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mind and my body has always remained and is insurmountable.42 Both The Village of Longing and The Bend for Home are suffused by a muted revisionism which is partly to do with telling stories in ways that disrupt the normative relationship between self, community and nation.43 They also testify to the difficulties that attend the post-colonial subject’s claim to autobiographical agency, as shown by the narrators’ repeated acts of decentring and recentring the self. As such, these works properly belong to the performative mode of autobiography in which ‘the self is a
’s countenance, noble, emaciated, the nostrils quivering. (Bataille on Michelet, quoted in Barthes 1987 [1954]: 221) The role of the intellectual voice in the construction of radical identities has been central to the post-colonial critique of Ireland.2 Memmi’s amusedly affectionate dismissal of ‘venerable scholars’ sleepwalking their way through a history that is constantly passing them by is an appealing way to circumvent the interminable question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, which shadows, in potentia, all pronouncements on the post-colonial subject and, by analogy, all
in the City at large to prompt the audience reaction described by Busino, as discussed previously. Middleton also updates Munday’s approach in The triumphs of re-united Britania to King James as the embodiment of union when in The Triumphs of loue and antiquity he has ‘seuerall Countries . . . all owing Fealty to one Soueraigne’. By 1619 James’s realm, as depicted in the Show, has expanded across the seas to include the colonial subjects not mentioned by Munday, who concentrated on ‘Britain’.105 For Middleton, however, the Noble English, the faire thriuing Scot