“The Hunting of the Earl of Rone.” The Emergence of “New” Folklore Motifs: Individual Creativity and Group Control

In 1798, a French expeditionary force under General Humbert landed in County Mayo to support the United Irishmen's rebellion. Both the French and their local allies were eventually defeated by British and Yeomanry troops, but the memory of the events and personalities of “the Year of the French” was still strong when the Irish Folklore Commission started its collecting mission in the 1930s. This article suggests that the folk narratives of these events can be collated into an alternative, and more democratic, version of the rebellion. Popular interest rested not with the French general (except as a scapegoat for defeat) but with local men (and women) of less elevated status. The common people of Ireland were, in their own narratives, less directed from above and more agents in their own right. These are less a corrective to the supposedly “authoritative” histories written by professionals and diffused through the media and education system, than a coherent, alternative historiography.1 The ballad “The Men of the West” was composed by William Rooney, one of the most enthusiastic organisers of the centenary commemorations of 1798. The ballad was set to the air of “Eoghan Cóir,” a song attributed to the eighteenth‐century Mayo poet Richard Barrett [Riocard Bairéad], who was implicated in the Rebellion.      

Pismires and Protestants: the ‘lingering dissolution’ of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall

Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall presents an Ireland in which the traditional lines of sectarian division are unravelling. The blurring of difference that ensues is symptomatic of the curious state of suspension implied by the title of the play, which both suggests and withholds the promise that ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall’. This ‘lingering dissolution’ stabilises in a peculiarly indiminishable life force, reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze's notion of vitalism, which serves to reveal the unifying singularity underlying all distinct identities. However, while the play points out the illusory origin of sectarian (as other) division, it also acknowledges that such division will always, inevitably arise.     

1948 and All That: A New Chronology for the History of Palestine?

DEREK J. PENSLAR. The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv, 210. $25.00 (us).

JACOB BARNAI. The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine, trans. Naomi Goldblum. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 305. $39.95 (us).

BARUCH KIMMERLING and JOEL S. MIGDAL. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press (Macmillan), 1993. Pp. xix, 396. $29.95 (us).

MAYIR VERETÉ. From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté, ed. Norman Rose. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Pp. xiv, 233. £28.00.

ISSA KHALAF. Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948. Albany: State University Press of New York, 1991. Pp. xix, 318. $19.95 (us).

ANITA SHAPIRA. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948, trans. William Templer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. x, 446. $59.00 (CDN).     

The Sartre–Camus Quarrel and the Fall of the French Intellectual

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual.     

The Style of Blugzeimat and the “Masks” of the Prehistoric Rock Art of the Western Sahara: New Evidence for Long-Distance Contacts

Blugzeimat is a prehistoric rock-art site in the Tiris region (southern Western Sahara), with more than 100 engraved slabs. The major portion of these engravings represents zoomorphs, anthropomorphs and non-figurative signs. Based on the absence of protohistoric texts, chariots or horse riders, and the probable depiction of a halberd, the age of these engravings may correspond to the first half of the second millennium BCE. The stylistic attributes of the engraved bovines, which are the most commonly represented subject, allow us to relate Blugzeimat to several sites with pecked engravings located in the Tiris (Western Sahara) and Adrar (north-western Mauritania) regions. In addition to this first stylistic and geographic delimitation, we have also been able to identify signs, traditionally designated as “masks” in the literature, which relate Blugzeimat to several sites with incised engravings located in the northern Saguia el Hamra basin. As incised and pecked engraving techniques have been regularly considered examples of unrelated rupestrian traditions in the Western Sahara, the engraving of these highly specific signs using both techniques allows us to question that paradigm. Finally, the long-distance thematic coincidence represented by the presence of such signs, in regions far from one another, provides additional evidence to refute the common idea of an absence or scarcity of cultural contacts between the north and south of the Western Sahara before the adoption of the horse and camel.     

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

Yeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.     

All the World’s a Stage: Promotional Politics and Branded Identities in Asia

ABSTRACT

This article highlights key questions raised by the growing concern for global competitiveness and promotional politics in contemporary Asia. Global politics is increasingly governed by promotional imperatives and in the last two decades it has become a common practice for governments to engage in nation branding. Asian states have been particularly eager to implement such promotional strategies, as their rapid development in the last decades has increased their international presence and the overseas expansion of their national corporations. Why and how do Asian states promote themselves? Where and how do promotional imperatives interact with traditional state policies? How are national identities produced, reproduced and challenged through promotional practices in Asia? This article introduces a series of three articles that underline the significance of these policies with regard to renewed, market-based forms of nationalism in the region. It highlights the way questions of image projection within a global capitalist order are becoming crucial for major emerging Asian economies such as China as they integrate and seek to reshape the global political economy. Finally, it considers how, in several regimes in the region, nation branding and the necessities of image projection serve as powerful governance tools to recreate apolitical versions of national identities that serve domestic political purposes.