Esmail Khoi: The Poet as Observer and Creative Explorer

This article focuses on how Esmail Hkoi poetically inhabits the world of his poetry as an observer and visionary explorer. Its aim is to make manifest how he engages his readers in reciprocal poetic dialogues to communicate his unique vision of the lived world. The dialogic function of his poetry is then examined as the ground of emergence of an experiential poetic mode of knowledge of the human condition. The article also considers Khoi's poetry as work done in the fields of language, alchemically transmuting everyday language of communication into poetic discourse. Finally, an analysis of his poem “To the Aged Mulberry Branch” explicates how Khoi can create a world of imagination whole and entire unto itself by his minimalist approach to poetry.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Forms of secularism and multiculturalism: Charles Taylor and Ireland

This article seeks to frame the work of the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor in terms of its significance for Irish culture. Taylor came to wide prominence for his work on multiculturalism, but the varying ways he understands this term are especially important for Ireland. “Multiculturalism 1” speaks to the kinds of difficulties between nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. “Multiculturalism 2” speaks to the more widely understood meaning of the term, which is connected to a cultural diversity that is often born of immigration. Taylor has had a strong role in the emergence of the term “interculturalism” to describe a form of cultural diversity that explicitly seeks to balance the needs of minority and majority cultures, and in Canada and Quebec that term has taken on a different understanding than the one that is common in Ireland. That work on interculturalism also strongly underwrites Taylor’s work on secularism, and he traces that social phenomenon in ways with clear relevance for Ireland. Although Taylor’s explicit engagement with Ireland is rare, it is clearly time to bring his work into the mainstream of studies of Irish culture.