Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.     

Writing the History of Irish Women

Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland 1890-1914 Margaret Ward (ed.) In Their Own Voice: Women and Irish Nationalism Mary O'Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women's Status in Church, State and Society Joan Hoff and Moureen Coulter (eds) Irish Women's Voices Past and Present     

From aisling to chora: female allegories of the nation in contemporary Irish women's poetry

Contemporary Irish women poets use female tropes of Irish nationalism as a potent site for revising traditional conceptions of femininity, maternity, and cultural identity. Arguably, female tropes of aisling poetry inhabit the same cultural location that anchors the societal role of motherhood as theorised by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's work highlights mothers' important function in regulating the drives and preparing children for entrance into the symbolic order of society, in relation to which mothers remain structurally liminal. The Platonic chora, an amorphous receptacle from which forms emerge, symbolises this position at the threshold. This essay shows that Irish women poets revise female allegories of the nation either by aligning them with women's lived experience, as Eavan Boland has done, or by re-evaluating them from within their liminality, through stylistic experimentation or irony, which the analysis of poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Rita Ann Higgins demonstrates.     

Authoritarian power in space,time and exile

Autocrats have been shown to exert influence over their populations and dissidents abroad through strategies such as ‘transnational repression’ or ‘diaspora engagement’ policies, demonstrating that authoritarian power carries across borders. But existing work on extra-territorial authoritarian power has tended to view state power as a stand-alone variable that endows regimes with a relatively free hand to make their own diaspora policies. This is despite that studies of authoritarianism inside states, including those observing the ‘dynamics of contention,’ have consistently highlighted the relational and contingent nature of authoritarian power. This paper asks whether the iterative dynamics of contention that describe regime-opposition relations within state boundaries endure between authoritarian regimes and their exiles? It brings together the literatures on extra-territorial authoritarian power and the topology of power with that on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes to undertake a case study on the relationship between the Syrian government and the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. It finds that extra-territorial authoritarian is relational and contingent on the political context and its recipients, and shares many of the characteristics of authoritarian power inside state boundaries.