Ireland, Empire and Utopia

This article is a response to Bill Ashcroft’s ‘Critical Utopias’, which appeared \nin this journal in 2007. In his earlier piece, Ashcroft offered a summary genealogy \nof the historical and literary historical links between Utopian Studies \nand Postcolonial Studies.While ‘CriticalUtopias’ was a salutary intervention \nin this discursive dialogue between these two fields; by including the Irish case \nthis article is designed as an extension to the geographical and historical limits \nof Ashcroft’s piece. Therefore, my article offers a substantial outline of some \nrecent work within Irish postcolonial studies and identifies the Utopian energies \nthat sustain such criticism. Positioning Irish postcolonial critiques as \ndifferential, yet conversant, engagements with the processes of late twentieth \ncentury Irish modernisation, the article treats the issues such as: the philosophical \nand political subtleties of Edmund Burke; the civic republicanism of \nthe United Irish movement; the imbricated political, cultural and social \nmovements of the Irish Revival; the Socialist nationalism of James Connolly, \nas well as the recalcitrant local practices of counter-modern social formations \nmined by Connolly’s proto-subalternist historiography. My ‘Response’, \ntherefore, is intended as a supplement to Ashcroft’s initial intervention, but \nalso as a reminder that Ireland should not be easily elided from postcolonial \ndebates, as it so often has been. Finally, the article has a particular focus on \nmatters that pertain to the utopic in terms of the literary historical and the historiographical \nwithin Irish postcolonial studies, and will, one hopes, catalyse \nfuture interventions that might engage with other facets of Irish colonial \nhistory and postcolonial criticism

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Criticism · Empire · Irish · Literature · Utopia · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy