Ireland After History

📖 The Scoop

What is the agenda of postcolonial theory? Is there a peculiarly Irish postcolonial theory? If so, how does it relate to decolonizing projects elsewhere in the world, contemporary or historical? What does Irish postcolonial theory learn from other sites and what, in turn, does it contribute to the understanding of colonialism as a world-wide phenomenon? Is an Irish postcolonialism merely a stalking horse for nationalism? Or does it take up the critique of identity and the nation state in the attempt to find an alternative understanding of state formation and decolonization and of the historical processes that bring these movements into conflict? What are the historical myths that have governed modernity -- colonial, nationalist, and capitalist? Do they limit and obscure the heterogeneity of Irish culture and its apparently oblique relation to modernization? Are there other methods and theoretical approaches that might open up the field of Irish Studies to alternative perspectives and narratives?

These are some of the questions addressed in the linked essays collected in Ireland After History -- essays that draw on a range of theoretical resources, from walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School to subaltern historiography and Marxist critiques of ideology. This volume addresses a wide variety of Irish cultural phenomena, from politics to cinema, from poetry to murals, but it focuses primarily on the tired dichotomies of nationalism and revisionism in order to establish alternative possibilities, both theoretical and practical, for the understanding of the past and the shaping of the future.

This book is an outstanding contribution to Irish Studies. It is innovative, challenging, andshould provoke much-needed debate. Above all else, this is a pioneering contribution to the methodology of Irish Studies, theorizing the discipline and placing it in both an international and an interdisciplinary framework.

Genre: History / Europe / Ireland (fancy, right?)