Irish multicultural epiphanies: modernity and the recuperation of migrant memory in the writing of Hugo Hamilton

Abstract

This contribution examines the ways in which contemporary Irish writers, particularly Hugo Hamilton, deliberately recuperate migrant memory in their work in order to visualise cultural hybridity and difference as modes of self-acceptance. The author sets Hamilton’s work beside that of his modernist predecessor James Joyce (in particular, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses), in order to compare notions of exile, homesickness, and displacement. Contributions such as this remind us of the relevance of reinterpreting, in the present context of twenty-first century Ireland, canonical texts in order to reveal more fully their multicultural meanings, something that Declan Kiberd has also done at various points in The Irish Writer and the World(2005: 20, 305-7).