Abstract: The Irish-language term duanaire is now best known as the title of a landmark volume, An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed , published by Dolmen Press in Mountrath, Portlaoise in 1981. For this dual-language anthology, poems in the Irish language were chosen by academic and poet Seán Ó Tuama, and new translations into English verse were provided by poet Thomas Kinsella. The collection won immediate and lasting acclaim for enabling a much wider readership for these three centuries of creative work by Irish-language poets, and also for foregrounding the cultural and social consequences of language shift and loss in Ireland: "there, more clearly than anywhere else," wrote Denis Donoghue in his review for the London Review of Books , "we can see what an Irish tradition means by marking its loss." Yet behind the word duanaire , made newly prominent by the 1981 collection, is a long linguistic provenance with deep explanatory power, cultural significance, and continuing resonance, a term which records a long cultural history of confident possession and repossession, and not only dispossession and loss.
Abstract: This essay takes a comparative perspective, looking at both Ireland and Palestine in order to assess the term "settler." It argues that the planting of settlers in Ireland and Palestine was intended by Britain to subjugate their peoples and take control of their land, while providing a loyal local garrison for the colonial power, all of this under the rubric of a noble "civilizing" mission to tame and uplift the natives. Stripped of its ideological baggage, and placed in context, whether that of Ireland, North America, or Palestine, the term "settler" reeks of aggression toward, and disdain for, the native.
Abstract: From the time they arrived in the United States in the 1820s, Irish immigrants built wooden shanties that, while often only a single room, reflected the resourcefulness of their builders. As the pace of immigration accelerated, "shanty Irish" became shorthand for otherness and a lack of civilization. Shantytown residents pushed back on the streets, in the courts, and on the stages of nineteenth-century America, asserting ethnic and class aspirations. As Irish-Americans cemented their political and cultural influence in the twentieth century, the shanty acquired a nostalgic glow, celebrating the tenacity of Irish immigrants even as they ceased to live in shanties.
Abstract: The origins of the term "Troubles" to describe war in Ireland have a history that is difficult to pin down with any degree of precision. But what we do know is that, in historical terms, the word is not specific to the violence that erupted in the streets of Derry and Belfast in the summer of 1969. One can find the term being employed by a variety of actors to describe conflict in Britain and Ireland as far back as the seventeenth century. The ambivalent, even evasive term remains deeply embedded in contemporary Irish culture. Understanding its use offers perspective into both Ireland's past and present.
Abstract: "Brogue" is a dialectical pronunciation or accent that seeks to represent the particularities of Irish speech. The term derives from the Irish word bróg meaning "shoe," and can also refer to a coarsely made leather shoe. Its usage has historically been burdened by colonial and class prejudices, embedded with anxieties about national identity and hybridity. Frequently associated with hackneyed representations of English as spoken by the Irish, and generally deployed by outsiders to Ireland to reinforce broader stereotypes of Irish identity, brogue offers a means to track perceptions of Irish English from the sixteenth century to the present day.
Abstract: Hunger describes a physical sensation as well as a social phenomenon, and both have existed from time immemorial. There was hunger before the word; there was hunger, indeed, before words. This essay insists that, in the bilingual context of Ireland, English-language "keywords" can only ever offer a partial and incomplete understanding of cultural developments. It proceeds, however, to consider how hunger came to be a phenomenon associated, at home and abroad, with Ireland. Focusing on a few selected texts, this essay recovers attitudes to hunger in the 1840s; how it has been experienced, expressed, and politicized.
Abstract: Seanchas is an Irish term for vernacular knowledge of history, memory, and tradition. It was recited in medieval aristocratic society by professionally trained seanchaithe . Despite aggressive colonial Anglicization, the Gaelic bardic culture that sustained seanchas persisted into the seventeenth century. From the early modern period seanchas evolved into more demotic articulations of history-telling. Its demise was repeatedly proclaimed in the face of modernization. Yet seanchas traditions have been documented over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by antiquarians and folklore collectors, and continue to appear in contemporary popular culture, showing resilience and adaptability.
Abstract: The word "civilize" signified military domination, along with legal, political, cultural, and, increasingly, economic imperialism, first in Ireland, then in the English Atlantic world and, by the later nineteenth century, across the British empire in Asia and Africa. The change in usage from the 1570s reflects an important shift in the nature of the English mission in Ireland, from one of humanist inspired reform and "civility" to more aggressive policies grounded in outright conquest, colonization, and commercialization. This essay surveys the bloody, complex, and contested landscape within which the meaning of the word "civilize," along with the ideas associated with it, evolved.
Abstract: Travellers have been marginalized as "lower caste" because of their cultural differences from majority Ireland, a racialization denoted by the pejorative term "tinker." This racialization is entwined with the importation of that term into Anglophone Ireland in the early nineteenth century. In post-Reformation northern European Protestant culture, "tynkers" were condemned as the inverse of Western and Christian norms. As English spread, tinker unevenly but gradually replaced Irish-language terms used for the peripatetic that did not carry the negative connotations of the imported word. Therefore, in tracing any earlier presence in Ireland of those so named, the word tinker is a red herring. This essay will unfold how the racial and cultural politics of the classification of disparate European peripatetic communities since the Reformation are central to how the word tinker became attached to the community now known as Travellers.
Abstract: This essay examines the developing use of the term "plantation" to describe human settlement in an Irish context. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the use of "plantation" in an Irish context dates to the 1610s. This raises some questions, as historians and archivists have commonly applied the term to describe patterns of settlement that obtained in Tudor Ireland following expropriation of native landowners. This interpretive use, however, is, strictly speaking, an anachronism. The essay also examines some of the political and cultural resonances of the term "plantation" in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Abstract: This essay offers a survey of the political, economic, and literary fortunes of the term "absentee" from its Anglo-French medieval and early English origins to contemporary international usages, paying particular attention to its deployments with reference to Ireland. The essay traces the term's emergence in English legal discourse dealing with English feudal magnates awarded large estates in Ireland who preferred to live in England, and follows with subsequent uses with reference to the Ulster Plantation. It deals also with disputations over "absenteeism" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concludes with engagements with absenteeism in Maria Edgeworth's novels and Daniel Corkery's criticism.
Abstract: "Partition" gained its keyword status through the acts of territorial division that took place in the twentieth century in the context of the decline of formal empire. The term, when applied to such acts, has contradictory connotations of disruption and solution, with partition viewed either as severing a natural geographic unit, or as a panacea for communal tensions and competing territorial claims. The establishment of a border on the island of Ireland in 1921 laid the foundations for Britain's recurring resort to partition as imperial exit strategy. The ongoing ramifications of that strategy have ensured that partition remains an essential keyword.
Abstract: There are certain indigenous words that carry a considerable burden of signification within a culture, across space and time; Aisling is one such keyword. In tracing its origins, histories, sublimations, and transformations as a musicopoetic form, we illustrate the power and limitations in applying Raymond Williams's methodology to a Gaelic word and cultural concept. Aisling confronts and subverts the colonial logic of Western epistemological thought, as manifest in the original Keywords project. Aisling is understood as a "resource of hope," a native artistic response and speculative hermeneutic for a contemporaneous society beset with immense challenges and experiential ruptures.
Abstract: This essay traces the etymological and semantic evolution of the word "gombeen," from the material deprivation and chaotic bilingualism of early-nineteenth-century Ireland, to the political clientelism of the "Celtic Tiger" two hundred years later. First appearing in print in 1838, the term likely emerged in the spoken English of Connacht. Initially, "gombeen" denoted extortionate interest on food and money loans in rural Ireland, and was applied by extension to the unscrupulous lenders who exploited their desperate neighbors in times of hardship. Over the course of the twentieth century, the word gradually shed its association with usury and came to denote venal local businessmen and politicians, becoming, for a time, a common label in the Irish political vocabulary.
This essay shatters the myth of the oil era's birth in the antebellum US by recuperating prior imperial writings that constructed oil as a global resource. The essay shows how oil was born alongside its territorial twin, the oil field, in British literary, scientific, and economic discourse. Of particular importance was Trinidad's Pitch Lake, where writers imagined oil's ontology and distribution vis-d-vis local slave plantations. While Charles Kingsley's West Indian travelogue At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871) consolidated this tradition for lay readers, Alfred Mendes's novel Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinidad (1934) offers a contrapuntal riposte that anticipates a future beyond oil.
This essay proposes a new interpretive theory called fictions of queer attachment, which refers to three synergistic forms of composition and reception: (1) works of fiction that depict queer or "forbidden" relationships; (2) audiences' imaginings of pleasurable queer bonds with works of art; and (3) vital adaptations or new artistic compositions inspired by such queer works and bonds. I analyze Jessica Hagedorn's 1990 novel Dogeaters-and three of its fictional intertexts (by Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Manuel Puig)-to illustrate how works of fiction both depict and enable life-sustaining bonds with art, especially for marginalized artists and audiences.
This essay explores "perplexity" as a feature of Geoffrey Hill's poetry and prose, and thereby argues for its categorical salience in literary criticism. Drawing on a range of writers in addition to Hill-Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Michael Clune, Emily Dickinson, and others-it presents perplexity both as cognitive difficulty and as a description of excitingly unresolved reading. Such perplexity, the essay argues, throws us into "the live mediatedness that precedes knowing," and entails a kind of critical judgment that emerges from the phenomenology of reading itself.
Abstract: In this essay, "light labor" names an eighteenth-century trope intent on optimizing labor for industrial expansion. As Britain economically developed through transatlantic industries, the georgic's twin modes of didacticism and description appealed to the problem of managing Britain's mass labor force. In John Dyer's The Fleece (1757) and James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764), managers provide workers with access to healthcare, holidays, and modern technology in order to guide industries toward a morally "lightened" version of labor that is crucial to the managers' profit model. While balancing the workers' output with their relief is a common trope of the ancient genre, I argue that "light labor" is an eighteenth-century technique managing modern productivity for British markets. While the georgic seemingly exhausted its relevance long ago, I suggest light labor is evidence of its lasting success.
This essay examines the central role of the typewriter in materializing Frantz Fanon's entire body of writing. Indeed, two typistsJosie Fanon and MarieJeanne Manuellan-painstakingly took dictation from Fanon to give his thoughts a physical shape. Examining accounts both fictional and non-fictional, I argue that the typewriter-woman is the medium of Fanon's revolutionary thought: she not only performs the reproductive labor of writing, but also actively shapes and constrains what Fanon said, thus contributing her voice to his famous works. By the same token, I insist on moving away from Fanon's words to those of his typist. Analyzing Manuellan's memoir as well as Josie Fanon's extraordinary career as an Algerian journalist, this article re-assesses the feminist stakes of reading Fanon. In particular, Josie Fanon's decolonial feminism provides a new way to contend with, if not repair, the violent misogyny associated with the "Fanon" name.
This article theorizes a reading hermeneutic and environmental literary history for what I call "situated poetics": limit cases of literature that build more-than-representational relationships between language and materials to intervene in discourses of land use. In two odd scenes from different arenas of literary history, Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite go to great lengths to imagine a poetry that is at once literary technique, sculptural object, and living landscape. Installing poetry on their private landholdings to oppose government encroachments on their land and artistic projects, each poet diagnoses the status of property in the late twentieth century. At the same time, in this poetry that limns poetic and environmental making, each poet strains to create something resembling a "land trust" to protect local customary use patterns and cultures of human and interspecies relationships. In the surprising comparison between these poets emerges a theory of poetics as an environmental technology and as a trust of knowledge for reimagining the spatialization of cultural knowledge.
