Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (review)

2010

Links & Letters, 2006

Wasafiri, 2010

2016

Scene, 2020

In a perceptive essay on Scottish national and imperial identity, Richard J. Finlay framed what he termed the ‘transplantation of “Highlandism”’ to the colonies through Scottish societies, Highland dancing clubs and Burns nights as the ‘performance of Scotland’ overseas. Using a range of documentary archival sources and written and oral personal testimonies, this essay applies Finlay’s idea to Irish communalization in the twentieth-century British dependent empire. The transient ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas that Irish soldiers, settlers, colonial servants and missionaries comprised formed an integral and generally indiscernible part of the British ruling class. However, Irishness was spatialized in colonial life through Irish clubs, societies and St Patrick’s Day celebrations which enacted a ‘stage’ performance of Ireland based on ritualized caricature and trope. This performance was also thoroughly imperialized and was directed with performative purpose. It worked to ecumenize the social, religious and political ‘varieties of Irishness’ that co-existed in British colonial life; ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas represented the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Irish identities and these performances created depoliticized spaces which emphasized commonalities rather than contrasts. Inter-accommodation of these disconsonant identities was required in the colonies where ‘British’ ethnic, political and religious differences had to be submerged to preserve the more critical distinction between colonizer and colonized on which the empire’s legitimacy and sustainability depended. The colonial performance of Ireland also served to demonstrate that Irishness and loyalty to the Crown and empire were not, by definition, dichotomous: the non-threatening, imperialized image of Irishness that they presented countered the enduring trope of the Irish as ‘natural subversives’.

A n independent Irish state will soon attain its centenary and its birth pangs of rebellion, war, and civil strife are being commemorated as a decade of anniversaries. 1 Themes of memory and commemoration have been a particular interest of cultural and historical geographers working on Ireland. 2 Brian Graham and his colleagues, for example, have produced a rich set of studies on the multiple and contested politics of memory, particularly in Northern Ireland. 3 Given such geographical scholarship on the contestability of memory and history in Ireland, we can anticipate that geographers will engage as public intellectuals during this current period of taking our bearings from our past. At such times of reflection upon identity and legacy, there will always be a tension between exceptionalism and generalization. Each vibrates with political resonance, each risks false explanation, and yet each is necessary for critical and effective historical geographies. 4 In introducing this set of historical-geographical essays on Ireland, let me begin at the comparative pole. The Irish Free State of 1921 was haunted by plantation and famine, the two defining moments of its colonial history. The separation of six counties, as the Province of Northern Ireland, from the remaining twenty-six, the Irish Free State, was a legacy of the last and most systematic of the plantations, that of Ulster. With eighteen thousand men, the English army sent to re-conquer Ulster from the Irish was the largest deployed anywhere in the world at that time (larger even than the Spanish army sent to take colonies in South America). 6 As commander of the English forces (1600-1603), Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, determined upon a scorched-earth policy reducing much of the province to starvation, which together with disease and battle, may have killed eighty thousand Irish, halving the population of Ulster. Into this vacated space was poured a new people, one that from the 1603 union of the English and Scots crowns under James I/VI of England/Scotland, was increasingly described as British, such that "the colonization of Ulster" became "the first cooperative British enterprise of James's newly proclaimed Kingdom of Great Britain." 7 With people from Wales, England, and, in particular, Presbyterian Scotland, a distinctive society was made within the half-emptied nest of Gaelic Ireland. From plantation came a religious division integral to the control of Ireland, a divide-and-rule policy that became typical of British colonial rule elsewhere and that encouraged partition as its postcolonial legacy. The Great Famine of 1845-52 was the last in a traumatic series but it was managed by the British in a novel fashion, both modern and cruel. The blight upon the potatoes in Ireland deprived the majority of the population of their daily food. Only exceptional measures could have kept them alive, and at times these were tried. In July of 1847 perhaps three million people were being fed at public or charitable expense, about one-third of the population of the island. 9 Thereafter, policies became more savage. The Irish were not to be encouraged in idleness with Historical Geography Volume 41 (2013): 22-34.

Wasafiri, 2010

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1991