Uncommon Grounds: Postcolonialism and the Irish Case

The problem of the Irish case resides in its uneasy suspension between exemplarity by certain criteria and atypicality or even outright ineligibility by others. The agglomerated conception of the geopolitical constituents comprising what I uncomfortably dub the “Irish case” is open to interpretation for it is uncertain whether it is a conceptual construct, a habitus, a sentimental fiction to live and die for, a projected cultural union, or an idea whose time has come and gone as the context shifts from colonial relationships to European unionism.1 Complications comprise the stuff of Irish identity. If the Irish case evinces symptoms of postcoloniality at all, it is still grudgingly conceded to be only arguably, anomalously, or putatively so.2 The grounds on which critics argue for the inclusion or exclusion of the Irish case in the postcolonial register reveals an accretion of default formulae that dominate the construction of a very selective sort of postcolonialism, one I have earlier referred to as poco postcolonialism. Such debates usually proceed, mutatis mutandis, on the presupposition that there is a real and stable postcolonial identity against which the Irish must be measured. In asking the question, “What is and is not postcolonial about the Irish case?,” a covert mission should be assumed that announces another question altogether, namely, “What is postcolonial about the postcolonial?” Perhaps the more interesting discovery in entering this briar patch will be a deeper understanding of the unacknowledged contours of the metropolitan “postcolonial.” It is the measure of what we call “postcolonial” that risks exposure when the case study itself mutates into the yardstick. The discussion to follow is powered by this unavoidable transformation.

The exclusionary trend in postcolonial frameworks can be traced back to a disciplinary moment of determinative consequence for the current debate.3 The foundational role of The Empire Writes Back in the history of postcolonial studies has earlier been acknowledged. The authors of this influential text use the term “post-colonial” to “cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft et al. 2). Using this formula, they accord postcolonial status to such locations as India, various African countries, Canada, and Australia. Yet they deny it to Ireland even though, by their own admission, “It is possible to argue that . . . [the Irish] were among the first victims of European expansion” (Ashcroft et al. 33), and even though there is ample evidence that its resistance struggle was considered “talismanic” by leading nationalists in that paradigmatic colony, India (Boehmer 4, 114).4 Why does the postcolonial engine, when it does not circumvent the issue, grind to an uncertain halt when it comes to Ireland? A reexamination of the reasons for excluding Ireland despite its colonial experience is long overdue, particularly now that the debate has been rekindled among Irish critics.5 The Irish case has the potential to issue a frontal challenge to a customary understanding of postcoloniality and to reveal assumptions that are seldom openly acknowledged. It is also likely to lay bare the practical discipline’s glib reduction of the complex circumstances of colonialism to a disciplinarily intramural drama with a cast of characters comprised of usual suspects and predictable victims. These are the risks that attend the investigation undertaken here.

If we performed even a brief comparison between Ireland and India— that colony par excellence—we should find many occasions for a productive comparison. One is struck, for example, by the uncanny similarities between the language of Henry VIII’s 1537 act that aimed to promote “a conformity, concordance and familiarity in language, tongue, in manners, order and apparel”6 among the Irish and Macaulay’s 1835 articulation in the famous minute on Indian education of the goals of English education: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (249). A very similar sentiment also pervades Sir William Parsons’ dictum regarding the Irish: “We must change their course of government, clothing, customs, manner of holding land, language and habit of life” (quoted in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 10).7 The mission civilisatrice produced comparable effects—alongside admittedly differential ones—throughout the colonized world, and a comparison of Irish and subcontinental literature reveals many common themes. Historically, Indian nationalists found many occasions to compare their situation with that of the Irish. Indeed, India found “inspiration and guidance” in the example of Ireland, studying “Irish strategies of both parliamentary pressure and armed insurrection” and the formation of the Sinn Féin. To Jawaharlal Nehru, “The 1916 Easter Rising represented a model of indomitable nationalism,” while Tagore confessed to sharing Yeats’ ideas of “inheriting the past” (Boehmer 114). Besides, Irishwoman Annie Besant was credited “with the successful application of Irish methods of political agitation in the campaigns waged by Indian separatists” (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 252). The exchange, moreover, sometimes went both ways.8 David Cairns and Shaun Richards also find useful points of comparison between the Indian and Irish nationalist sense of relations of dominance in response to imperial projections of English masculism and the effeminacy of the colonized (49).9 Moreover, Margaret Kelleher has pointed out the startling parallels between the Irish and the great Bengal famines, even though they occurred roughly a century apart.10 In a more contemporary frame, the experience of the Indian partition and the ongoing communal struggles in the subcontinent also extend the opportunity for instructive comparison with the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. The perceived lacuna in the attainment of a full Irish identity offers a compelling counterpoint for those studying the movement for an akhand Bharat (undivided India). In a continuum into this century, the phenomenon of diaspora has had an important history for both cultures, especially with regard to the involvement of the diasporic population in homeland nationalism.11 In the realm of literary expression too, there would seem to be important points of comparison between the Irish and other readily admitted post-colonial writers. The legacy of colonial educational policies features as an important theme in Irish and other postcolonial works. Other parallels might just as easily be mustered. In defiance of what seem to be ostensibly compelling justifications, however, the Irish case nevertheless remains an uncomfortable solecism for postcolonial studies.

At some risk of seeming slick, one might submit that the grounds for questioning the postcolonial identity of Ireland and the Irish usually boil down to some version of one or more of the following: it’s the wrong place for it, they’re the wrong color, the timing is all wrong, and they had or have the wrong politics. In objective terms, these would be termed the criteria of race, geography, history, ideology, and economics, the last being a category heavily informed by a curious conflation of race with geography. The discussion to follow reveals that each of these spawns more controversy than we would expect. If the application, and for some critics the misapplication, of the epithet “postcolonial” in the Irish case reveals the extent to which it is one of anomalous postcoloniality at best, it is also instructive because it insinuates a hitherto unexamined proposition: that states of colonialism and postcolonialism, when subjected to examination along similar criteria, can be exposed as similarly complex in non-Irish contexts as well. An investigation of the Irish case, as this chapter goes on to demonstrate, uncovers the value of discrepancy as a heuristic device in the investigation of colonialism and post-colonialism. The problem of orientation (or what Theodore Allen refers to as a “‘white’ habit of mind”) has prevented a consideration of non-Irish cases as capable of revealing similar resistance to generic characterizations (Allen quoted in Gibbons, Transformations 208n18). In a resolutely comparative mode, a sober reckoning of the Irish case as discrepant begins to uncover the complex conditions of a world where power and its lack occur fractally rather than in predictable geographic or racial dichotomies, and where victimization and oppression reside in situations and contexts rather than in broad categories. It is precisely because of the alternative economy of the small scale afforded by the specific case of Ireland that we begin to perceive difference and exploitation as mobile across contexts, attaching to situations rather than to groups. Neither race, nor geography, neither Third nor First Worldliness are straightforward issues in the Irish context; nor is the thorny topic of the participation of the Irish in empire building. The resistance of the particular case of Ireland mocks the classificatory impulse that threatens to flatten the complexity of postcoloniality.

The two categorical differences that inevitably arise in discussions of the Irish case are those of race and geography.12 In the view of some critics, the antagonism we assume between most colonies and England simply could not have existed between Ireland and England because of two powerful factors: geographical proximity and the absence of racial difference. Luke Gibbons reports that the “lack of fixed boundaries, of clear racial markers, has led some commentators to conclude that there was no rational basis for the ‘ancient quarrel’ between Ireland and England, and that the separatist movement was fuelled simply by the willful obsurantism of Irish nationalism” (“Race” 96). English perceptions of the Irish difference, it is argued, are difficult to translate into the vocabulary of race because of the lack of visual markers. Sheridan Gilley argues that “since an objective criterion of race like skin colour is lacking to define Saxon dislike for the Celts, there is a difficulty of definition in deciding at what point vague talk about Celtic character amounts to ‘racial prejudice’” (quoted in Gibbons, “Race” 96; emphasis mine). If anything, Gilley contends “that English attitudes towards the Irish were distinguished by a spirit of toleration and a willingness to accommodate Irish difference” (96).13 Gilley’s assumption that prejudice against blacks would be more natural and understandable aside, in the absence of visible difference, it has been difficult to develop a discursive set of terms comparable to those engendered to discuss the systematic discrimination associated with racism.14 Thomas Carlyle’s summary dispatching of the visibly white Irish in the comment, “black-lead them and put them over with the niggers” is one of many contradictory gestures made in the Irish context that betray the instability and arbitrariness of the racial measure, one that also affected the self-identification of the Irish in their bid to assimilate into mainstream America (quoted in Gibbons 96).15 The troublesome ramification we are obliged to confront here is that whether or not we portray the Irish-English encounter in terms of colonialism or Europeanist state assimilation, and whether or not we assign prejudice to race or religious bigotry, being the “right” color did not prevent the Irish from being targeted as inferior or from being targeted for “development.” If anything, whiteness only highlighted their difference.

What difference under the skin, we might now ask, allowed the Irish to be described in terms used for blacks and American Indians and yet to be categorically differentiated from them? If the Irish were not quite not white, they were nevertheless perceived as different. Even if they were compared to aborigines, Orientals, blacks, and Jews, the Irish difference, we are constantly reminded, is of a different caliber (Cheng, Joyce; Gibbons, “Race against Time”; Curtis). It is also, moreover, a prior difference in that Ireland was the oldest of England’s “colonies.” The casual transference of derogatory epithets and references from the Irish to the more colored of the colonized peoples suggest a continuity it would be impossible to disregard, even if the Irish were always seen as differently different. Kiberd reminds us in Inventing Ireland that “in centuries to come, English colonizers in India or Africa would impute to the ‘Gunga Dins’ and ‘Fuzzi-Wuzzies’ those same traits already attributed to the Irish” (Inventing Ireland 15). If this is so, it is race that is the latecomer in the vocabulary of colonial prejudice. A prior sense of difference would have to await the discursive mechanism of race for its systematic articulation. It is perhaps unnecessary to remind the reader that it is not until the nineteenth century that the language of race was allowed methodical discursive legitimacy through rational scientism. The content of Irish difference, although it was only racialized in later accounts, was sufficient grounds for annexation and colonization a long time ago—even if some would insist that it was only “a colonization of sorts.” The Irish case then obliges us to confront not only the difference of their difference, but it also impels us to consider that it is not the phenomenon of colonization and scalar views of peoples so much as their theoretical and discursive shape that are radically new in successive historical periods.

Viewed on a large scale, difference is only visible in the design of polar distinctions. The language of race is particularly compatible with this global view. In a close-up we would begin to see the differences that inhere in more intimate settings. What, then, was the content of Irish difference? Clair Wills argues that “despite some pseudo-Darwinian attempts to match Irish with black physiognomy, in general stereotypes of the ‘wild Irish’ have tended to concentrate on their habits and lifestyle (poverty, laziness, dirt and drunkenness), and . . . their language” (21). Not white, not quite, by certain measures but not quite not white visually, the Irish challenge glib platitudes about racial categories and binaries. If not race, although the language of race was routinely used in characterizing them, there were clearly some factors that placed the Irish on the same side of the cartographic divide as other colonized peoples even as others kept the Irish case firmly entrenched within a European and white context. The Irish case reveals the extent to which the reductive formula of race can be complicated considerably by attention to the coding of difference in various other registers: language, behavior, or visual markers unrelated to color, for instance.

The conflation of the Irish with American Indians and blacks, thoroughly discussed by numerous critics and historians, is scarcely in need of repetition here, save to observe that visible difference was only one of many criteria used in the oppression of various peoples in the colonial enterprise.16 In “Mill and the East India Company,” Trevor Lloyd observes that Mill’s paralleling of Ireland and India seemed to rest on something quite other than race:

When he wrote “What has been done for India, has now to be done for Ireland,” it might have been expected that he would refer to changes in Irish land law, or at least in the administration of land taxes. In fact he was saying that India was fortunate to have been governed by people who lived there and did not want to turn India into something English, but simply to get rid of “mischievous practices” and take the rest of Indian society as the starting point for “further stages in improvement.” This is not quite the same as Lord Salisbury’s Irish policy of “twenty years of resolute government,” but it does suggest that Mill felt the Irish had bad habits which they would be all the better for losing. (72)

Although “bad habits” and “mischievous practices” may not have been the only grounds for comparison used by Rudyard Kipling, he, too, is reported to have said, “By every test that I know, the Irish are Oriental” (quoted in Dunsany 47). It is by the relatively unobjective criterion, to recall Gilley’s usage, of “temperament and constitution,” that the Irish are rendered strange in the following account by George Templeton Strong, an American journalist. Observing a group of Irish women bemoaning the death of “a pair of ill-starred Celtic laborers” who had died during building construction, Strong notes:

I suppose they were ‘keening’; all together were raising a wild, unearthly cry, half shriek and half song, wailing as a score of daylight banshees, clapping their hands and gesticulating passionately. . . . It was an uncanny sound to hear, quite new to me . . . Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese! (quoted in O’Connor 159)

As I will argue in the concluding sections of this chapter, perceptions of the relationship of these diverse constituencies to the evolving conditions of modernity may provide the all important key to the conflations suggested here, using an overarching criterion well beyond that of racial difference.

The following example suggests a space for the development of this argument. An Irish immigrant, writing back in 1860 from “America” confides, “If an Irishman abroad be quick, active, enterprising, disposed to labor hard, get rid as soon as possible of National peculiarities and set himself down to adopt the ways and customs of the people he is certain to succeed” (quoted in O’Connor 244). Under which rubric should we class such criteria as “national peculiarities”? The persecution of the Irish in the American context would end over time, largely as a consequence, Noel Ignatiev suggests, of their having become white, a proposition that begs the questions, What is the content of whiteness? And might nonwhites, eventually, attain to it? The honorary whiteness granted the Japanese by the South African apartheid regime suggests one instance of apparently random dispensation that we might investigate more systematically to ascertain whether our exclusive preoccupation with colorism and colonialism has blinded us to other mechanisms of oppression, exploitation, and identification we have no easy names for yet. It would be willfully naive to deny the reification of racial difference as an operative factor in past and present violence, but it is also unnecessary to aggrandize this to the exclusion of less calculable forms of difference that also demand attention, particularly in a closer view than usually available on the postcolonial world. The operation of random and irreducible factors in a structured system such as colonialism can alert us to the importance of factors displaced by exclusivist attention to race and color.

The contention here is not that race is irrelevant to a discussion of the Irish case. As it turns out, if the racially different Irish and Africans or Indians were subjected to similar prejudices, there were nevertheless significant racial obstacles to the formation of solidarity between these peoples. Their own experience did not always prevent the Irish from exercising their putative racial superiority toward other colonized peoples. If “the Irish and Indians shared platforms across the United States” in 1919 and 1929 and many Irish nationalists thought that “British rule in India was an obstacle to the freedom of other colonial peoples” and made common cause with them, also to be found “within the tradition of Irish nationalism was a strain of white triumphalism” that discouraged many from wanting to work with the Indians (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 255, 259).17 The use of race as a stable criterion in judging post-colonial candidacy, however, is highly problematic because it is likely to fail on two significant counts: first, because it privileges visible difference that is usually manifest only in a macroscopic view, preventing any experience with the intimacies of difference; and second, because the criterion of racial superiority and the prejudices attached to chromatism would disqualify not only the Irish but many other hitherto uncontested postcolonials. If the argument is that racial hierarchies were introduced by empire, then we must either excuse the Irish their prejudice toward their darker colonial cousins or indict much of the postcolonial world for succumbing to racial and chromatic hierarchies even as it struggles to overcome them.18 Complicity, mimicry, ambivalence, and resistance exist together in the worlds transformed by colonization and its projects of modernity.

If a discussion of race in the Irish context presents complications, the associated allegation of complicity in empire and the question of Ireland’s European identity are scarcely simple issues. It is specifically on these grounds that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin deny the Irish a postcolonial identity:

While it is possible to argue that these societies [Irish, Welsh, and Scottish] were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial. (33)19

To the complaint of wrong color and wrong place, we add wrong politics. Ashcroft et al. imply that inside Britain it may have been possible to argue for a postcolonial identity for Ireland, but in the necessarily macroscopic view now natural to postcolonial studies, the claim would be untenable. Dismissing the argument for a postcolonial identity for the Irish, Liam Kennedy maintains that “members of the Irish gentry and middle classes participated willingly in the administration of the imperial system world-wide. Thousands of Irish officers and soldiers manned its defences. Ireland, in effect, was a junior partner in the vast exploitative enterprise known as the British empire” (115). Kiberd also concedes the role of the Irish in empire, but not without a reference to Ireland’s own beleaguered status in empire: “If many Irish suffered the economic and cultural woes of life under the imperial yoke, quite a few others happily took on the white man’s burden in Africa and India” (“Modern Ireland” 97). Colonial textbooks routinely made reference to Ireland’s place within the imperial enterprise. As Coolahan reports, “The Third Reading Book stated ‘Great Britain and Ireland formed the most powerful kingdom in the world’” (85).20

Charges of hierarchalism and complicity in empire are rooted in a perception of Irish identity as close enough to the racial and geocultural identification of imperial England to be predictably complicit with its nefarious objectives. Indeed, Irish regiments did participate in the dirty work of empire, but it is also true that the colonial empire conscripted native armies throughout its dominions for its business in other parts of the world. Undoubtedly, where conversion to its civilizing mission did not or could not occur, monetary considerations played a role, perhaps even a determinative role, in gaining native complicity. It was not only the Irish army that served British colonial designs, the Indian army was also used to further the imperial project in various African locations, including Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan, and Uganda. It is possible, of course, to argue that the greater degree of Irish complicity should constitute a meaningful distinction. But a somber consideration of shades of difference creates further complexities. Insistence on a difference of degrees can certainly be used to set the Irish apart from the postcolonial fold; it could just as easily, however, be used to striate the Irish experience internally. In his critique of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s claim that Irish complicity in the British imperial enterprise “makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial” (33), Gibbons urges closer attention to distinctions among the Irish:

This remarkable statement (which does not appear to include Ireland as one of those countries ‘outside Britain’) only makes sense if one identifies the Irish historically with settler colony in Ireland, the ruling Anglo-Irish interest, thus erasing in the process the entire indigenous population—a view closer, in fact, to ‘Commonwealth’ than post-colonial literature. This indiscriminate application of the term ‘post-colonial’ is indeed a recurrent feature of The Empire Writes Back. (Transformations 174)

Using the work of Hiram Morgan on the Irish contribution to colonialism, Gibbons reminds us that in relation to India, “those Irish who received commissions and commands were from the protestant elite.” This is also true of Australia where “the Catholic Irish were numerous but it was the Anglo-Irish ‘imperial class’ who exercised most influence’” (quoted in Gibbons, Transformations 207n8). Kennedy’s proposition that Ireland was “a junior partner in the vast exploitative enterprise known as the British empire” is followed by the dutiful proviso that “there were of course variations within Ireland. Protestant Ireland was far more enthusiastic in the pursuit of imperial projects, Catholic Ireland’s commitment being more passive” (115). Gibbons concedes that some Catholic and indigenous Irish did buy into “hegemonic forms of racism in the United States and Australia when they themselves managed to throw off the shackles of slavery or subjugation” but he insists on a proper recognition of this phenomenon as a process of identifying with “the existing supremacist ideologies, derived mainly from the same legacy of British colonialism from which they were trying to escape” (Transformations 174–75). If we were being scrupulously analytical, we would also consider that a great many Anglo-Irish were resistant to mainstream dominant English culture and attitudes and that there were a great many native soldiers all over the colonized world who did not scruple to raise arms against their fellow countrymen. Moreover, regardless of the actual breakdown of the Catholic/Protestant constituency among the soldiers abroad, there is also evidence that some of the Irish troops did experience a measure of empathy with the local colonized populations elsewhere.21 In his remarks to the Friends of the Freedom of India in 1924, Republican Sean T. O’Kelly

apologized to Indians and Egyptians for those of Irish background who had assisted in their oppression and “formed the backbone of the invading and destroying armies.”. . . He also regretted the collaboration in the British administration of India by Irishmen who lacked the excuse of most soldiers that “what they did, they did in ignorance, not malice.” Many soldiers, he conceded, had joined up as an alternative to starvation. (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 258)

As the above examples indicate, Ireland’s relationship with other colonies was neither uniformly racist nor one of predictable solidarity, making the charge of complicity in empire far more convoluted than any simple deployment would suggest.22

The test of complicity, applied to other postcolonial societies, is hardly likely to turn up many winners. It was not only the colonizers and the Irish who profited from empire, but a whole network of supporters— pilloried in part in Anthony Appiah’s damning description of “the comprador intelligentsia”—who found it monetarily gainful to forward its goals. Moreover, the slow spread of prejudice through the colonial educational apparatus operated not only on an intercolony basis but on an intracolonial level as well because imperial attitudes were gradually imbibed by the educated classes throughout the British empire. The consciousness of power structures and of education as the via recta to power created a distinct class system in many colonized societies, layered onto the extant hierarchical order. If we are to accuse the Irish of supporting the hierarchies of the British imperial system through active participation in it, we must also consider the internal hierarchies that prevail within other postcolonies that relegate to the category of savage its tribal populations on the grounds of their being “backward,” that is, in a lamentably retarded relationship to the project of modernity and development. The subscription of the postcolonial elite to an imperial and now neocolonial agenda of development and progress within their own nation demonstrates a commitment to an essentially hierarchical mode of thought. It is, once again, the close-up view that will permit us to perceive the operation of a mentality we usually connect with racist imperialism in the many instances of internal colonialism within any of the numerous nations whose postcolonial identity is never challenged.

Given that the final—and definitive—criterion differentiating the Irish from the rest of the postcolonial world usually hinges on its approximation to or distance from Third Worldliness (geographical, economic, and otherwise), it is worth dwelling on the contours of the debate over Ireland’s continental identity. Even critics who agree that “the ‘facts’ seem clear enough,” that “Ireland was conquered and colonised by Britain in ways similar to those used in the colonisation of areas outside Europe” and that “over time, as elsewhere, the native population reasserted itself, and eventually dismantled the colonial order which had been imposed on it,” insist that the matter is complicated by its location:

First the colonising power was a neighbour, and its colonising project in Ireland was contemporaneous with, motivated and informed by, its own state building project. . . . Second, colonialism in Ireland became bound up with other, typically European, processes and conflicts—of religion, nationality, modernity and tradition. (Ruane 109)

Geographical proximity, actual integration within one economic unitary order in the present moment, and a shared political modality of longer standing have reinforced, over time, a sense of cohesiveness that once began with little more than a shared map name.23 Liam Kennedy claims that

When independence was achieved by . . . Ireland, this was no war of liberation, in a classic Third world sense. The complementary struggles of Griffith and Collins bore little resemblance to the mass uprisings and bloody retribution which occurred in Algeria, Cambodia, Vietnam or Mozambique. . . . the most relevant parallels are to be found in Europe. (116)

Irish experiences are seen by many critics as continuous with European history despite the occurrence of colonization in ways comparable to non-European parts of the world. Those who may not accept a long shared history nevertheless find a European context more relevant for the present than any other. Dermot Bolger claims, for instance, that “the inherent suggestion behind it [a phrase like ‘postcolonial literature’] is of a society somehow obsessed with its relationship with a former colonial power—something which might certainly have been true in the pre-European Community society of a quarter of a century ago” (xiii).

At least some of the basic essence of a European identity, as far as the postcolonial measure is concerned, is its discursive and economic distance from the Third World. In an intermeshing of race with geography and economics, the “race” differential of the Irish from other postcolonials is often coded in terms of a European identity. Similarly, the criteria of race and geography sifted through the sieve of contemporary politics produces something very like an amorphous Third World quality that serves these days as the definitive shibboleth for a postcolonial assessment of the Irish case.24 If the postcolonial is simply a polite way of saying not-white, not-Europe, as Ahmad bluntly states, it is not surprising that the provisional standards of race and geography are used consistently in assessments of Irish postcoloniality. It is also, of course, politesse for not-poor. By the criterion of Third Worldiness as a primarily economic measure, Ireland currently has little postcolonial purchase. The “wrong place” argument is reinforced by historicist views that put geographical units on a linear map of (usually economic) progress.25 By the economic standard associated with Third Worldliness, it might be argued that Ireland becomes less and less postcolonial with every passing year. Eagleton points out, for instance, that since 1996, Ireland is “the eleventh most competitive nation in the world” (The Truth about the Irish 37).

As a competitive nation, Kennedy suggests, Ireland’s own recent history of protectionism against the Third World and its poor record of aid scarcely bespeak solidarity with the downtrodden: “One can’t help thinking that developing countries might have wished for something more tangible from Ireland than protestations of a shared identity” (120). Far from minimizing his clear-sighted translation of such terms as “solidarity” and “shared identity” into material action, I would point out that inter-postcolony relations could generally stand to take the same test, an exercise that would inflect his proposition somewhat differently. If Ireland is not Zaire, as Denis Donoghue wryly points out, neither is India Zaire. And if Ireland’s economic policies are intended to keep Third World products uncompetitive, other postcolonial countries also evince a lamentable lack of economic solidarity. The woeful dearth of regional feeling in South Asia, for instance, an area that has shared the experience of colonialism and its socioeconomic aftermath, is testament to the limitations of postcolonialism as a concept denoting common purpose and mutual consideration among the various ex-colonized.

If it were not only or mostly an economic measure, the term “Third World” could be useful as a conceptual counter to that system of rationalism and modernity we associate with the colonial project and with the capitalist subscriptions of First Worldism.26 This now defunct connotation of “Third World” would have allowed us to explore not only imperialism within the First World but the supercession and overpowering of a whole system of values that are antithetical to those that produce an economically superior First World: maldevelopment in the name of progress, disregard for extant knowledge on the grounds that it is primitive and traditional, and the inability to deem the past as a conceptual resource for alternatives, and not simply as an earlier phase of the progressive present. Within the existing scheme of difference it has been very difficult to distinguish between a shackling primitivism and a productive engagement with “tradition” in which the past is a sign of nostalgia for a future informed by a different system of values. The Third World is not a place so much as a conceptual and creative supplement— rather than a viable alternative in the present circumstances—that interrupts the devastating world order ushered in by modernity. The earlier discussion on the racial and continental standard in the Irish case refracted through this alternative sense of “Third World” allows us to ponder the proposition that imperialism and colonization in the modern period are characterized by a different sort of operative difference as the hallmark of their engine: contempt for the existing systems of values held by those “other” to its colonizing project and the resolute attempt to bring the world into one system of symbolic desire characterized by capitalism and its valuation of high-paced transformation, overproduction and overconsumption, and “development” or exploitation of resources, a desire, in other words, for modernity.

Insufficiently considered in dominant models of postcolonial investigation is an alternative apprehension of difference—the fact that it is the lack of desire among the colonized for certain modes of economic and social behavior that would have seemed so alien to the colonizer as much as visual and linguistic difference. A very similar phenomenon prevails in the classification of backward peoples within the boundaries of one nation like India. Fundamentally, then, it is the placement of different world areas within the projects of modernity, which include capitalism as well as “modern” knowledge and belief systems consonant with its progressive logic, that seem to define the identity of different geopolitical areas. If the “Third World” is a discursive space, then so too is the idea of “Europe,” which is not so much a region of the world as it is what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as “an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought” (Provincializing Europe 4). Powerfully and collectively imagined, it is an idea that seems able to transcend particularization as it maintains its identity in terms more discursive than merely geographical, even if there is an overlap between the two. It is possible, therefore, to be in the geographical space of Europe and to remain outside it by virtue of prototypically Third World relations of production and attachments to belief systems considered outmoded by the project of modernity. The criteria of race and geography alone are inadequate intellectual resources for understanding the experience of colonialism in a comparative frame. These criteria may well serve our classificatory impulses, but they cannot by themselves account for the similarities and differences that characterize the exercise of colonial expansion in various locations through force as well as a belief in an almost morally motivated “modernizing” mission. Through the prism of modernity, the spread of capitalism and modern values in various parts of the world appears in various colors that are nevertheless refractions of a similar force in world history, allowing us to see both the continuum of the same and the discreteness of difference. Like capital, it is “the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in its specific quality” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works 43).

Not surprisingly, most references to the Third World measure in debates about Irish postcoloniality are obliged to acknowledge the rapid changes being experienced by Ireland in the age of globalization as it moves ever closer to “Europe” in its modern incarnation as the Celtic Tiger. If the primarily Protestant official identity of cities like Belfast, once described by Louis MacNeice as “A city built upon mud; / A culture built upon profit,” reinforces the link between the Protestant work ethic and capitalism (perhaps at the expense of the working Protestant poor and the underprivileged Ulster Scots groups), the evolving cosmopolitan city of Dublin is no less susceptible of such a description today despite its primarily and historically Catholic identity (133). The debates over the postcolonial identity of Ireland, Northern Ireland, or indeed Field Day’s more diffuse “Fifth Province” can hardly reckon adequately with contemporary realities without recourse to the terms of modernity and the logic of global capitalism. For all that the Irish case retains a sense of local color and uniqueness, its imbrication within this logic shifts the terms of discussion into the far more challenging discursive realm of a relationship to modernity than to the routine terms of a post-colonial identity based on race, geography, or even strictly historicist notions of progress alone. It is not surprising then, that in Ireland after History, David Lloyd argues for “a critical instance of contemporary postcoloniality” in the challenges to traditional modes of Irish nationalism thrown up by the resistance in Northern Ireland to the state’s repressive techniques of surveillance and control (49). It is on these grounds that a more productive application of comparative and differential analyses can be mounted. A postcolonial framework may well prove the most hospitable to such a project, allowing for an examination of difference within a nevertheless comparative structure.

The foregoing discussion would be nugatory as far as this project is concerned if it did not bear on the primary concern of Native Intelligence, which is the reception and treatment of a certain sort of elite and dominant postcolonial text. The scale of three worlds upon which the identity marker of “postcolonial” rests is not without repercussions for its curricular and pedagogic fate. In systemic terms, Irish and postcolonial literatures occupy a very different conceptual space in the metropolitan canon. Critics argue that centuries of English occupation and the substantial penetration of English culture and literary practice in Ireland on the one hand, and the impact of Irish culture and expression on the formation of English identity on the other, blur the distinction between Irish and English literature somewhat. A tangible consequence is the far greater curricular space traditionally occupied by Irish writers. Many Irish writers enjoy canonical status as part of the field of English literature, and no fewer than four Irish writers are numbered among Nobel laureates. The representation of Irish literature in the regular English canon apart, the growing number of programs in the study of Irish literature and culture signal a very different perception of its status against the toehold space granted to representative writers from a large number of Third World countries within a largely undifferentiated post-colonial category. As its preemptive descriptor implies, Irish literature is perceived as a national literature, whether we see this as an area-based or as a cultural or political sort of nationalism. Although this may be a disadvantage from certain perspectives—it negates other frameworks for Irish identity, based on the adjacence of Northern Ireland with Scotland, for instance—it does allow for a measure of coherence unavailable to the postcolonial. Because of its area studies approach, this model permits depth, whereas the primarily transnational model within which postcolonial studies has operated so far emphasizes breadth at the expense of the microscopic focus. Within the more manageable set available to it, it has been possible to explore more fully the diversity of expression and political positions in Irish literature. Within the national literature model, there is far greater pedagogic space for a rich and textured understanding of the issues across genres, even as there is room to stray from the formula of politics as “selling point” in Brennan’s phrase (At Home 41).

Although all Third World literature has been infamously described as “national allegory” by Jameson, many of the literatures considered paradigmatically postcolonial have yet to achieve the status of national literature disciplinarily in the above-mentioned sense. The notion of Indian or African literature was of course familiar to the Western academy even before the rise of postcolonial studies, but these literatures must now be reintroduced through the postcolonial register to command metropolitan attention. The unconscious irony of conflating the literatures of numerous nations spread across the second largest continent in the world under the sobriquet of “African literature” should indicate the distance these literatures must travel before they can be recognized in their specifics. The suspicion of many Irish critics, including Longley, that the term “postcolonial” simply disguises “nationalist” ambitions, obtains in a very fragmented sense, if at all, with regard to a great deal of postcolonial literature. Any advantages that might have accrued to postcolonial literatures in a framework emphasizing national rather than transnational contexts have, in fact, been prematurely squandered.27

The security of a canonical national literary status paradoxically liberates the Irish writer to move beyond “national” concerns and “national” genres, permitting exploration in genres and themes untethered to the nationalist obligation of telling the prototypically “Irish” story. That these deessentialized expressions, too, must be seen as Irish indicates an enviable instance of the comforts of traditional categorization that can deploy both reductiveness and capaciousness to advantage. The important place of Irish poetry in Irish literature and in the metropolitan canon offers a compelling contrast to the primacy of the novel in postcolonial studies. Whereas the one affords the creative and interpretive license available to its complex modes of representation, the other tempts prosaic and transparent interpretation, particularly in response to the historical novel.

Two significant issues emerge from the foregoing discussion. The first concerns the politics of representation in the metropolitan canon. Although it still dominates discussion, it is not the Field Day project alone that proposes a postcolonial paradigm for Irish studies. Numerous hortatory studies on the “postcolonial” Yeats and Joyce insist upon reframing the terms of discussion about these writers. But if there is growing interest in asserting the “deservedly postcolonial” identity of writers like Joyce and Yeats, there is also consternation at the implications of such a move. The recuperation of already canonical Irish writers such as Swift, Sterne, Burke, Beckett, or Wilde for postcolonial membership signifies the double representation of writers already safely launched in the mainstream literary canon at a time when other writers from the postcolonies are still struggling for admission. The resulting resentment is not surprising, as Eagleton notes:

When a previously dominant group begins to speak the language of cultural unity or diversity, it is understandable if their subordinates detect in this rhetoric a way of perpetuating their privileges in displaced form. (Heathcliff 271)

The battles over scant literary space at a time when the humanities is already under the glare of public scrutiny make the issue even more contentious. It may well be that regardless of the ability to make a case for Irish literature as postcolonial in a bid to complicate the concept, logistics and curricular politics will reinsert themselves as the ultimate arbiters.28

Although the perceived incursion of Irish literature into postcolonial curricular space is not an issue easily dismissed, the grounds on which Irish critics resist the postcolonial paradigm should occasion far greater disquiet. Such critics voice fears for Irish literature that ought to be remarkably instructive for practitioners of postcolonial literary criticism. In an interview with Dympna Callaghan about the Field Day anthology, Seamus Deane scores through a thicket of issues to the core with diamond-edged precision:

What is this thing called Irish writing? What is this thing called Irish literature? These are the kinds of questions that are asked. Is she or he Irish because born on the island? etc. Ridiculous questions at one level, but at another level profound. Because they are not asking whether Congreve is or is not Irish, but rather, what kind of identity formation attaches to certain kinds of writing and how are these identities recruited for certain purposes. (41; emphasis mine)

The second issue that is particularly germane to the concerns of this study pertains to the “kind of identity formation [that] attaches to certain kinds of writing and how. . . these identities [are] recruited for certain purposes.” Although Field Day writers and critics such as David Cairns, David Lloyd, Emer Nolan, Shaun Richards, and Clair Wills, inter alia, have tried to build a case for a postcolonial Irish identity, the matter has remained controversial at best. Among the prominent naysayers are critics Edna Longley and Denis Donoghue and writer Dermot Bolger. The former denounces “the one-size-fits-all zeal of most theorists” and the application of “the post-colonial pastry-cutter” (30, 31). Bolger’s introduction to the 1995 Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction rejects the category of postcolonial literature outright, claiming that “it is simply not possible to allow a phrase like ‘postcolonial literature’ still to wander about like a decomposing chicken in search of its head, and to have it foisted upon the backs of younger writers” (xiii). While Longley’s criticism addresses its lack of specificity, Bolger’s is a rejection on the grounds of the obsolescence of the postcolonial and its irrelevance for contemporary Irish writers.29 Both criteria deserve further investigation in the context of the more uncontroversial varieties of postcolonialism as well.

In their introduction to Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, Jussawalla and Dasenbrock argue strenuously for a consideration of Ireland in a colonial context: “If the United States is the first of the ‘dominions,’ Ireland is surely the first of the colonies. Seven hundred years of colonization changed Ireland but never subdued it, and the rich literature of the Irish literary revival is in important respects a prototype for the explosion of writing in countries formerly colonized by the British around the world” (6). They nevertheless exclude Irish writers from their interviews because “Irish literature today is at a different moment of its historical evolution, but were one able to travel back in time, interviews with James Joyce and Flann O’Brien would have fit in perfectly with the concept of this book” (6–7). The point is not trivial, and it heralds one of various uneasy moments occasioned by the Irish case. As the moment of decolonization recedes for most postcolonial nations and the discipline of postcolonial studies continues to solidify its practices, it would be remiss to neglect Longley and Bolger’s objections to the postcolonial paradigm for Irish studies on the grounds that it is inhospitable to specifics, entirely too generic, and obsolete or irrelevant for many postcolonial writers. A differentially comparative frame of analysis might accommodate these objections better if it also were able to examine the ways in which evolving historical forces have shifted the terms of discussion into the less commensurable arena of global modernity.

In a piece with the telling title, “Fears for Irish Studies in an Age of Identity Politics,” Denis Donoghue bluntly asserts that “not only is the postcolonial approach ill-suited to the Irish situation, it sacrifices literary understanding on the altar of politics” (B4). Within a postcolonial frame still defined by the colonial moment, it is not surprising that colonial experience is centralized, and difference is conceived of in a macroscopic structure that discourages the disclosure of specifics. Thus fastened, it is very difficult to allow for range and distance from this context; thus fixed, the postcolonial remains predictable, except as the center itself moves and changes. Donoghue argues that “the interpretations of literature that it [postcolonial theory] produces are shallow and one-dimensional. Literary criticism cannot be reduced to political interpretation.” The implied poverty of the postcolonial approach as critical apparatus, according to Donoghue, rests in its hostility to “aesthetic recognition.” Donoghue may be accused of painting a complex series of critical maneuvers in deceptively broad strokes, but the criticism obtains for a great deal of the readings of postcolonial literature.

When Jahan Ramazani attempts to answer the question, “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” he begins by suggesting that sponsors for Yeats’s membership to the postcolonial club “would start by placing Yeats in the first nation to emerge from British colonial rule in the twentieth century.” He goes on to suggest that Yeats’s resistance to British cultural domination would also feature in the list of his qualifications as well the fact that his poetry could be seen as “similarly preoccupied with issues of hybridity, subaltern identity, and national formation” (64). Others “would bar the canonical poet,” he argues, “on account of his Eurocentrism, his whiteness, and his affiliation with the centuries-old settler community of Anglo-Irish Protestants” (64). In concluding an illuminating discussion in response to the question, Ramazani argues that “though white and canonical, though non-third-world and Anglo-Irish, Yeats has at least enough in common with the present members to make for some animated conversation” (89). In order to reach this conclusion Ramazani concedes that “the conceit of a postcolonial club. . . . implies a consensus and stability that need to be qualified” (65).

Although postcolonial theory is marked by an unusual degree of self-awareness and continuous self-invigilation, the favored subject of literary criticism has nevertheless come to be stabilized, as Ramazani’s observations suggest, through a series of disciplinary moves themselves enmeshed in the politics of the real world in which disciplines exist. The default and often unstated assumptions that emerge in the attempt to define postcoloniality are not without consequence for the manner in which postcolonial literature is read, taught, and interpreted. The foregoing discussion on postcolonialism and the Irish case reveals the general contours of the “kind of identity formation” that attaches to postcolonial literature. The aesthetic nonrecognition of the value of postcolonial literature prevails as the unfortunate residue of the self-reinforcing mechanisms of dominant critical practice.

In a Gramscian scheme, Lloyd reminds us, “a given conceptual model gains in complexity according to the levels of specificity with which it is applied” (Anomalous States 9). If the arguments for exclusion of Irish studies from it reveals the shape of the dominant paradigm, the characteristic complexity of the Irish case holds valuable lessons for a post-colonial criticism that seeks to reinvest the postcolonial with a fuller understanding of its morphogenic intricacy. The pathology of nominalism surrenders the object to general categories and unity “as a rationalization of [the] failure to understand [the] facts from within” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 83). The intimacies of difference suggest that the “globalization” of postcolonial literature must also nonetheless be revalenced as an “internal” affair, both contextually and aesthetically. Alongside the theoretical reevaluation of the ossifying bones of postcolonial identity, attention to the aesthetic component of literary representation, Native Intelligence submits, provides an important avenue for reinvesting the singular literary text with the capacity to challenge the phantasm of generic formulae even as it seems to cleave to them.