Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

The question at the heart of Ireland and Postcolonial Theory was Ireland a colony? is a simple one. How it is answered, however, has enormous repercussions for understanding just about every aspect of Irish history and society: culture, economics, politics, demographics and a whole array of everyday rituals, ranging from patterns of speech through the inhabiting of physical space to daily prayer. Accepting the fact of British colonization (a premise that this book recognizes, pursues and complicates) amounts to possessing a way of seeing, a master narrative of sorts that can explain all manner of economic and epiphenomenal events. Most obviously, from such a vantage point, the Irish famine from the immediate fact of starvation to the legacies of emigration, cultural memory, language decline and social reorganization was a catastrophe produced primarily by the colonial system, with its landlordism, laissez-faire economics and artificial land holding patterns. Similarly, to acknowledge that the driving contradiction of Irish history has been the struggle between foreign rule and independence is to have a grid onto which just about everything can be mapped. It is precisely this all-encompassing explanatory power that makes postcolonial theory so appealing and so simple, so reductive, so biased for its opponents. We have known at least since Freud that the past never goes away, and that debates over history are an attempt to understand and grapple with the present. The issues addressed by postcolonial theory are about how that past, shaped by the structures of colonialism and the personalities of its agents, lives on and continues to shape the psychology and culture of the nation. And it is here, in the present, where the real intensity and stakes of the above question was Ireland a colony? is felt. If colonialism was real, then nationalism and resistance to imperialism are legitimated. It may be redundant to assert that definitions matter, but if one accepts that Ireland was colonial, then not only was undoing partition legitimate, but so were attendant critiques of, even attacks on, the British state in Ireland and the institutions that propped it up. This question obviously did not begin with the emergence of what we now call postcolonial theory on the academic scene, circa 1980, or as Joe Cleary puts it in the first essay of this collection, roughly at the start of the 1980s, when postcolonial studies emerged "within the Irish academy as a distinct mode of critical analysis." Many of the themes of this book how we define colonialism (Joe Cleary), who narrates history (David Lloyd), the connection between Ireland and European ideas (Luke Gibbons), spiritualism and national identity (Gauri Viswanathan) have seen earlier