Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw what is known today as the Highland Clearances, which was in effect the forced migration of a large proportion of the population of the Scottish Highlands due to intensified sheep farming in the name of a more effective economic land use (Devine, 1999, pp.176-78). For the Gaelic speech community this meant ‘the removal of its heartland’ (MacKinnon, 1974, p.47). MacKinnon argues that ‘effectively this was to reorientate the linguistic geography of Scotland in reducing the Gaelic areas to the very fringes of northern and western coastal areas and to the Hebrides’ (1974, p.47). Yet, it was not economic exploitation alone which influenced the existence of the Gaelic population in a most profound way. There was also an active interference with language use through the eradication of Gaelic from the sphere of education as manifested in a series of Education Acts from 1872 onwards. Such education policy ensured the integration of the Gaelic speech community into English-language Britain (MacKinnon, 1974, pp.54-74). Gaelic Scotland therefore had its share of experiencing what in postcolonial literary studies is identified as the ‘two indivisible foundations of imperial authority knowledge and power’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995, p.1; referring to Said, 1978, p.32). As the editors of The Post-colonial Studies Reader explain: