Inside-Out: Literature, Cultural Identity and Irish Migration to England

Abstract

Ireland’s lengthy colonial relationship with England demands to be viewed in its specificity, whilst also sharing many points of overlap with other such histories. Marginalizing discourses across eight centuries of colonization have positioned the Irish as an original ‘other’, over against whom Englishness or Britishness might be defined. But, at the same time, such representations are in tension with the Irish experience of incorporation, albeit as ‘marginal Britons’, the domestication of the Irish within an overarching ‘British’ identity which might absorb disruptive and oppositional energies.³ Both problematically part of Britain, and its problematical colonial other, Ireland’s position might be described as that of a ‘metropolitan colony’.⁴

… identifies are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past … cultural identity… is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Of course, it is not a mere phantasm either. It is something… It has its histories—and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past’… It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the… unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.¹

… living between worlds, caught on a frontier … to come from elsewhere, from ‘there’ and not ‘here’, and hence to be simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situations at hand, is to live at the intersections of histories and memories … Cut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to make herself at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present.²