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