Race, Cosmopolitanism, And Modernity: Irish Writing and Culture in the Late Nineteen Fifties (Critical Essay‪)‬

In a recent essay Joe Cleary observes that contemporary Irish culture relies heavily on representations of the mid-century decades as 'a grimly oppressive "dark age"' in order to legitimate its own sense of enlightenment and liberalism, (1) The mythologizing of success in the nineteen nineties was achieved, it seems, only at the expense of an equally powerful mythologizing of failure and insularity in the period which has become known as 'the age of De Valera'. As a result, Cleary argues, we are no closer to understanding the cultural implications of 'the social world of financial services centres, computer industries, comfortable middle-class suburbs or centre-city [sic] gay saunas' of the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland than we are to understanding the complexities of modernity in De Valerean Ireland (p. 128n.). More importantly, such myths have tended to obscure the analysis of race and racism in Irish society, which have been permitted to appear a sudden effect of contemporary economic success. The myths of Irish cultural homogeneity, as Bryan Fanning has argued, 'preclude inquiry into racism within contemporary Irish society'. (2) In recent years critical and academic discourses have begun to theorize the racialization of Irish society, particularly in response to the hype surrounding ethnic diversification in the popular media, notably around the figures of the refugee and the immigrant. (3) The refugee and immigrant in Irish society are examples par excellence of the uneven development of modernity, for as much as they register that Ireland is an economic magnet and no longer on the oppressed margins of Anglo-American economic power, they are also, as Declan Kiberd argues, the haunting reminders of 'a colonial past of shame and shared humiliation which some might prefer to ignore.' (4) As such they disturb and interrupt the carefully constructed narratives of Irish cultural modernity. (5) For behind every media image of the contemporary refugee lurk the images not just of Irish emigrants and of Irish poverty (by no means confined to the past), but also the history of Ireland's cultural Others, a history of its own stakes in racial stereotypes--the 'black babies', the Limerick pogrom, the participation of Irish men and women in the military and missionary campaigns of imperialism, and the habitual contempt and abuse of travellers. Such a history is not just the background to, but also continuous with, the eruption of racist violence, practices, and discourses in contemporary Ireland.