Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ireland and Postcolonial Theory Nessa Cronin Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King , pp. 246 Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. $47.50. A good place to start with this collection of essays is at the end, with Edward Said's reflection that "one of the main strengths of postcolonial analysis is that it widens, instead of narrows, the interpretive perspective." One thread woven into all ten essays in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory is a concern for the widening of the field of analysis in terms of Ireland's relation to the discourse of empire and colonialism. While recognizing the material differences of each colonial situation, such a critique would also show similarities of colonial discourse and modes of resistance in materially different regions. This collection foregrounds the need to identify the location of such critical perspectives in terms of their historical and methodological positions. Clare Carroll notes that further enquiry is needed into how the Republic of Ireland will relate to Northern Ireland, and also asks what will it mean to be Irish in the future—questions that, she acknowledges, are beyond the remit of the current collection of essays. She also highlights is the need for more critical engagement with Irish-language sources. Carroll stresses that these essays share a consideration for "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." In the collection's first essay, Joe Cleary argues that, for now, "postcolonial studies in Ireland represents less an authoritative corpus of work than the name of a still quite novel research agenda." Ireland, he argues, should not only be examined in terms of a European frame of reference, but also in relation to its relationship to other colonial experiences. Such a postcolonial critique "impels Irish Studies in the direction of conjunctural global analysis." David Lloyd concerns himself with the "differential method" as being the "distinctive practice of postcolonial analysis," while also calling for more comparative work in the field [End Page 145] of Colonial Studies. With "Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals," Carroll sets the "genealogy of postcolonialism" with the sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland in relation to the conquest of the Americas. She follows Nicholas Canny in arguing that the "colonizing activities" of Raleigh, Gilbert, and Drake in Ireland can be read as a "rehearsal" for their later exploits in the Americas, and argues that the English Elizabethans represent the Irish as being more alien than the contemporary European representations of Native Americans. Her perceptive readings of Gerald of Wales, Derricke, and Spenser argue that race is mapped onto an idea of ethnos or nation, and that this takes place through language— the English language here being the uniting discourse of civility which will later become the discourse of nation. Luke Gibbons writes of how theory is usually associated with the metropolitan center, but argues for the possibility of "alternative Enlightenments, on the periphery" which "is of interest to Irish culture." The influence of the United Irishmen on the Scottish Enlightenment is an influence, he argues, that has yet to be fully explored. Kevin Whelan deals with the politics of filiation ("that to which we are born") and affiliation ("that to which we aspire") and postcolonial memory in an essay that utilizes Paul Ricoeur's concept of memory in a postcolonial frame. Whelan concerns himself primarily with questions of narrative, history, and the duty to remember "because of the inescapable links between past and future." In another essay, Seamus Deane examines the implications of writing in English, which he argues is also "the language of a condition—modernity," though his contention that Irish is an "abandoned language" is one that some may find problematic as a description of what happened to the Irish language in the nineteenth century. Joseph Lennon gives an overview of Irish Orientalism, and the link between colonial discourse on Ireland and India with readings of Renan, Mangan, and Vallencey; the life and times of James Cousins and his interests in theosophy and Indian nativism is examined by Gauri Viswanathan, who argues that...