Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia 1930–1960

The rich corpus of material produced by the anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) has come to dominate our understanding of Zambian societies and Zambia's past. The RLI was primarily concerned with the socio‐cultural effects of migrant labour. The paper argues that the anthropologists of the RLI worked from within a paradigm that was dominated by the experience of colonial conquest in South Africa. RLI anthropologists transferred their understanding of colonial conquest in South Africa to the Northern Rhodesian situation, without ever truly analysing the manner in which colonial rule had come to be established in Northern Rhodesia. As such the RLI anthropologists operated within a flawed understanding of the past. The paper argues that a historical paradigm of colonial conquest that was applicable to the South African situation came to be unquestioningly applied by anthropologists to the Northern Rhodesian situation, and discusses what the consequences of this paradigm are for our understanding of Zambian history.     

‘If I was Irish I'd be crying by now’: Irishness and exteriority,Doyle's Deportees and the Irish plays of Martin McDonagh

While variations on the relationship between Irishness and exteriority resound throughout Irish literature and Irish studies, the implications and applications of the version offered by Roddy Doyle's short story ‘Home to Harlem’ remain underdeveloped. This article explores the particular paradigm of Irishness derivable from Doyle's work, and is motivated by it to revisit and re-examine the Irish plays of Martin McDonagh and the question of audience relation to them. I argue that the constituents of the overly rehearsed ‘McDonagh enigma’ – his reliance on stereotypical representation and his highlighting of artifice – ensure a dynamic of recognition and exteriority in the Irish-identifying audience, which, in turn, enacts an extreme version of the process of Irishness extrapolable from Doyle.