racism, ethnocentrism, and violence that Britannia perpetuated in order to subdue indigenous populations across the empire. I, too, view Joyce as a highly politicized, colonial figure writing against canonical and political hegemony. While I agree that Joyce certainly sees British imperialism as a fundamental cause of Irish political chaos in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (Can the back of a slave forget the rod? Joyce asks [Critical Writings 168]), I would also assert that Joyce's primary, purpose in depicting this discord is not so much to condemn British mistreatment of Ireland as it is to expose and deride Ireland's oppression of its own sons and daughters as it attempts the impossible task of purifying or de-anglicizing Irish culture. Robert Spoo has claimed that Ulysses itself and its protagonists repudiate the totalizing impulse of conventional historiography as simplistic and unsatisfactory; that is, Joyce's novel rejects the depiction of as a teleological, inexorable progression towards one great goal (Ulysses 2.381, my emphasis). Spoo also contends that Joyce attacked Irish nationalism and its doctrine of racial purity for the same reasons (47).(2) I agree with this assessment of Joyce's position, but central to my argument is the contention that late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism - like the problematic notion of Irish - cannot be discussed as a monolithic entity; nationalisms seems to me a more accurate term than the singular form to describe the multiplicity of revolutionary movements in turn-of-the-century Ireland. These nationalisms divided colonial Ireland and presented a threat to Irish nation-ness as dangerously monolithic and oppressive as any imperialistic hegemony.(3) As Stephen Dedalus moves through the politically charged narratives of Portrait and Ulysses, his encounters with the evolving Irish nation - as well as his exclusion from its forms at every turn - reveal Joyce's implicit condemnation of these Irishmen (and women) who have recreated the very political and cultural constructs that they would overthrow. It is a repetitiously bloody and complex colonial heritage that Stephen Dedalus must decode, a national experience characterized by six centuries of British occupation and Irish revolt. Beginning in 1171 with Henry II's arrival on Irish soil and continuing until the 1922 partition of the island into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, Irish history records the gamut of colonial oppression aimed at expediting the absorption of the foreign culture and reaping the economic harvests of colonization. …