Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
9780719075636_4_002.qxd 16/2/09 9:23 AM Page 16 2 Flying high? Culture, criticism, theory since 1990 Scott Brewster Lucy McDiarmid begins her review of The Cambridge History of Irish Literature by reflecting on the upholstery of Aer Lingus seats, which features quotations from James Connolly, Yeats, Shaw, and lines from the sixteenth-century anonymous Gaelic lament for Kilcash. The quotations on the seats knit together the recurrent dynamics of Irish culture and society that have been interwoven since the twelfth century: tradition and modernity, arrival
approach has even greater validity for Ireland in particular. What passes for Irish ‘culture’ today – the musical dance show Riverdance, the ‘supergroup’ U2 or the ubiquitous global ‘Irish pub’ – does not spring from the eternal wells of the Irish soul. Rather, these phenomena are, to a large extent, manufactured by the global cultural industry. They reflect fully all of the hybridity, syncretism and even, arguably, the ‘postmodernism’ typical of the cultural political economy of globalisation. If globalisation can be said to have produced a ‘world showcase of cultures
to examine and evaluate the literary voices that continue to enhance and enrich contemporary Irish culture. The book that follows consists of seventeen chapters focusing on the drama, poetry and autobiography fiction published since 1990, but also reflecting upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The ‘diverse voices’ in the title refers not only to the variety of creative talents currently at work in Irish letters, but also to the range of perspectives brought to book here, from scholars scrutinising
Faustian split with particular intensity. Their inner anguish has often inspired revolutionary visions, actions and creations, and no doubt this is the fissure that has produced talents ranging from Joyce to U2, from Flan O’Brien to Brian Friel. That Westlife or Meave Binchey should be seen to be the bearers of this torch should be a cause for concern, as it may herald that what was fraught, and fecund, in Irish culture is becoming scarred over, dead and insensitive. eih ch-7.P65 126 26/3/03, 15:14 Millenarianism and utopianism 127 But as people are torn and tear
absurdity of her own culpability: ‘He hit me, he hit his children, he hit other people, he killed a woman – I kept blaming myself. For provoking him’ (p. 170). One aspect that is certain, Charlo’s behaviour is sanctioned by the authorities and by Irish culture. When visiting a doctor about her injuries, Paula is asked if she had been drinking: ‘Have you had a drink Mrs Spencer?’ And friends and family members ask her what she said to him to provoke him: ‘Did you say something to him Paula?’ and ultimately: ‘Why did you marry him then, Paula?’ (p. 171). Judged
feared nor frustrated, though that image itself may owe as much to Jack’s imagination as to fact, as Michael’s own memories of that golden summer of 1936 do. It is nonetheless striking that Friel should pit the sterility of Irish culture, deprived of any continuity with its pagan Celtic roots, against the joyous celebrations and dances of Africa perceived as a repository of a universal sense of the sacred. Africa though, is beyond the reach of the sisters, whose only choice appears to be either a frugal, lonely life in Ballybeg or emigration to London. A culture that
Irish culture – albeit highly hybridised ones – have the potential to reach a global audience. The burgeoning cultural appeal of the Irish Republic has been underlined further by the changing fortunes of the national capital. If we were to go back fifteen years or so, the reputation that Dublin held among foreigners was essentially that of a fairly drab and unsophisticated place. In the course the 1990s, the image of the city would, however, be transformed almost beyond recognition. Consequently, the view that outsiders have of Dublin today is invariably that of a
Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3 Timothy W. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4 Tara Stubbs, American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 5 Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000 (Princeton: Princeton
’, in The Cambridge Guide to Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 178. 15 Ibid., p. 180. 16 Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 41. 17 Stephen Dedalus notes in his diary: ‘The shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead’, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 273. 18 Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Poetry in Ireland’, in Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press