“Au contraire”: The Spectral Borderlands of Northern Irish Literature

Abstract

Ireland is “a small place” (Kincaid) with a fraught colonial past, now, too, a nation divided. Protracted histories of empire and anticolonial nationalism culminated in a political “tearing” (O’Leary 3) as this small island off the coasts of Europe and the British mainland was partitioned. In 1922, following a Civil War fought over the partition question, Ireland rose up from colonial domination only partially free and also newly constellated as two successor states: a twenty-six-county Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) and a still-colonized, six-county “statelet.” The political status of the northern counties would not change: newly dubbed Northern Ireland, this tiny territorial “amputee” would remain a colonized, constitutionally distinct region of the United Kingdom. In time, these events would lead to the war known as “the Troubles,” a moniker signifying the Gordian knot that is all-Irish political history and, more recently, the Northern conflict, from 1968 to 1998,¹ in which the six counties served as the final battlefield in a long-standing political struggle.