Andrew Kincaid. Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxx + 267 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-4346-2.

Reviewed by Nessa Cronin (IRCHSS Government of Ireland Scholar, Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway)
Published on H-HistGeog (March, 2007)

Ideologies Built in Stone

"If building is a political act, then the modern architect is involved in the politics of revolution" (quoted, p. 198). This statement made by the architect Simon Walker encapsulates some of the main concerns of Andrew Kincaid's Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment. Kincaid introduces the book to the reader by stating that it "details the ways in which Irish architecture and urban planning during the twentieth century engaged the legacy of colonialism and the politics of nationalism" (p. xiii). While he stresses that the work "seeks to bring the material city back into focus" (p. xv), the interpretive framework utilizes concepts adopted from postcolonial theory, urban studies, and cultural geography to help underpin the central themes under examination. The dual pressures of colonialism and nationalism, and their engagement with modernity, are thus the central narrative threads of the four main chapters of the book, each of which deals with a particular historical moment in the urbanization of Dublin. The contextualizing of each of these planning projects is well documented, with the discussion based principally on governmental papers, architectural plans, and contemporary historical sources.

Kincaid offers a brief survey of the historical development of urban space in Ireland in the introductory chapter, where "the legacy of urbanization" (p. xviii) is set from the Elizabethan period to the early modern period of seventeenth-century Ireland. (It is also argued that the development of urban space and architecture in Ireland began with the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century.) With respect to the change in architectural styles in the eighteenth century (particularly with the building of private stately homes), Kincaid writes that "the consolidation of Anglo-Irish power is most clearly visible in architecture across the whole of the country, not just in Dublin. Many landlords, magistrates, and other figures of the ascendancy built large neo-Palladian and Georgian estates throughout rural Ireland" (p. xxii). The interesting point here, not mentioned by Kincaid, is that the change in architectural styles was a direct result of a preceding period of relative peace in a country that was just beginning to recover from the aftermath of the events of 1641, and the Williamite War of the 1690s. This "consolidation" was arguably a movement away from military to peacetime concerns and influences. This is most notable with regards to architectural changes, where the embattled and defensive tower house gave way, as Kevin Whelan writes, "to the confident horizontality of Georgian architecture--porticullis yielded to portico, battlement to pediment, loophole to sash window, bawn to walled garden."[1]

While the introduction outlines the main concerns of the book, it also points to some difficulties that exist throughout the remaining chapters. The first problem is highlighted in the book's title, with the posing of the titular categories, "postcolonial" and "imperial," in the same context of twentieth-century Dublin. In places, "colonial" and "imperial" are used interchangeably with no clear indication of the differential claims and resonances of such terms in an Irish context. It is unfortunate (to say the least) that a book concerned with colonial and imperial legacies in Ireland refers to Derry city solely as "Londonderry," without any comment or note on the politics of such nomenclature (p. xix). This, one may argue, is a small quibble, but is one that is nonetheless a particularly sensitive issue, and especially in recent years after the changes in improving community sensitivities, especially after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

However, the central difficulty of terminology is the designation of Ireland as a colony at the turn of the twentieth century. For example, Kincaid writes of "the beginning of the twentieth century, when many colonies, including Ireland, rose up in violence against colonial oppression" (p. x). The status of Ireland post-1800 (Act of Union of Great Britain of Ireland) raises the question of whether Ireland was de jure a part of the imperial power, but de facto a colony.[2] The categories of colonial and postcolonial are here assumed as organizing principles through which Ireland can be read, rather than delineated and examined in detail. In the light of Joe Cleary's recent considerations on postcolonial theory and its intersection with Irish Studies, an examination of where Ireland and Northern Ireland fit into D.K. Fieldhouse's famous typology of administrative, plantation, pure settler, and mixed settler colonial modes would have been helpful here.[3]

The Irish Free State is described both as "postindependence Ireland" and "postcolonial Ireland."[4] We are informed that "Postcolonial Ireland, the period up until 1945, is normally divided into two phases. The first is the period from 1922 to 1932." But we are not informed as to when the second period was, and are thus left to infer that this was from 1932 to 1945 (p. 64). Why Ireland stops being postcolonial in 1945 is left unstated (and is particularly curious considering the Republic of Ireland Act in 1948), and the status of Northern Ireland as a postcolonial state, while mentioned, is left under-examined (which is a general tendency in postcolonial studies relating to Ireland). That Kincaid does not address these issues satisfactorily is all the more surprising as he appears to take issue with Ruth McManus's Dublin: Building the Suburbs, 1910-1940 (2001). He argues that McManus "fails to theorize the term she employs. What is 'the state' and how did town planning help create it" (p. 17)? While Kincaid does note the "ambivalence about Ireland's status--whether it was metropolitan enough to be part of the center or marginal enough to remain a colony" (p. 30), a brief analysis of the debate and a clarification of his terminology would have been useful to the reader at this point, especially when considering how such issues have heavily influenced developments in Irish Studies in recent years. [5]

The book is divided into four relatively long chapters, each dealing in chronological order with a particular moment in the urban history of Dublin. The first chapter deals with Patrick Abercrombie's 1914 town plan, Dublin of the Future, which was later published in 1922, and adopted in part by the Irish Free State "as the basis for a new comprehensive city survey" (p. 48). Abercrombie's Dublin was a vision of a future city that sought to bring Ireland into line with the modern industrial world, with provisions made for workers and transportation, and with the city envisaged as a living space, a place that should provide both work and recreation. The principal proposals were concerned with housing, industrial zoning, parkways, and roads, and included the proposed relocation of 64,000 people to different parts of the city and into newly designed suburbs. "High speed electric cars" would connect workers from Crumlin and Cabra with their place of work, as in this period "congestion meant failure" for city planners (p. 55). In this early Free State campaign for detailed town planning, Kincaid argues "we see the beginnings of a postcolonial geography that nationalists hoped would help legitimate their own ideological positions after the foundation of an independent state" (p. 57). Kincaid rightly points out that the ultimate aim of Abercrombie's project was to regulate "not just where but also how people lived, worked, and relaxed" (p. 66). This analysis of not only the regulation of what kind of space people were to live in, but how they were to spend their time moving around in that space, is one of the best chapters in the book.

Chapter 2, "Postindependence Ireland: Beyond Tradition," deals mainly with the housing development and reconstruction of Dublin, in particular, in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence in 1922. In his analysis of the importance of urban planning and the progressive steps made in the early years of the fledgling Irish government of the 1920s and 1930s, Kincaid makes a significant contribution to previous historical accounts of this period, by focusing on the improvements and the international influences that were brought to bear on the Dublin built environment. It is argued that "a cultural reading of the physical landscape of Dublin in the years after independence, therefore, reveals much about the priorities of the new state" (p. 69). The state, through its planning departments and projects, now became the ultimate arbiter over geography. We are informed that his "argument has two primary goals" (p. 61). The first is "to demonstrate how and why contemporary cultural and literary critics represent the postcolonial decades in the ways that they do." The second "is to offer an approach that investigates these years of national consolidation through a different discourse than literature" (p. 65). One key theme that Kincaid takes issue with is the fact that the "field of Irish Studies has long been dominated by a literary paradigm." He continues with the argument that "one of the pitfalls that literary approaches of Dublin has led us into is that the textual city has come to take on a greater degree of reality and importance than the physical city" (p. xiv). The success of this book is the foregrounding of the material culture and legacy of modern Dublin, but this central concern is rendered all the more curious when one reads the final section of chapter 4, where three literary memoirs of Dublin are interpreted in light of his previous discussions of the changes in urban Dublin. His engagement with the literary texts, while interesting, needed more sustained analysis with regards to the importance of Dublin's built environment if his earlier argument is to remain intact.

In addition, the literary account presented here is only one half of the story in a bilingual society. Here the politics of language are shown as Irish literature is understood to be literature written in the English language. Thus "the literary paradigm" (as noted above) is in fact an English language paradigm, with its Irish language counterpart never playing a role on this Irish Studies stage. There is no mention of the importance of Irish literature written in Irish in modern Ireland, and this is all the more unnerving considering his comment that "an experimental literature arose, a literature written in the English language and bearing the traces of a deeply rooted Irish one" (p. 225). The assumption here is that experimental literature is reserved solely for English language writing, where Irish writing exists only as a "trace," or backdrop for such works, and no mention is made of the experimental and revolutionary work of key Irish language writers such as Máirtín â Cadhain or Seán â Ríordáin, in light of this argument.

The analysis of the international style and the foreign influences on architectural style is well delineated in the third chapter, "Revisionism in Ireland." In particular, Kincaid's reading of the issues surrounding the building of the flats in Ballymun and the growth of Tallaght (described curiously as a "city," [p. 160]) are extremely interesting. These discussions lead into an equally thought-provoking examination of the development and marketing surrounding Dublin's "left-bank" quarter (the Temple Bar area) as an international, postmodern space which has come to represent "the collapse of nationalism" in its marketing of its former authenticity (p. 198). Abercrombie's "electric cars" have now been replaced by the Luas, an overground rail service the two lines of which do not link up much to the chagrin of contemporary Dubliners and the amazement of tourists.

Kincaid's Postcolonial Dublin places urban history as an integral part of Irish history. In relation to current critical literature dealing with the same topic, the book would have benefited from engaging with Jacinta Prunty's Dublin Slums (1998) and, more recently, Yvonne Whelan's magisterial Re-inventing Modern Dublin (2003), which examines the cultural geographies and material iconographies of Dublin before and after 1922. Kincaid's central concern with theorizing the urban spaces of colonial and postcolonial Dublin could also be further developed to engage with Edward Soja's critical urban geographies in the foundational Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989). Indeed, Kincaid's introductory comments that his project stresses the material in his consideration of urban Dublin reads as a corollary of Edward Soja's now famous readings of Los Angeles (heavily influenced by the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre). Soja's project sought to "spatialize the conventional narrative by recomposing the intellectual history of critical social theory around the evolving dialectics of space, time, and social being."[6] The disciplines of geography, history, and social theory are all admirably taken into account in Kincaid's examination of the colonial and nationalist discourses of urban planning and architectural design that were integral to the making and re-making of modern-day Dublin. In highlighting the material constructions of a nation-state, Kincaid's Postcolonial Dublin contributes to our understanding of its political and material nature, and demonstrates how ideologies can in time become built in stone.

Notes

[1]. Kevin Whelan, 'The Modern Landscape: From Plantation to Present," Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, ed. F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 69.

[2]. This point is made by Tadhg Foley and Maureen O'Connor, Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), xiii.

[3]. Joe Cleary, ''Misplaced Ideas? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies," in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork, Indiana: Cork University Press and University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 29.

[4]. The collective body of the twenty-six counties of post-partition Ireland in 1922 was referred to as the Irish Free State, and was officially changed to the Republic of Ireland in 1948.

[5]. Another curiosity is that Kincaid refers to Irish currency in terms of pounds, when the Euro has been in circulation since 2002 (p. 182).

[6]. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, (London and New York: Verso 1990), 3.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-histgeog.

Citation: Nessa Cronin. Review of Kincaid, Andrew, Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12945

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.