2022 will see the centenary of the founding of the Irish State as well as the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses, and this panel considers some of Ireland’s histories after 1922, both local and global, and their iterations in literature: the new state’s abandonment of the Easter Rising’s socialist and feminist principles in favor of free market capitalism and an education and welfare infrastructure that ceded ideological control to religious orders, the continuation of emigration when political self-determination did not align with promised economic success, and a post-independence language policy that politicized and fetishized Gaelic as a marker of white, Catholic Irish authenticity. Additionally, during the recent 'Celtic Tiger' boom, a globalized, seemingly post-Catholic and post-nationalist Ireland was lauded. However, Ireland’s experience of colonization and - in light of its long histories of immigration and of collaboration within the wider British Empire - its false narrative of racial and cultural homogeneity, shaped what was widely interpreted as a vote against the era’s immigrants, particularly those from Africa: In 2004, constitutional change by referendum meant that Irish-born children of non-nationals would no longer have a right to Irish citizenship. As such, the political emphases of this panel consider both Ireland and other locations to which the Irish are connected by history, both positive and negative, acknowledged and unacknowledged, from rural Mayo to Harlem and Minneapolis and on to the multiracial immigrant enclaves of postwar London. Strikingly, narrators in two novels considered are dead, testimony to the fact that the unfinished business of the past continues to haunt.

Zoë Henry, a BIPOC doctoral candidate, researches transatlantic modernism and race. Henry’s linking of Joyce to the Harlem Renaissance and forward to our current George Floyd moment acknowledges that Joyce’s masterpiece has been and remains relevant to places far from Dublin. The centenary of the creation of the Irish Free State and modernism’s annus mirabilis corresponds with our global reckoning with widespread anti-Blackness, following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Henry’s paper seizes the opportunity to consider the literary-historical parallels between conceptions of Irish and Black American identity, beginning in 1922. Specifically, it argues that Ulysses engages in questions of race and empire that borrow from abolitionist and Harlem Renaissance thought. Thurman, Ellison, and Wright saw themselves reflected in Joycean style, revising his stream-of-consciousness to explore the nature of Black subjectivity. Ultimately, Henry suggests, literary ‘Irishness’ and ‘Blackness’ have a more dialectic relationship than meets the eye, parallels that offer a path forward to greater equity and justice in 2022 and beyond, for both Ireland and America.

The consideration of a racialized Irish identity in Burke’s book on Irish Travellers laid the groundwork for her current book, Red, White, and Black: Race, Politics, and Irish America, under review at a university press. She brings this focus to a paper on race and the post-1922 Irish state centered on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s late-modernist classic, Cré na Cille/Graveyard Soil (1949). Written in an idiosyncratic Gaelic dialect, it consists entirely of the concurrent conversations of corpses in a West of Ireland graveyard. The fiction’s dominant voice is that of Caitríona, whose salty language is a Connemara besting of Dublin's Molly Bloom. The decolonizing state’s attitude that the avant-garde or risqué was alien to a native language associated with the supposedly culturally, racially, and linguistically sealed West meant that Cré na Cille was rarely included in Ireland’s boundary-pushing modernist canon, as exemplified by Ulysses. However, the novel’s densely idiomatic dialogue, its numerous loan words and neologisms, and its Irish-speaking Black Connemara returned emigrant residents – offspring of marriages between the Irish and immigrants of color in Britain – acknowledge the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration.

Michael Malouf will consider temporality and the postcolonial Irish state in Michael McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016). Although set in rural Mayo in 2008 (and also in eternal time, since the narrator is dead), Malouf argues that the novel’s disruptive and figural narrative temporalities posit an ecologically-based island time that goes back beyond the state’s founding and that serves as a counter-narrative to the symbolic violence of independent Ireland’s iterations as a postcolonial and then as a neoliberal state. Malouf’s research and teaching expertise in postcolonialism and Irish and Caribbean literature, particularly his book, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (UVA Press, 2009), will allow him to engage with the emphases of the other speakers as well as to open up McCormack’s contemporary novel in exciting new ways.

Papers run for 15 minutes to facilitate discussion.