Ireland, Empire and Utopia: Irish Postcolonial Criticism and the Utopian Impulse

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.