Postcolonial Ireland Research Articles

Dangerous memories and entangled temporalities: Irish republicanism and the postcolonial politics of time

ABSTRACT In this article we develop a ‘hauntological’ reading of republicanism in postcolonial Ireland. This reading takes as its object the ways in which the politics of remembering – and remembering republican politics in particular – is equally a politics of time. Exploring the politics of republicanism through the lens of entangled temporalities, we develop an understanding of a particular mode of political desire. This republican political desire holds open the demand for a radical interrogation of the (post)colonial given. As such, it takes the form of a ‘dangerous memory’. Through the concept of a ‘dangerous memory’, we excavate a certain republican politics of refusal, that haunts the legitimacy and automatic reproduction of the postcolonial settlement and the attendant proprietary relations of inequality that it formalizes – culturally, politically, economically and legally. This theoretical interpretation of Irish republican hauntology is empirically explored through three historical layers and entangled temporalities that are organized around the ghosts of Roger Casement, a radical republican figure. The dangerous memories of Casement not only disrupt the canonical or official interpretation of Irish republicanism, but also open up the left-republican possibility to further interrogate the postcolonial present, both in Ireland and beyond.

“She is finally home”: feminist storytelling, family imaginaries and transnational solidarity in Irish abortion activism

ABSTRACT Across the so-called West, feminist storytelling positions reproductive justice and the often-twinned issue of women’s place within the family as a progressive issue. This conveniently ignores the inherent contradictions of the existence of only limited access to abortion in many Western nations, as well as parallel histories of access to reproductive justice in non-Western countries. Postcolonial Ireland, as an apparently Western country with a renowned history of anti-feminist legislation, has existed as one of these contradictions. In this article, we examine Irish feminists’ familial storytelling to reveal how they managed their contradictory position in a teleological narrative that positioned Western feminism as the epitome of progress. We adopt a comparative approach – looking at the lead up to the introduction of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution in 1983, which awarded the foetus constitutional rights, and then the high profile Repeal the 8th movement that successfully revoked that amendment in 2018 – to understand reproductive rights activists’ changing uses of “the family” to effect intergenerational and transnational solidarity. Applying Sara Ahmed’s concept of “sticky” emotions, we examine how feminists transformed “the Irish family” from a site of coldness and despair to one of hope, dignity, humanity and happiness.

THEORIZING ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIATION THROUGH IRELAND'S PEATLANDS

In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, boglands were seen as "wastelands" to be "improved" by large-scale enterprise. Today, they are strategic landscapes for carbon sequestration and climate solutions, both for the state and multinationals located in Ireland. Various contemporary projects, co-funded by industry and state partners, have facilitated the expansion and proliferation of sensing, monitoring, and mapping technologies across Ireland's bogs to measure and maximize their value in these economies. However, by doing so, they are laying the foundations for a "green grab" of Ireland's land resources by tech companies. This paper situates the historical resource and conservation landscape of Ireland’s peat boglands within their emerging role in datafied “green” revolutions. Emphasizing the stakes of land, resources, technologies, and research institutions within green transitions, the paper theorizes peat bogs an emerging site of digital climate solutionism. In doing so, I offer a framework for understanding resource landscapes in so-called “post-extractive” contexts where networked forms of extraction are innovated through public/private technoscientific research at the intersections of digital technology and ecosystemic interactions between geologies, atmospheres, and cultures. Bringing together literature from environmental media studies, STS, and geography, and performing participant observation and discourse analysis on emerging projects of peatland science in academic and industry settings, I theorize how “environmental mediation” offers an aperture for understanding how digital technologies network landscapes towards “ecosystem services” and other capital-driven climate projects.

Greaney, John. The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation

Influenced by new modernist studies, John Greaney diligently interrogates the simultaneous proximity and distance that Irish modernism has to a national narrative of social and political history, particularly as enabled through form, aesthetics and questions of language and translation. The Distance of Irish Modernism adopts what Greaney calls a ‘flexible formalism’ (p. 26) in order to emphasize the importance of aesthetic features when approaching Irish modernism’s relationship to Irish history. In Chapter 1, Greaney complicates historicist readings of Beckett’s work, specifically Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnameable (1953). He convincingly illustrates the ways in which Beckett deflects ‘the capacities of even basic representation’ (p. 58), as apparent in his engagement with the Holocaust and Irish colonial history, and thereby enables his works to ‘operate at a remove from history to negotiate its trauma and ineffability’ (p. 58). Chapter 2 interrogates the questions of authorship and voice raised by the various pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, as well as the subsequent destabilizing forces of fragmentation and trivia located within texts such as At-Swim-Three-Birds (1939). Greaney argues that O’Nolan/O’Brien/na gCopaleen’s texts actively refute being conflated with their cultural and historical contexts. Chapter 3 perhaps best captures the spirit of Greaney’s endeavours. His metacommentary on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) highlights that the variability in academic definitions and readings of Bowen’s novels acts to destabilize the text’s relationship with Irish history. In his textual analysis, Greaney argues that Bowen’s representation of Ireland during the War of Independence through the perspective of female Anglo-Irish characters, whose worlds are limited by their class and gender, serves to put distance between the novel and the wider revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Greaney argues that Kate O’Brien’s application of omniscience is a formal modernist device which functions to distance the narratives of Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Land of Spices (1941) from her contemporary social history. Greaney clearly demonstrates how in O’Brien’s work, the setting of postcolonial Ireland is rendered ‘spectral’ (p. 139) by her omniscient narrator, who thus serves to detach O’Brien’s texts from their historical contexts. In his final chapter, Greaney considers the work of John McGahern, a writer usually associated with naturalism and social realism (p. 141), and tests the presumed distinctions between these attributes and modernism. Focusing on a wide range of McGahern’s texts, Greaney argues that McGahern’s critique of mid-century Ireland is informed by a modernist fragmentation of various narrative operations that render reality a ‘hermeneutic enigma’ (p. 165).

Brian Friel in Spain: An Off-Centre Love Story

Spanish theatres are not prolific in the staging of Irish playwrights. However, the Northern Irish writer Brian Friel (1929-2015) has been a curious exception, his plays having been performed in different cities in Spain since William Layton produced Amantes: vencedores y vencidos (Lovers: Winners and Losers) in 1972. The origin of Friel’s popularity in this country may be attributed to what many theatre directors and audiences considered to be a parallel political situation between post-colonial Ireland and the historical peripheral communities with a language other than Spanish: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia; the fact is that the number of Catalan directors who have staged works by Friel exceeds that of any other territory in Spain. However, despite the political identification that can be behind the success of a play like Translations (1980), the staging of others with a subtler political overtone, such as Lovers (1967), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Molly Sweeney (1994), Faith Healer (1979) and Afterplay (2001), should prompt us to find the reason for this imbalance of representation elsewhere. By analysing the production of the plays, both through the study of their programmes and interviews with their protagonists, and by scrutinising their reception, I have attempted to discern some common factors to account for the selection of Friel’s dramatic texts.

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain: W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain:W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero Heather McCracken (bio) W.B. Yeats is perhaps more often remembered as a poet than a playwright, but his work in the theater was a central part of his artistic identity during his lifetime. The form, style, and accessibility of his plays varied over his career, but the theme was consistent: Irish mythology. The myths to which he frequently returned dealt with the Ulster cycle hero Cuchulain. In addition to several poems, Yeats wrote five plays addressing different episodes in the hero's life with the purpose of shaping Cuchulain as a new culture hero for Ireland. These play's—On Bailes Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—are imaginative revisions promoting an Irish culture separate from that of England's, and they reflect the struggles of an author and a nation fighting for independence. Irish decolonization was not a simple, unitary effort, and Yeats believed that he could be a voice to guide the nation, whether the nation wanted his guidance or not. These struggles—defining Irish identity, moving toward independence, and Yeats's role in the formation of a postcolonial Ireland—are all on display in the Cuchulain plays. That Yeats wanted to create an Irish national identity from precolonial myths and legends is not a new discovery,1 but [End Page 147] his deliberate shaping of Cuchulain as an Irish culture hero warrants more exploration. My analysis provides a deeper reading of Yeats's plays by focusing on the shifting, uncertain relations between Yeats, Cuchulain, and postcolonial Ireland, where Cuchulain is a cultural "superhero" stand-in for Irish national identity and a metonymical representation of Yeats's political frustrations. Because Yeats authored his public identity in these plays in unique and complicated ways—raising questions about his role as an artist/citizen—examining Cuchulain as a culture hero and role model for the nation illuminates the personal and political struggles that Yeats faced as a postcolonial author. Postcolonial theorists have suggested that culture heroes such as Cuchulain function as significant metonymic figures for colonized nations struggling for a sense of identity. In Calibrations, Ato Quayson explains how culture heroes contribute to national identities as an invaluable part of cultural decolonization. "How," Quayson asks, "do we isolate a particular social, cultural, or political phenomenon for analysis while retaining a view of its relationship to complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be perceived as an object or objective field in the first place?" (31). His solution centers on the culture hero. Quayson defines the trope of cultural heroism as a "mode of characterization of agency." whose typology involves some of the heroic associations of priests, traditional rulers, medicine men, hunters, politicians, and even thieves and popular rogues" (36). In other words, a culture hero emerges as a socially recognizable figure capable of exhibiting some degree of agency. In the case of a colonized nation, Quayson explains that the native population looks to these culture heroes as models for the formation of an anticolonial national identity because culture heroism "is a threshold that reveals important structural ideas about the nation-state form" (33). I believe it is important to attend to this threshold by examining heroic characterizations of agency for Irish decolonization efforts. As Quayson notes, culture heroism "provides a peculiar intersection of the discourses of literature, politics and civil society" (Postcolonialism 76). Examining culture heroes such as Cuchulain in Ireland—a nation with a well-documented unique relationship between art and politics—can help to shape an understanding of the kinds of anticolonial resistance narratives used by the Irish and to expand our understanding of postcolonial culture heroes generally. Although Quayson drew his examples of culture heroes from [End Page 148] what he called "the everyday genres" of West Africa, I believe that this critical apparatus has great value in colonial settings like Ireland because of the shared concern with shaping a national identity. Understanding the image of the culture hero metonymically, we can see that this figure would serve as a valuable...

Mad Daughters, Narcissist Mothers: A Study of Turn-Taking Mechanism in Martin MacDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Martin MacDonagh's play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane depicts a violent domestic crisis in a rural household of post-colonial Ireland. Teeming with wild humor and anxiety, the play tells the gloomy fate of Maureen Folan, a mentally fragile and emotionally trapped spinster in her early forties and Mag, her aging, selfish and demanding mother. The main objective of this paper is to apply a conversation analysis (CA) approach to evaluate the mutually destructive relationship between the mother, who constantly strives to inhibit her daughter's romantic life, and the daughter who accuses her mother of constraining her natural right for self-realization. The first part of this paper outlines the work of the conversational analysts of the ethnomethodological school, namely Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, which crystalizes the mechanics of turn taking in ordinary conversation. The second part employs the insights derived from the conversational analysts to examine the strategies of speech alternation and interaction management in the opening scene to demonstrate how the two women are involved in a fierce battle for control that inevitably leads to the play's appalling end in which one of them devastates the other.

Critical SFL Praxis With Bilingual Youth: Disciplinary Instruction in a Third Space

ABSTRACTThe authors explore the theoretical and pedagogical premises of their critical systemic functional linguistics approach, which they developed to challenge the deficit positioning of bilingual students in the Southeast of the United States. As multilingual educators from postcolonial Ireland and India, the theoretical framework has helped the authors conceptualize and design interventions that support the incorporation of the linguistic and cultural repertoires of students while acknowledging that disciplinary literacy needs an explicit form of linguistic instruction. Key tenets of this approach include fostering a third space where voices, languages, and registers of students and teachers interweave to make and challenge disciplinary knowledge domains. The authors’ pedagogical and professional work, which they illustrate through discussion of data from a larger ethnographic study, has encouraged their students to switch among registers and languages while appropriating academic discourses in a high-stakes testing culture. It has also supported bilingual students in challenging normative discourses about immigration and other issues related to social inequity.

Political geographies, ‘unfaithful’ translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism’, postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles’ as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.

MARTIN McDONAGH S THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE AS A TALE OF DEBUNKED MOTHER MYTH, (SELF-)EXILE AND EMIGRATION

The Irish struggled for centuries to gain their sovereignty from the English; however, after the independence that was obtained in 1948, the following problems were experienced: socio-economic problems, dislocation, fragmentation, and, as a consequence of all, problems of emigration and being exposed to being in (self-)exile. All these problems are projected in Martin Mconagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) by means of the symbolic representation of mother Ireland through the old mother, Mag, who suffocates her daughter, Maureen, who tries to find a way of being freed from the suffocation of the country. In this way, McDonagh criticises the postcolonial condition of Ireland by means of debunking the mother myth of Ireland. Taking into consideration the high value of the symbols reflected in The Beauty Queen, the play might be regarded as the symbolic representation of Ireland as a country that has not yet been freed from the burdens of its colonial past. Within the light of these discussions and as opposed to the general criticism on McDonagh’s plays that they do not reflect Irish realities and are nothing more than imaginary stories, this paper aims to discuss McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane as a play that represents the above-mentioned conditions and problems experienced in postcolonial Ireland particularly in the 1990s.

All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean

Joan Fitzpatrick Dean. All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 335 + 8 color plates. $39.95. In 2004, Irish theatre scholar Lionel Pilkington called for an expansion of the focus of Irish theatre studies to include more sustained investigations of forms of performance outside of the theatre itself, including mumming, pageantry, and political demonstrations. Dating from William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and Lady Augusta Gregory's founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 (which would become the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre), the critical cachet of the playwright and the literary power of the legitimate stage have had remarkable staying power in Ireland, and remain in most cases the go-to method for organizing surveys of the Irish theatre. In the ensuing decade since Pilkington's call to action, the field has certainly expanded in a variety of dynamic ways to meet his challenge. Professor Joan Fitzpatrick Dean's All Dressed Up represents a substantial addition to this discourse, focusing as it does on forms of performance occurring outside the traditional theatre. Her work is the summation of years of primary-source research: Dean has mined a vast array of private papers, newspapers, and archival collections to produce a formidable work that shall certainly remain required reading for anyone interested in examining the complex interplay between historical pageantry and the changing cultural realities of postcolonial Ireland in the twentieth century. Pageantry has been critically discussed in Irish cultural debates before, but in a piecemeal fashion, centering (as Dean notes) on events such as the loyalist parades in Northern Ireland celebrating the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the various, opposing nationalist commemorations of events such as the 1798 rebellion and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. All Dressed Up builds on earlier works, such as Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan's collection Revising the Rising (1991) and Ian MacBride's edited collection, History and Memory in Modern Ireland (2001) to provide a more comprehensive examination of how pageantry specifically functioned in a vast array of contexts. Dean also situates her work within contemporary theatre and performance studies debates about the interplay between performance and the literary, text-centered tradition of the legitimate stage. Taking her bearing from Diana Taylors well-known work The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Dean asserts that the various forms of Irish pageantry that covered the century possessed affective, ludic, and cultural powers (2). Developing alongside the more easily archived, literary works of the legitimate stage, she stresses the popular appeal of pageantry as a barometer of cultural memory: if one asks what theatrical experience was both routine and popular with ordinary Irish people in the twentieth century, pageantry surfaces as a likely candidate (2). More people within that time period saw pageants than saw legitimate plays by several orders of magnitude. Equally influenced by the work of Pierre Nora and his conception of lieux de memoire (places of memory), Dean focuses on where and when these pageants transpired and on the cultural work they were doing in their specific milieus. Although it was generally celebrating] rather than interrogating] the past, Dean maintains that historical pageantry consistently reflected a desire to imagine, understand, or recover the Irish past by dramatizing a narrative (3). Pageants occupied and transformed non-traditional spaces: halls, squares, public parks, and sporting arenas attracted people that might not ever attend a play in a traditional theatre. The pageants' enormous popularity and broad appeal demanded a more sustained examination of the cultural work they were doing in Ireland, and Dean certainly delivers such. …

European Postcolonial Studies and Ireland: Towards a Conversation amongst the Colonized of Europe

In the 1980s, key Irish Studies scholars proposed that Irish culture, politics and economics – both past and present – are most usefully viewed in the context of imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. The result of this intervention is an Irish postcolonial studies which, over the past 35 years, has produced an influential body of scholarship premised on the idea that Ireland is a colony/former colony of the British Empire. Notwithstanding its considerable impact, Irish postcolonial studies has not been without its detractors, with the country's location within Europe forming the basis for one of most persistent objections to the application of a postcolonial framework to Ireland. Given the key role assigned to geography in the postcolonial debate in Ireland, this article explores the implications for Ireland of an emerging postcolonial critique centred on Europe. In addition to discussing the concept of internal colonisation as applied to such Western European countries as Italy and Britain, the article makes reference to postcolonial analyses of the region of Eastern and Central Europe and its relationship with both Russia and Western Europe. The article acknowledges that the branch of European postcolonial studies that focuses on uneven power relationships within and between European countries offers a useful challenge to the argument that Ireland should either be examined within a European framework or a postcolonial one, but argues that the categorisation of a greater number of European societies as colonies or former colonies raises important questions that require further debate.

Paul Durcan’s Critique of the Sexual Politics of Postcolonial Ireland: Toward a New Irish Womanhood and Manhood

Paul Durcan’s Critique of the Sexual Politics of Postcolonial Ireland: Toward a New Irish Womanhood and Manhood

Rethinking Postcolonial Worlds through Physical Activities

This special issue follows on from an international workshop entitled ‘Postcolonial Bodies’ which was held – in partnership with The International Journal of History of Sport – at the Institute of Sport Studies at the University of Lausanne on 5–6 June 2014. Thanks to the contributions from numerous specialists in the historical and social developments of physical activities in a colonial and postcolonial context, the main objective was to explore the epistemic issues raised by our approach. Why such a theme? Today, input from postcolonial and globalization studies greatly extends the scope for including the subject of ‘sport’ in polysemous analysis of transnational cultures and diasporas. The porous nature of both spatial and political borders is just as present in the development of sporting migration from not only south to north – but also north to south – as they are in the postcolonial transformation of former colonies (Niko Besnier). Moreover, the exploration of such practices before, during, and after decolonization shows that the political split which occurred on independence should also be put into perspective and rethought by looking at the role played by cultural practices – and physical activities – ‘through the colonial mirror’ (Nicolas Bancel), which shows the strong continuities which existed from colonial times to the postcolonial period. The ambivalence of this process which mixes political freedom with forms of intermixing, even acculturation, of the former colonial power’s culture can be identified from the moment modern sports were introduced into the former colonies until the postcolonial development of sport and sporting migration. On the one hand, the analysis of the role played by sport in postcolonial practices and representations of multiculturalism, frontiers, and gender shows the ambivalent nature of their local and international footings. Whilst the standards transmitted by modern sports favoured an individuation of the body, it also opened the door to numerous assertions whether of identity or politics. From South Africa (John Nauright and Benedict Carton) to postcolonial Ireland (Mike Cronin), from an East-West antagonism to a North-South competition (Anais Bohuon), well-known sportsmen and women incarnate the essential dimensions of the sporting postcolonial scene: ethnic and national identities, definition and control of gender, cultural change and hybridation of practices. On that point, one approach of this collection is to be able to gain a better understanding of the practices studied, in vastly different contexts, revealing at the same time a process of reaffirmation of genealogical rules in modern sports – meritocratic values, discipline of the body, competitive habitus – which all contributed to reinforcing

Lost Decades: Postcolonial Ireland and Zimbabwe

Lost Decades: Postcolonial Ireland and Zimbabwe

Lost Decades: Postcolonial Ireland and Zimbabwe

Lost Decades: Postcolonial Ireland and Zimbabwe

Hélène Cixous's Autre Bisexualité and the Eternal Feminine in the Works of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

This article analyses the creative engagement of the Irish-language poet Ní Dhomhnaill with Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine. Ní Dhomhnaill translates Cixousian images and concepts into her texts, returning on several occasions to the concept of l'autre bisexualité (‘the other bisexuality’). Cixous uses this concept to rehabilitate—and celebrate—what she designates as ‘the feminine’, the alterity within and outside the self. For both writers, this alterity comprehends marginalized cultures as well as femininity. Both bring anti-essentialist convictions to their views of gender and cultural identity, but their respective poetics are born of shared preoccupations with biblical and mythological figures, and narratives often implicated in essentialism. Ní Dhomhnaill connects these archetypal figures with the cultural realities of post-colonial Ireland. The author argues that she draws on the works of Cixous to connect the indigenous Irish language and culture with the rehabilitation of femininity. But whereas, in Cixousian texts, ‘femininity’ eludes concrete definitions and stable meanings, in the works of Ní Dhomhnaill, it often signifies an authentic pre-colonial culture that is ripe for rediscovery in post-colonial Ireland. Ní Dhomhnaill simultaneously celebrates this culture and acknowledges its embeddedness in a Celtic patriarchy that her Cixousian tropes work to undercut.

Bad subjects: language and interpellation in the Irish post-colony

This article explores the possibilities and limitations for a linguistic praxis in the post-colony. By deploying indigenous speech acts in strictly Anglophone contexts – i.e. by answering the British troops in Irish (Gaelic) when interpellated in English – republican/dissidents have constructed a multi-faceted resistance technique. What is or is not useful in this strategy, and what does its Althusserian architecture say about the connections between language, power, and the subject in post-colonial Ireland? Each of the three scenes analysed here (a poem and two film clips) features this technique, but only the final scene gestures towards a counter-interpellation of radical proportions, calling into question the very edifice of colonial-capitalism and enacting a means for its demise.

The Shannon Scheme, Rural Electrification, and Veiled History in Conor McPherson's The Weir

The Shannon Scheme, Rural Electrification, and Veiled History in Conor McPherson's The Weir Andrew Hazucha It is a commonplace observation among critics of Conor McPherson (b. 1971) that he is an apolitical playwright, largely uninfluenced by Irish history or Ireland's twentieth-century emergence as a modern postcolonial state.1 A native Dubliner whose plays are typically set in present-day urban environments, McPherson has, in the past, steadfastly resisted references in his works to the longue durée of British colonial rule, or for that matter to the birth, and the associated birth pangs, of postcolonial Ireland. However, in McPherson's most recent play, The Veil (2011)—his first in five years—he has shown himself to be thematically engaged with Irish history and identity; it is a period piece set in rural Ireland in 1822 at a bankrupt Anglo-Irish landed estate, where a bad harvest and starving local peasants bring the household's inhabitants to the psychological breaking point. The play's haunted Ascendancy estate and hostile environs become, as several reviewers have noted, a synecdoche for Ireland—including its troubled colonial history, its centuries-long position as a subaltern culture, its traumatized national psyche.2 [End Page 67] In interviews, McPherson has endorsed this reading of his play, confessing to a newfound interest in Irish historical and political events dating back some two hundred years. In a September 2011 interview with the Guardian, for example, McPherson states that he set The Veil in the 1820s because of the similarities between what he calls the "big economic crash following the Napoleonic wars" and the recent implosion of the Celtic Tiger. Citing the "post-colonial corruption and mismanagement" of the Irish economy, McPherson adds that prior to Ireland's economic collapse he would always have said, "I was born in Ireland, but I'm not an Irish writer—I'm a writer. Now I realise: of course I'm an Irish writer."3 In another 2011 interview, McPherson describes how, as the Irish economy started to disintegrate at the end of 2008, he began taking notes on Irish economic history. "For the first time," he says, "I realised the public can share a dysfunctional psyche, and that psyche can be generational. The Irish Famine is only five generations ago. I began to realise the mess we'd got ourselves into must have come from some tremendous trauma. For the first time, I accepted I am Irish—up till then I'd always felt European or a citizen of the world."4 But is the playwright's political and historical consciousness is an entirely new development, or has been there all along, albeit in less overt forms? It would be easy to accept McPherson's own assessment of himself and conclude that he has arrived at an epiphany at the age of forty. And yet, a rereading of his early breakthrough play, The Weir (1997), which he wrote when he was just twenty-five-years-old, suggests that an attention to a formative Irish historical event—and an awareness of a literary precedent for using that event—were both influences in his formulation of the play dating back to its first production in 1997. The Weir is widely celebrated for the psychological and emotional depth of its characters. Less widely noted are the ways in which it also masterfully links the nascent Free State government's harnessing of natural resources in the 1920s, specifically the damming of the lower Shannon River, with the "New Ireland's" rage for economic development at the cost of a vanishing landscape some seven decades later. In doing so, it also calls attention to Denis Johnston's [End Page 68] The Moon in the Yellow River, a play that made its debut at the Abbey Theatre in 1931 and which is set, like McPherson's work, against the backdrop of the much-trumpetedhydroelectric project at Ardnacrusha. Although McPherson has singled out James Joyce as one of his influences, Johnston's play is clearly the most practical antecedent for The Weir.5 Michael Rubenstein's recent Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (2010) has usefully posited that the problem of modernity confronting...

Joyce and the Spanish Ulysses

Joyce and the Spanish Ulysses Gayle Rogers (bio) Antonio Marichalar . . . asked me for something for [Juan Ramón Jiménez’s review] Índice, and I suggested my article [on Ulysses], freely and out of the love of making Joyce known to the people of the land of María Santísima. (Molly Bloom in Gibraltar, reading about herself in a Madrid review.) Valery Larbaud to Adrienne Monnier, 24 March, 19221 Valery Larbaud’s parenthetical comment in the epigraph above conjures a fascinating scenario that connects the world evoked by a fictional text to a critical world in which it circulated: James Joyce’s Spanish-Irish heroine Molly Bloom reads an analysis of herself (as depicted by an expatriate Irish author) in an actual Spanish periodical in the 1920s. Even if it would require Molly to return to the disputed territory of Gibraltar of her youth and to remaster the “little Spanish” she has mostly “forgotten” (U, 4.60–61), Larbaud’s vision of her reading his own influential article in translation raises several intriguing questions: how did Spanish critics initially receive Ulysses and interpret Molly’s character and avant-garde monologue, in contexts that dramatically contrasted those of their Anglophone and continental counterparts? What political critiques did they see entwined in Molly’s Hispanicity and in the Spanish and Irish affinities staged throughout the novel? As writers and intellectuals in Spain searched for new, foreign literary forms that would regenerate the culture of their marginalized “land of María Santísima,” what kind of map did they see in Joyce’s postcolonial Ireland integrated within an imagined post-imperial Europe? That is to say, when Stephen Dedalus overhears the Irish man of letters [End Page 255] Dr George Sigerson’s claim that Ireland has no “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” and that its “national epic has yet to be written,” Joyce points unawares to a challenge that many Silver Age (1898–1939) Spaniards saw for a country whose national epic from its Golden Age had become outdated, if not altogether irrelevant (U, 9.308–309). How does all of this bear on present readings of Joyce, his complex cosmopolitanism, and the politics of Ulysses, tied as they were to a country where civil war broke out in 1922? To answer these questions about the reciprocity between the “Spain” within Ulysses and Ulysses in Spain, this chapter begins with a close reading, rooted in Anglo- and Hispanophone literary-critical history, of the embedded and multilayered political narratives in the novel. Widely circulated throughout Europe but largely unavailable in the emerging Irish Free State, Ulysses spoke to a generation of Spaniards living under dictatorship who modified Joyce’s sketch of a future continent to be rebuilt after the era of provincializing nationalist cultures. This work was both inaugurated and, in many ways, crystallized by Antonio Marichalar, the first critic to use Ulysses as a means of linking specifically Ireland, Spain, and Europe, and the first to translate portions of Ulysses into Spanish. Marichalar, who became the interwar era’s leading intermediary between Anglophone and Spanish modernist cultures, did not translate Larbaud’s piece, as suggested in the letter above. Instead, he published his own groundbreaking work, “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” (“James Joyce en su laberinto,” 1924), in the Revista de Occidente (1923–36), which would become the most influential Hispanophone periodical of the interwar era. Here, in a medium edited by Spain’s leading intellectual and most vocally pro-European figure, José Ortega y Gasset, it became one of the most important pieces of interwar Spanish-language literary criticism, and in a loose pan-European network of reviews, became a broadly disseminated touchstone for Spanish-European modernism. It also launched Marichalar’s career along paths that led to Sylvia Beach and briefly to Joyce himself. A review in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion proclaimed rightly that Marichalar’s essay was not only the best that could be imagined for readers in Catholic countries, it also—and the two things are not unconnected—has claims to being the best estimate of the intellectual significance of Joyce that has appeared in any language so far.2 The Spanish-Irish alliance posited in...