Clare Carroll, Patricia King, eds. Ireland and Postcolonial Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. x + 246 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-268-02287-7; $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-268-02286-0.

Reviewed by Stephen Howe (Ruskin College, Oxford)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2003)

Applications of postcolonial theory--or, perhaps more accurately, of various literary and cultural studies conceptions of colonialism--to Ireland have become the fastest-growing, probably most internationally influential of all currents in Irish Studies. They have also been among the most contentious. For, while many practitioners have asserted or even assumed the appropriateness of such conceptual frameworks to analysis of Ireland's past and present, others (including, to "declare an interest," the present reviewer) have been highly skeptical about their applicability or explanatory power in relation to Ireland.

The controversies have intertwined with others, including the long dispute between so-called "revisionists" in Irish history and their opponents, the sometimes sharp divisions between disciplines--for literary scholars and cultural historians have tended to be far more receptive to colonial frameworks for understanding Ireland than have political, social or economic analysts--and indeed directly political disputes. Irish Republicans and cultural nationalists have been inclined to welcome the use of colonial models, Ulster Unionists to reject them. At worst, a complex, multifaceted and dynamic Irish historiography has been oversimplified and dichotomized into a picture of stark oppositions, with "revisionists" (stereotyped as anti-theoretical, anti-nationalist, indeed pro-Unionist and inclined to make excuses for Britain's historical record in Ireland) on one side, "postcolonialists" (depicted as cultural determinists, as jargon-obsessed, and as unreconstructed romantic nationalists if not apologists for Republican violence) on the other. Echoes of that simplification may be heard in this book's afterword, by the effective founder of postcolonial studies, the late, much-lamented Edward Said--whose scattered, mostly brief writings on Ireland often lacked the subtlety of perception so evident in much of his other work.

Yet the more sophisticated analysts from all sides of these disputes have shared important common ground. Writers from a wide variety of intellectual and political positions have largely concurred that concepts like tradition, modernity and modernization, or for that matter postmodernity and globalization, have taken on unique, complicated, perhaps especially problematic inflections under Irish circumstances. Simple, linear models of change from tradition to modernity or postmodernity, or from colonial to postcolonial--though still to be encountered in the literatures of Irish sociology, history and political economy, and even more in journalistic comment--have come under ever more vigorous scrutiny and questioning. So too have many older or simplistic conceptions of national identity, as it has developed and mutated across Irish history. There is sometimes a tendency, evident for instance in Clare Carroll's introduction here, to write as if postcolonial theory, in Irish and other contexts, has been the foundation for critique of modernization theories, and of homogenizing or naturalizing conceptions of nationality and identity. This is to claim far too much: such theoretical approaches, and notions like Bhabha's conception of hybridity, have been only one among many routes to such critique--far from the first, and by no means in all eyes the most productive.

The collection Ireland and Postcolonial Theory thus intervenes in and contributes to an important, vigorous and rapidly developing field of debate. Unfortunately, and a little curiously, its timing and format make it a less important or innovative intervention than it might have been. The publisher's blurb calls it "the first book of its kind." If it had appeared a little sooner, the claim might have had more truth. But clearly there were considerable delays in the editorial and/or production processes. Said's afterword is dated August 2001, and it is apparent from internal evidence that the preceding essays were all completed substantially earlier than that. Their endnotes contain almost no references to works published later than 1999. In the meantime another, equally important collection of essays covering much of the same ground has appeared: Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham eds., Irish and Postcolo nial Writing: History, Theory, Practice (2002). So have several other wor ks making major contributions to, or sharply challenging, the field of discussion in which Ireland and Postcolonial Theory situates itself, such as Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (2001); Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, eds., Ireland and Cultural Theory (1999); Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland (2001); Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire (2000); and Geraldine Moane, Gender and Colonialism (1999). Appearing so belatedly (even by the usual, frustratingly slow standards of academic publishing) as it has, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory's potential impact is much diminished.

More seriously, in the past three to four years many of this volume's own contributors have already published the same material as appears here, or closely related texts, elsewhere. Two of the longest, most challenging and sharply argued chapters have previously appeared in print: Joe Cleary's as "Misplaced Ideas? Locating and Dislocating Ireland in Colo nial and Postcolonial Studies" in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002), and David Lloyd's as the first chapter in his own collection Ireland after History (1999). And whereas Cleary's contribution to Ireland and Postcolonial Theory is slightly different from and a little longer than the version which appears in Bartolovich and Lazarus, Lloyd's appears to be identical. Indeed it includes references to "the essays collected here" and "furt her in this book," where the "here" and "this book" clearly re fer not to Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, but to Ireland after History. Luke Gibbons's contribution to the present volume, too, substantially reproduces arguments which have appeared in at least three other places, while Clare Carroll's chapter relates very closely to her 2001 book, Circe's Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland. Seamus Deane's "Dumbness and Eloquence" is a characteristically vivid, forceful and, well, eloquent meditation on Irish writers' linguistic dilemmas, especially in relation to the legacies of the Famine; but is essentially a variation on themes long familiar from Deane's previous writings.

Of the remaining, previously unpublished chapters the longest, most substantially researched and in many ways most important is Joseph Lennon's on "Irish Orientalism." Although Joep Leerssen and others had, more briefly, discussed images of "the East" in Irish literary and political cultures, and their relationship to evolving ideas about Irishness itself, Lennnon's article--and even more the Ph.D. thesis and forthcoming book on which it draws--is undoubtedly the fullest, most detailed and perceptive analysis of these themes yet to have been attempted.

Gauri Viswanathan's study of James Cousins starts badly, giving the perhaps inadvertent impression that she thinks "the time" of Irish Home Rule agitation was after the First World War. Thereafter things improve, with a fascinating, multifaceted exploration of Cousins's relationships with theosophy, with both Irish and Indian nationalisms, and with figures such as Tagore. Amitav Ghosh, on "Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism"--a brief, seemingly preliminary sketch rather than a substantial essay--says almost nothing about Ireland at all. Kevin Whelan's evocative and allusive exploration of "the politics of postcolonial memory" has many of the strengths one has come to expect from his work, not least in its sheer breadth and boldness of argument. But it also--like Lloyd's essay--engages in some very stark, unasked, and contentious political claims about Northern Ireland as England's (sic) "last colony" and northern Unionists as an "intractable 'settler' problem," and some incautiously sweeping ones about history as merely a form of myth.

Edward Said's afterword only engages briefly with Irish affairs as such, seeking to relate these to a wide range of international parallels, in both political and intellectual registers: most especially, as one might expect, to the similarities he discerns between Ireland's history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although his remarks here are expressed with Said's familiar mixture of elegance and pugnacity, they add little that is new to his numerous previous works on the same themes. Thus this essay, one of the last to appear during Said's lifetime, is unfortunately not a particularly significant addition to his enormous and distinguished oeuvre. The particular way in which Said draws connections between Irish and Palestinian "anticolonial" nationalisms is, naturally, open to contention, involving him perhaps in a less probingly critical attitude towards Irish nationalist traditions than might have been expected in light of his general theoretical commitments. Thus, for instance, Said clearly views Israeli historical "revisionism" as a welcome and progressive development, but Irish "revisionism" (a term he, and others in this collection, use too unproblematically and homogenisingly) as essentially a reactionary one. Others, including the present reviewer, have been struck more by the structural similarities and numerous parallels between these two movements, as critiques of previously dominant nationalist narratives.

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

Citation: Stephen Howe. Review of Carroll, Clare; King, Patricia, eds., Ireland and Postcolonial Theory. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. December, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8588

Copyright © 2003 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.