2nd Research Posts 2009                      LITR 5731 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature

Sarah DeLaRosa

Brief Survey of Research Done in Irish Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

            My father’s family is of Irish descent, and for as long as I can remember I have been interested in that country and tried to connect myself to Ireland. In high school I did a thorough genealogical study to find out the details of my family’s “Irishness”—we’ve actually been here since before the American Revolution, and we may be more Celtic than Irish. For years I have followed Ireland current events, studied its history, read its literature. My parents traveled to Ireland several years ago and brought back a silver ring which they gave to me as a present, and it is one of the most meaningful pieces of jewelry that I own. I have a (regrettably) faddish fascination with Ireland, since that is the closest association I can make with it right now. My family is by no means recently from Ireland, and I have never visited it myself, so perhaps my (self-made?) connection with it is an attempt to rescue myself from being a plain-vanilla average white middle-America American girl. Or maybe being “Irish” is something akin to being “Jewish” or “African-American” (if I may be so bold as to assert my own understanding on these other groups of people). Jews and blacks identify with their respective groups not necessarily because they themselves faithfully practice Judaism or have emigrated from Africa, but simply because they want to identify with those heritages; and the legitimacy of their claim is never called into question (at least not generally and not without insult). This paper, then, is yet another attempt of mine to identify myself with Ireland, and to explore what research has been done concerning Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial literature.

            From what I have found, there seems to be quite a lot of research concerning Irish colonial and postcolonial literature. A major theme among these writings is the Irish national identity. Two articles that I found discuss the way literature has reflected and represented Irish identity—both colonial and postcolonial. Catherine Nash’s “Irish Placenames: Postcolonial Locations” describes the multiple stages of renaming Ireland has gone through, and Shaun Richards explains in his article “To Me, Here is More Like There: Irish Drama and Criticism in the ‘Colision Culture’” that Irish theatre, and in particular Dublin’s Abbey theatre, has “simultaneously staged and created the nation” (1). Nash explains that “[o]ver the last two centuries, government bodies have systematically named and renamed places in Ireland” including “the mid-nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey project to map Ireland and officially validate versions of Irish place names that had been modified to various degrees to suit English speech and orthography” (457). Nash emphasizes that tensions still exist over the identities and meanings associated with these names, such as the city of Derry/Londonderry, and the many and varied designations for the two sections of the Emerald Isle—“the North, Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Six Counties, and the Republic, tire, the Free State, the South, Southern Ireland, the Twenty-Six Counties”—each name carrying a degree of nationalist or unionist reference (Nash 457). Thousands of street names and road signs are now bilingual in Southern Ireland, listed both in the original Gaelic and in English. This naming crisis/phenomenon “could be read as [a memorial] to the erosion of one language and culture by another” (Nash 457), reflecting the troubled history of Ireland’s national identity and its struggle to find itself after colonization has ended. Similar to Irish place names representing Ireland’s national identity, Richards argues that theatre “provides a location where national desires can be expressed and debated by local voices” (1). He calls Translations (1980, Brian Friel), an Irish drama based on the English name translations laws in the 1830’s, “the most canonical play of contemporary Irish theatre,” (Richards 3).

            Famine literature, works based on the Irish potato blight of 1845-52, is a large part of the collection of Irish literature. A quarter of the population (approximately two million people) died or emigrated due to the famine or political, social, or economic complications during that time, and the memory of the famine has not faded from the art of Ireland. Eileen Moore Quinn’s “Entextualizing Famine, Reconstituting Self: Testimonial Narratives From Ireland” discusses how famine literature has been used to (re)construct Irish identity in a postcolonial world. Quinn explains that “listeners emphatically insert themselves into narrative, and vicariously re- experience stories framed from a personal perspective” (78). Thus, “[T]he power of stories to amuse or frighten, anger, or excite rests on a felt overlap with the narrator's recounted experience” (Quinn 78). In Ireland, “the receptors vicariously re-experienced Famine stories framed from the personal-and spoken aloud-perspective” (Quinn 78). As Quinn explains in her article, several organizations in Ireland utilize literature to revive Irish pride, nationalism, culture from their demise begun during the famine.

            I found one article in my research, however, that believes the focus of the previous three articles I have discussed is misguided and outdated. Emer Nolan says, in “Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland,” that she believes Ireland should move past postcolonialism and its focus of reviving Irish nationhood and listen to voices it has not yet paid much attention to—the voices of Irish women. She explains that Irish feminists have been wary of (mostly male dominated) postcolonialism; “women critics have accused postcolonial studies of reinstating ‘the national question’—and thus sidelining issues of gender” (Nolan 337). Nolan believes that “the current Irish feminist preoccupation with the ways in which women have been repressed and excluded by nationalism has led to a certain insularism in Irish feminism,” and her paper suggests that they should be careful of confining Irish feminism to a nationally focused agenda and consider “a rethinking of the question of feminism and nationalism in a wider imperial frame” (Nolan 338). She says that this refocusing “may in fact help Irish feminists to forge connections between the experiences and priorities of Irish women and those of women in other societies—especially women elsewhere in the postcolonial world” (Nolan 338).

            I had a good time familiarizing myself with the work done in Irish colonial and postcolonial studies. Besides the articles I highlighted here, it seems that much of the literature and research being done is focused on re-establishing Ireland’s national identity, as would seem fitting for a postcolonial nation. There were also a few articles I found, like Nolan’s, that went off in other directions; taking a different slant on the study of Irish colonialism and postcolonialism. As I said before, I love Irish history and Irish literature, and I will probably peek into this segment of research literature again, even if only for my own pleasure.

Works Cited

Nash, Catherine. “Irish Placenames: Post-Colonial Locations.” JSTOR. 19 November 2009.

            <http://www.jstor.org/stable/623235>.

Nolan, Emer. “Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist Critique in

            Contemporary Ireland.” Project Muse. 20 November 2009. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Quinn, Eileen Moore. “Entextualizing Famine, Reconstituting Self: Testimonial Narratives

            from Ireland.” JSTOR. 20 November 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318389>.

Richards, Shaun. “To Me, Here is More Like There: Irish Drama and Criticism in the

            ‘Collision Culture’.” MLA International Bibliography. 19 November 2009.             <http://search.ebscohost.com/>.