Ireland: John Bull's Other Island

Abstract

Edward Said's influence on cultural, literary, and historical theory in post-colonial Ireland is highly significant. Theorists such as Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and Luke Gibbons have engaged productively with Said's work to elucidate and interrogate the ways in which colonization and decolonization operate(d) in the Irish context, particularly through literary and historical texts. Irish geographers, however, have been slow to engage with the implications of Said's work for the construction of geographic knowledge, despite Said's obvious concern for the intersection of geography, colonialism, and decolonization. The geographical sense, he wrote, makes possible the construction of various kinds of knowledge, all of them in one way or another dependent upon the perceived character and destiny of a particular (1994, 78).In this essay, we draw on Said's insights into the process of decolonization to speculate on ways in which geography and geographic knowledge in newly independent Ireland may...