2003/07/01 by Mark Quigley · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Irish and British Studies #Subaltern #Colonialism #Nationalism #Modernity #History #Irish #Subjectivity #State (computer science) #Commodification #Literature #Gender studies #Aesthetics #Sociology #Art #Law #Political science #Philosophy #Linguistics #Politics #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1080/1369801032000135639
openalex publication_date 2003/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Like many national cultures emerging from the crucible of colonialism, Irish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently seeks to ground itself in a rugged soil as far removed from the colonial metropole and the inroads of colonialism as possible. In the Irish case, this involves a turn toward the western part of the country, especially those areas where the Gaelic language remains ascendant. Though this westward look has long been seen as a key feature of Irish literature and culture in this era, attention has tended to focus on regions such as Connemara, Sligo, and the Aran Islands, and on metropolitan writers like W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. This essay seeks to approach these constructions of the west and the Gaelic subaltern from the opposite perspective: that of the subaltern looking eastward to the metropole and the nationalist regime that would frame ‘the Gael’ as archaic cultural substrate. The essay examines writing from the remote Blasket Islands during the early years of the Irish Free State, focusing particularly on Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s notable autobiography, An tOileánach. Rather than the naïve ethnography or simple elegy many scholars have presented, this essay proposes to read An tOileánach as a sophisticated meditation on the commodification of the subaltern by the nationalist postcolonial state. In that, the essay argues that the subaltern enters into speech in a way that travesties representation and the regime of subjectivity upon which the postcolonial state constitutes its authority.