“Did that play of mine …?”: James Connolly,Cathleen Ni Houlihan and staging revolution

Abstract

Despite the crucial position he occupies in Irish history as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and the political – and emotional – impact of his subsequent execution, while wounded, by the British Army on 12 May 1916, the writings of Edinburgh-born James Connolly have often been overlooked in both Irish and Scottish studies, and not just in accounts of the Rising but also in the wider context of cultural connections, including cultures of commemoration. In particular, Connolly’s surviving literary work, including Under Which Flag?, the drama staged on the eve of Easter 1916, as well as poems and songs, has had limited attention. This article reconsiders Under Which Flag? in comparison with Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan in order to demonstrate the central place the drama holds as a continuation – and complication – of Connolly’s political and journalistic writings. If Connolly is a neglected figure as a writer – as opposed to a political leader and martyr – then the play he left behind (once thought to have been lost, like another of his dramas, The Agitator’s Wife) affords us an opportunity to reassess his contribution to the struggle for independence as part of its literary wing.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

P.H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh: a literary friendship

ABSTRACT

Tracing the relationship between P.H. [Patrick Henry] Pearse (1879–1916) and Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), this essay explores the impact their friendship had on their careers as writers and critics. Their work together in St Enda’s, the school for boys founded by Pearse in 1908, provides a significant context for this exploration. There, while working with MacDonagh, Pearse made drama an important part of school life and started writing plays for public performance. Meanwhile, their collaboration in putting together the St. Enda’s school journal, An Macaomh (1909–1913), helped to hone MacDonagh’s skills as a literary critic and to prepare for his later editorial role at the Irish Review (1911–1914). Attention then turns to how MacDonagh’s views on Irish literature and his translations from Old Irish influenced his friend’s development as both a critic and poet. Paticular consideration is paid to “Mise Éire”, one of Pearse’s best-known poems. Finally, similarities are considered between MacDonagh and the hero of The Wandering Hawk (1915–1916), Pearse’s unfinished, English-language, school story for children. Taken together, these various investigations reveal that, despite differing temperaments and at times divergent approaches to Irish writing, Pearse and MacDonagh enjoyed a mutually stimulating friendship that impacted positively on their literary careers.     

Revising history: Elvira Giallanella’s Umanità and the editing of gender

A mix of fantasy, history, spirituality, and political engagement, Elvira Giallanella’s film, Umanità (1920), is a sort of Carrollian ‘through the looking glass’ in which reality resembles itself but upside-down. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Giallanella’s film – a revision of Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s 1916 children’s story from 1916. children’s story – both reflects and critiques gender roles that had been temporarily fissured by the war itself. A feminist position transpires in the juxtaposition of the pre-war male-authored text with the postwar female-directed film, further revised by men. An invaluable historical source, Umanità not only offers insight into a woman’s and a feminist’s perspective on the Great War and its aftermath but also sheds light on the moral, political, and philosophical atmosphere of destabilization at the time. Coming full circle, Umanità suffered from the very same revisions by the re-established postwar patriarchy, and by the end of the 1920s, cinema itself had been reclaimed as male territory, leaving the film lost amongst the debris. Umanità’s resurfacing in 2007 allows us to reflect on the process of history-making in itself: what is omitted, what is included, and more importantly whose voices will be validated enough to be heard along the way. This instance – one amongst several – can serve as an example of how history is indeed a continuous process made up of (re)visions, and never a singular, univocal one.     

The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACT

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.     

The Continuity of Victorian Traces: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Both King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) pursue a quest to regenerate the authority of the English gentleman as ‘the highest rank that a man can reach upon this earth’. The present essay focuses upon Haggard's construction of this ideal of masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Laura Chrisman and Bradley Deane in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard's masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies and human relics. Attention to their thingness entails reflection upon the complexity of textual representations of objects and practical encounters with them as constituent elements of late-Victorian material culture. In addition to examining the significance of hunting and battle trophies in Haggard's fiction, close attention is also paid to the keynote spectacle of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum in 1886, Rowland Ward's habitat diorama, ‘The Jungle’, and to Ward's subsequent forays into ‘animal furniture’. Through reflection on such formations of objects, the thingness of the imperial souvenir illuminates the ideological formations within which hegemonic masculinity and imperialism were articulated at this key moment in the mid-1880s.     

‘Dissidence’ in Holocaust Memorials in Literature: Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou zemí)

Abstract

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel, The Devil’s Workshop (2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust.     

“Don’t call me a Cajun!”: race and representation in Louisiana’s Acadiana region

In southwestern Louisiana, the public sphere is dominated by the image of the Cajuns, presented as a hardy, likable people who have overcome significant obstacles since their arrival as Acadians in the late eighteenth century. Across the cultural region designated “Acadiana,” which comprises 22 counties, nearly 30% of the population is black (or Creole, mixed-race peoples generally identifying as black). Contributions of non-whites to the region’s history are usually not incorporated into the public historical narrative, and the erasure of these groups’ influences on the state’s cultural “gumbo” has profound symbolic and material consequences. Black/Creole residents note that much of their culture – primarily music and foodways – has been repackaged as Cajun or subsumed under the Cajun label and that they are unable to take advantage of the benefits that Creole-oriented tourism could bring to a region in which half of the counties are designated “black high poverty parishes.” Using mixed methods, including interviews, archival analysis, and census data, this paper explores the social, political, and economic consequences of the domination of Cajuns in the south Louisiana memorial and representational landscape and argues that commemorative silences in what Alderman et al. have called the “memorial arena” perpetuate a hegemonic social order.     

Australian Communist Party of Australia v The Commonwealth: Histories of Australian Legalism

Abstract

In this article I structure legalism as a device to interpret how 1951 is remembered in law, in order to show what legal orthodoxies meant in their own time, and how that shifts to a different form of legalism in our own. In doing so, I will argue that the idea of legalism famously produced by the High Court judgment in 1951 has shifted its meaning as much as the ideological support of and opposition to communism that were expressed in the case. I will suggest that this history requires conscious incorporation in the commemorative narratives of ‘democracy vs. communism’.     

“A German Bred Revolt”: the Manchester Guardian’s perceptions of the Irish Easter Rising, 1916

ABSTRACT

At the time of the Easter Rising of 1916 Britain had been engaged in the Great War against Germany for almost two years and on a scale and intensity previously unprecedented. This broader Great War backdrop is significant when analysing the 1916 Easter Rising, as it not only influenced the events which occurred in Dublin, but also the interpretation and presentation of the political violence. Despite the Easter Rising being well-documented in secondary literature, with a resurgence accounted for by its recent centenary, the British press and its portrayals of the events of 1916 has been one aspect which has not received as much scholarly attention. By analysing key stages in the uprising’s portrayal, it can be determined that the Manchester Guardian’s utilisation of the German connection had a two-fold implication. Utilising historical precedents of German-Irish “friendship”, such as the gun-running episodes of pre-War 1914, the newspaper justified its portrayal of Germany provoking violence in Ireland to disrupt British war efforts. Additionally, for the Manchester Guardian, the Irish rebels were depicted negatively in its articles as it attempted to halt the growth of republicanism, thereby ensuring the promotion of a more “moderate” form of nationalism.     

The body politic and “political medicine” in the Jacobean period: Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique

ABSTRACT

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations.     

Conserving by aesthetics,conserving by development: the rescaling and worlding of global south heritage

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the genealogy of rescaling the cultural armature of heritage in the Global South rooted within the colonial culture and postcolonial aid programs. Taking the case of historic Cairo, it explores how policies have developed through experimental practices of conservation to scale up authority, control, and power over residents and neighborhoods from the 19^th century to the present. The paper theorizes two paradigmatic approaches of conservation practices – by aesthetics and development – which have expanded Cairo’s inventory of monuments. The infatuation of heritage experts (the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe and Aga Khan Trust for Culture) with old neighborhoods has fostered accumulation by dispossession, disrupting people’s environments to generate a worlding image of heritage. The paper concludes with the metaphor of conservation practices as re-construction sites, as they repurpose the relationships between heritage, people, and their means of governmentality.     

Historical duty,palimpsestic time and migration in the Decade of Centenaries

Abstract

This article analyses Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien (Dublin Tiger Fringe, 2014) and ANU Production’s Vardo (Dublin Theatre Festival, 2014) in relationship to the performative backdrop of the Irish Decade of Centenaries (2012–22) and a series of key extra-theatrical political events have that featured asylum seekers and migrants prominently in Ireland and to a limited extent in Europe at large from 2012 to 2015. Both theatrical productions centrally engage tropes of Irish national memory vis-à-vis engagement with migration through a primary focus on women’s stories and premiered against the backdrop of the Decade of Centenaries. How to Keep an Alien and Vardo’s embrace of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “palimpsestic time” and their critical focus on gender during this moment of the Decade of Centenaries models a theatrical dramaturgy that aids in reading key theatrical and extra-theatrical events featuring asylum seekers and migrants against one another. These works reveal the relationship between these events and the ongoing redefinition of Irish national memory and political community, a process thrown into sharp relief by the present commemorative mode. They insist that a turn to the past is inseparable from querying the lived political structures of the present, structures that have repeatedly displaced as well as instrumentalised the bodies of migrant women from the post-inward migration of the mid-1990s onwards.     

Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque

ABSTRACT

Circe’s presence in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) invites readers to read both Milton’s Circe and Milton’s own poetic activity through long and intertwined traditions of theology and literary commentary. Stretching from Augustine and Aquinas to the commentaries and translations of Homer and Ovid by Sponde, Sandys, and Chapman, these traditions use Circe to explore and conflate the possibility, the permanence, and the experience of both human and literary transformation. Taken up by Townshend and Jones in their Caroline court masque Tempe Restored, they become essential intertexts for Milton’s Masque. Milton embeds this discourse in his masque – a genre that places metamorphosis at the heart of its poetics – to examine the nature of Renaissance intertextuality and the authorial self and interrogate his own use of Renaissance practices of imitatio and aemulatio. In Comus’ wood, Circean transformation becomes a touchstone for the virtuous soul and the virtuous poet alike.     

James Connolly on stage: history,imagination, and interpretations

James Connolly (1868–1916) has been an underrepresented figure in Irish history, despite the fact that he was one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The controversy surrounding Connolly centres mostly on his questionable role in this radical nationalist siege, even though he had been one of the most prolific Marxist theorists of his day. Interestingly, Connolly’s political ambivalence has yielded plenty of scope for the imagination of playwrights in envisaging his final few days before he was executed by the British government. Their theatrical conjectures – backed by archival research to varying degrees – allow audiences different alternatives for learning about, interpreting, assessing, or even celebrating, the legacy of this controversial Marxist. Most importantly, they are able to look beyond the selectiveness of historians in re-creating Connolly as a material figure. The three plays under discussion are Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’s The Non-stop Connolly Show (1975), Larry Kirwan’s Blood (1993), and Terry Eagleton’s The White, the Gold and the Gangrene (1993).     

The Potential for Conflict Archaeology in the Republic of Ireland

Abstract

Ireland has been the scene of countless engagements and battles. Early clashes saw the Irish fight not only each other, but also foreign invaders such as the Vikings and Anglo-Normans. The Early Modern period saw conflict reach a new level of intensity, with much of the Country being devastated between 1550 and 1700. Later, rebellions such as 1798 and 1916 punctuate the historical record, ending with the War of Independence and Civil War between 1919–1923. Battles are only part of the story, however. The Republic is also rich in military buildings of varying dates, and has its share of sites such as World War One training areas and World War Two coastal defences, encompassing the full spectrum of conflict archaeology. All these sites have received little archaeological attention in the Republic of Ireland. A pilot study of the Boyne battle field remains the only significant work carried out. Despite this, a significant number of military objects have been recovered throughout the Country, indicating the potential richness of this archaeological resource. This paper will examine a number of locations where further work could be considered, including: Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow (1580), Dún An Oir, Co. Kerry (1580), Kinsale, Co. Cork (1601), Dungan's Hill, Co. Meath (1647), Ballymore, Co. Westmeath (1691) and St. Stephen's Green, Co. Dublin (1916).     

The Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Abstract

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from larry's Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the debacle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of she movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.     

Gendered viewing,childbirth and female authority in the residence of Alice Chaucer,duchess of Suffolk,at Ewelme,Oxfordshire

ABSTRACT

This article examines the visual culture of the late medieval great residence from the perspective of the female gaze. In 1466, the widowed Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (c.1404–75), moved several items from her London and East Anglian houses to her principal residence at Ewelme, Oxfordshire. A unique set of inventories reveals that the move anticipated the birth and baptism of one of Alice’s grandchildren at that manor house. Focusing on the tapestries displayed in the main rooms of Alice’s residence, this article argues that the rituals surrounding the birth of Alice’s grandchild – and their occurrence within a female-headed household – provided a gendered viewing context, which both informed, and was informed by, their iconography. It considers how the mutually constitutive relationship between space, iconography and ritual would have authorised an event centred on female bodies, whilst also articulating Alice’s authority as household and family matriarch.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.