Introduction: Ireland: ‘A Supreme Postcolonial Instance’?

Abstract

The critical pioneer of contemporary postcolonial studies, Edward W. Said, notes in his introduction to Orientalism that ‘what I learned and tried to present was that there was no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them’ (1978: 16). Thus, in a critical survey of Irish postcolonial studies, there is no natural starting point. Equally, when I trace the genealogical roots of theoretical postcolonial studies to Said’s 1978 intervention, it is a matter of contingent selection. There is no natural beginning, or for that matter consecrated telos, in the discourse of critical analysis; the contingency of critical interrogation is matched by the contingency of the selection of texts. My ‘beginnings’ are dictated by a conviction that Said’s Orientalism provided, and provides, an extraordinary stimulus and precedent to more recent Irish postcolonial criticism. In asserting Said’s precedence I am not diminishing the import of Atlantic historiography; subaltern studies; Marxism; feminism or post-structuralism or postmodernism, but, as Luke Gibbons remarks in discussing the legacy of Edmund Burke: ‘An exemplary text or event, to adapt Seamus Deane’s formulation, is both a culminating moment in a process or series of events already under way, but is also a disruptive, originating moment in the subversion of that process, an omen of things to come’ (2003b: 5).

I am so grateful to Ireland, especially for its literary and cultural example. You have had many more years of imperialism than we have had, and you have produced a fabulous culture of resistance and an extraordinary spirit, which I desperately hope we [the Palestinian people] can measure up to by about 10 per cent… There are three places that have meant a great deal to me; one is South Africa, another is Ireland, and the third is India. These places have meant a great deal to me culturally, not just because there was always a spirit of resistance, but because out of it, there is this huge cultural effort which I think is much more important than arms, and armed struggle.¹