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nationhood have dominated the scene since the early 1990s, with examples like David Lloyd’s Anomalous States: Ireland and the Post-Colonial Moment (1992), Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995), Gerry Smyth’s The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (1997), Seamus Deane’s Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (1997), Joe Cleary’s Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002) and Ray Ryan’s Ireland and Scotland: Literature and
legitimise it, as Benedict Anderson argues (1991: 11), then given the patriarchal, male-centred nature of Christianity and most other world religions, and the oppressive nature of their relation to women, it is inevitable that the construction of the idea of the ‘nation’ should have been equally male-centred and patriarchal, manifesting itself in the traditions of warrior nations, warrior clan systems, with women as bearers of warriors or symbolic female figures of nationhood – the equivalent nationalist muses to the traditionally female poetic muse. The Irish poet Eavan
in certain more recent writings, as a source of invention. Writers investigate metaphor, symbol, dream and fetish as signifiers of a national reality or as constituents of a sense of national being, rather than the nation as literal truth. Under a range of pressures – political dislocations and violence, economic trauma, geographical and cultural displacements, other forms of national schizophrenia – the made up nature of nationhood has emerged into greater prominence. And so, as the split between nationalist fantasy and nation-state reality has been teased open
the people that paradoxically thrive on both at once a strict oppositional segregation of the sexes and an adamant disavowal of their intrinsic heterogeneity, or self-andotherness. In the modernist era of the early twentieth century this fundamental deconstructive disunity at the heart of nationalist discourse – albeit ‘repressed and disguised by the veneer of national unity’ (Plain 1996: 20) and thus prone to strengthen the alleged bond of complementarity between the nation’s men and women – gives rise to the genderspecifically disparate experience of nationhood
distinctions are not merely superficial. On the contrary, as in the chapter on Ngugi, nationalism, whether as ideology or as political movement, configures and consolidates itself through a variety of deeply embedded gender-specific structures. The idea of nationhood bears a masculine identity although some national ideals may wear a feminine face. Such gender tags are clearly illustrated, for example, in the iconographies the nation cherishes. In the literature, rhetoric and pageantry of nations, as in nationalist politics and political structures, it is a male figure who is
. . . . McCabe suggests, however, that the ultimate source of abjection, and the ultimate monster, is the Irish nation itself’.33 The Dead School (1995), Breakfast on Pluto (1998) and Call Me the Breeze (2003) further extend this coruscating critique of toxic nationhood by anatomising the psychotic borderline identities produced by the interplay of multiple and competing ideologies, while Winterwood dramatises the lethal effects of repressed historical memory through the spectral persona of Redmond Hatch/Ned Strange/Dominic Tiernan. This mutating monster is at once abused
-nippled mother, a mother who gave plenty of herself and demanded loyalty of one, loyalty to an ideal, allegiance to an idea, the notion of a nationhood – no more, and no less. (Maps 96) Askar seeks fusion with the illiterate mother-as-body yet can do so only by objectifying it. In this predicament a central contradiction of postcolonial nationalist narrative is epitomised. Self-articulating narrative cannot deliver what it promises: a completely united and unifying history, an absolute identification with the national body. To conceptualise that fusion demands, in practice
Irish autobiography, however, the intense relationship between the psychology of the self and the politics of nationhood has been rendered through an especially powerful and experimental preoccupation with place and time. One of the unusual and distinctive features of recent autobiographical writing has been its tendency to highlight its own spatial and temporal complexities as a way of denoting the problematic nature of identity. A strong commitment to the co-ordinates of place and time might well be expected in nationalist memoirs and autobiographical writings by
, therefore, which this chapter will theorise, and the following chapters will further exemplify and expand, is that gender forms the formative dimension for the construction of nationhood, if in relation to varying contextual determinants across different regions and countries. This is a point which, with remarkable unanimity, leading male theorists of the nation such as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony Smith have either ignored or failed to address, often choosing even so to define the nation, BOEHMER Makeup 3/22/05 2:55 PM Page 23 John's G5:Users
, be imagined as the prodigal son who saves his vagabond father, the north. The Antipodes’ inversive potential is, moreover, frequently used to collapse rather than maintain dualities. By mobilising the trope of antipodality, Australian newspapers could reorient the Australian colonies and allow the south to address the north as it moved steadily from ‘below’ to ‘besides’, anticipating and animating the move from a discourse of colonial self-governance to one of Australian nationhood and federation that began to seriously emerge in the 1880s. 57 Figure 2