Table Of ContentNEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
IRISHNESS ON THE
MARGINS
Minority and Dissident Identities
Edited by
Pilar Villar-Argáiz
New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature
Series Editor
Claire A. Culleton
Department of English
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and
examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness and works
that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of
Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American
culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent
scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s
focus on Irish and Irish American l iterature and culture contributes to our
twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans,
and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747
Pilar Villar-Argáiz
Editor
Irishness on the
Margins
Minority and Dissident Identities
Editor
Pilar Villar-Argáiz
Departmento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana
University of Granada
Granada, Spain
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-74566-4 ISBN 978-3-319-74567-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931929
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Mural by Joe Caslin, 2015. Installed on a 15th century castle near
Craughwell, Co. Galway. Photograph by David Sexton
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International
Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Para mis niños, Pablo y Alejandro
F
oreword
Irish studies has flourished outside of Ireland partly due to Ireland’s diaspora
and thanks to the international reputation of some world-class writers. It has
mostly done so in the fields of literary scholarship, although historians have
also contributed greatly towards understanding how the island of Ireland
has come to be influenced by Atlantic and European political, cultural and
economic connections and interdependencies. It has been institutionally
nurtured and intellectually driven by scholars mostly based in the United
States and other places around the world where Irish emigrants settled and
whose descendants professed hyphenated identities. This landmark collec-
tion, edited by Pilar Villar-Argáiz, has a Spanish centre of gravity. The
Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses has become a focal point for
scholars from a wide disciplinary range whose work has invigorated the
study of Irish cultures and society. The idea for this book came together at a
conference in Granada which brought together Spanish scholars as well as
those from several other countries. Ireland’s historical connections to Spain
run deep but the focus here is very much on understanding twenty-first-
century Irish diversities and complexities and the legacies of earlier mono-
lithic rules of belonging and coercive social norms.
Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities interrogates
that which is new about twenty-first-century Ireland whilst also scrutinis-
ing some toxic legacies of past failures to understand and acknowledge
long-standing social and cultural complexities. It exemplifies what might
be termed a critical Irish studies, one that draws on the social sciences as
well as upon the study of history and literature, that bears witness to the
complexities and diversities of twenty-first-century Ireland. Nations,
vii
viii FOREWORD
Benedict Anderson has influentially argued, are imagined communities.
And what is being imagined of course changes over time. However,
national identities and nation-building narratives are also very much the
product of acts of collective forgetting, of tendencies to homogenise and
of penchants for sweeping inconvenient truths under the carpet. It seems
that every Irish generation is complicit in sustaining its own hidden
Irelands and that the work of scholars and writers is to bring these into the
light of day.
What is distinctive about this volume is its juxtaposition of older and
new hidden Irelands. It offers a synthesis in which the reader is invited, for
example, to consider the silenced voices of Irish women incarcerated in
Mother and Baby Homes, whose struggle for recognition took decades to
find mainstream acceptance, alongside those of African women and their
Irish children deliberated sequestered away from our present-day Ireland
in Direct Provision. Various chapters directly challenge cherished narra-
tives that have been part and parcel of Irish myths of homogeneity. Essays
focus on how writing, cinema and social media hold up a mirror that
reveals a background complicity that is often disavowed within the main-
stream narratives of the Irish imagined community. The intellectual
emphasis throughout is upon dissident minorities and on the public intel-
lectual role of dissidence in exposing the complexities of Irish society. The
test of an edited volume is whether individual essays add up to more than
the sum of their parts. This powerful synthesis meets that test.
University College Dublin Bryan Fanning
C
ontents
1 Introduction: Irishness on the Margins—Minority
and Dissident Identities 1
Pilar Villar-Argáiz
Part I Unearthing Dissidence in the Irish Past 15
2 Dragging up the Past: Subversive Performance of Gender
and Sexual Identities in Traditional and Contemporary
Irish Culture 17
Jeannine Woods
3 The Wasted Island: Epistemic Friction in Revolutionary
Ireland 37
John Keating
4 Dancing Against the Tide: Reconstructing Irish Cultural
Identity in Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall 55
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Sexual Minorities and Dissident Gendered Subjects 75
5 Academics Becoming Activists: Reflections on Some
Ethical Issues of the Justice for Magdalenes Campaign 77
Katherine O’Donnell
6 ‘We Were Treated Very Badly, Treated Like Slaves’:
A Critical Metaphor Analysis of the Accounts
of the Magdalene Laundries Victims 101
Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro and Encarnación
Hidalgo-Tenorio
7 Abortion in Ireland: From Religious Marginalisation
to State Recognition 129
Edwige Nault
Part III Minority Voices in Irish Public Discourse 151
8 The Aestheticising of Minorities in The Crane Bag 153
Aidan O’Malley
9 A Fragmented Minority: The Challenges to Public
Institutionalisation of Islam in Ireland 173
Marie-Violaine Louvet
10 The Cyber-Discourse of Inclusion and Marginalisation:
A Critical Discourse Analysis of Muslims in Ireland
and Northern Ireland on Twitter 2010–2014 193
Abdul Halik Azeez and Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero
Part IV The Dissent of Minority Voices in Art 217
11 I nterculturalism and the Arts in Post-Conflict Northern
Ireland 219
Hélène Alfaro-Hamayon
