In 2000, the Parekh report foresaw two possible futures for the country, namely, a narrow and inward-looking tendency that would only accentuate the rifts between the nations of the UK and its denizens and, on the other hand, a country that had the potential to develop as “a community of citizens and communities,” provided it underwent a series of transformations, including the “rethinking [of] the national story and national identity” (xiii). The increase in anti-Muslim racism after 9/11 (Poynting & Mason 2006), the perceived crisis of multiculturalism and the increasing dominance in the public sphere of populist, ultra-conservative discourses signal that this transformation of national identity has not occurred in the terms of the report but rather as a consequence of what Appadurai has termed the “fear of small numbers” (2006). Several studies have pointed to the criminalisation of Muslim communities in newspapers, and the way in which media reports on honour killings have “misrepresented ethnic minorities and engendered a sense of mainstream moral superiority” that envisions the Muslim migrant “other” as morally inferior (Gill 2006). In her 2012 novel Honour, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak questions the “representational violence” (Shapiro 1998) exerted by media by imaginatively engaging with the complexities of the socio-cultural conditions in the home and host countries that lie behind the unreported realities of perpetrators and victims of gender violence against women in a family of Turkish Kurdish migrants to Britain in the 1970s. This paper will contend that Shafak’s Honour embodies a type of ethical engagement with this “representational violence” that fosters a way of imagining the nation differently through the perspective of its Muslim migrant “other.”
The study of migration literature has often been characterised by the reproduction of Beck’s (2002) “methodological nationalism” due its frequent focus on literature produced by migrant writers as separate, while at the same time challenging the tenets of the literature produced by writers of non-migrant background. Recent critical approaches to the study of literature (Walkowitz 2006) have underscored the significant role of this migration literature, in the context of globalisation and of the increasing “cosmopolitanization of reality” (Beck 2006), to render the logic of the nation state within the discipline of literary studies as “unmeaning” (Damrosch 2003: 1), thus arguing for its “denationalisation” (Dimock 2001: 176). Still, within this context of emergent understandings of national literature as transcultural, migration literature has often maintained the migrant background of the author as the main criterion for inclusion in this system. In the British context, English writer Rose Tremain’s work signifies a challenge both to dominant disciplinary categorisations of migration literature, and to contemporary approaches to the study of migration and collective identities through the re-examination of past national experiences of migration in a context of colonization. By mostly resorting to Rothberg’s “noueds de mémoire”, this paper contends that in her historical novel The Colour (2003) Tremain resorts to re-enacting migration to the British colony of New Zealand during the 1860s gold rush as a way of underscoring the points of contact between different experiences of migration past and present. Thus, Tremain contributes both to de-migranticising (Dahinden 2006) migration literature and to highlighting the role of transnational migration in (re)shaping national narratives of identity.
Background and Objectives
Associations of young-old age with successful aging have contributed to relegating negatively perceived aspects of aging to very old age. This has prompted the formation of the social imaginary of the fourth age. Re-examinations of the fourth age foreground the diversity of aging experiences among the oldest old. In this sense, literature is in a privileged position to contribute individual narratives of aging to this field. The main aim of this article is to analyze Irish writer Jennifer Johnston’s later fiction and how particularly two of her later fictional works contribute a nuanced re-examination of the fourth age through the narrativization of individual aging experiences of the oldest old in the contemporary Irish context.
Research Design and Methods
The work of sociologists and social theorists on re-examinations of the fourth age functions as the framework to analyze the selected fictional texts.
Results
The analysis of the oldest old characters in Truth or Fiction and Naming the Starsshows the contribution of literary texts to rethinking the fourth age as a time characterized by the inextricable combination of gains and losses, with emphasis on the diversity of the aging experiences of the oldest old and on the importance of sociocultural influence on individual aging.
Discussion and Implications
Combining longitudinal analyses with case studies, such as the ones suggested by these fictional texts, can provide a more accurate knowledge of the experience of advanced old age and the fourth age.
The theme of displacement and a view of exile that differs from traditional definitions of the concept and its associations with feelings of loss and nostalgia are a constant in Colum McCann's oeuvre. Images of flight and fleeing are recurrent in his work and underscore the centrality that mobility occupies in his fictional world, in which these flights are, not infrequently, a metaphorical act of escapism from material reality and physical conditioning. However, mobility in Let the Great World Spin is articulated as a characteristically twenty-first century phenomenon in its emphasis on how interconnectivity beyond differences, especially in the form of transnational exchanges, characterizes contemporary societies and shapes individual realities and identities. This essay contends that this transnational interconnectivity is not only foregrounded at the narrative level, thematically and in terms of narrative structure; McCann's tangentially framing of this novel within American post-9/11 fiction, while formally echoing an Irish literature of exile and thematically relating to an Irish literature of migration and fictions of the global, suggests the process in which new imaginative realities and identities are shaped from a cosmopolitan outlook that promotes the synergetic dialogue between national and transnational differences in the creation of a cosmopolitanized reality.
In recent decades, globalization has led to increased mobility and interconnectedness. For a growing number of people, contemporary life entails new local and transnational interdependencies which transform individual and collective allegiances. Contemporary literature often reflects these changes through its exploration of migrant experiences and transcultural identities. Calling into question traditional definitions of culture, many recent works of poetry and prose fiction go beyond the spatial boundaries of a given state, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, and identities. In doing so, they also challenge recent and contemporary discourses about cultural identities, fostering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of identity-formation processes in diverse transcultural frameworks.This volume analyses how traditional understandings of culture, as well as literary representations of identity constructs, can be reconceptualized from a transcultural perspective. In four thematic sections focusing on migration, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and literary translingualism, the twelve essays included in this volume explore various facets of transculturality in contemporary poetry and fiction from around the world.
The central theme of landscape has long been associated with the construction and expression of Irish national identity, particularly in relation to rural Ireland, which traditionally has been regarded as an important source of national heritage and culture. Associated with this preoccupation is the rural/urban divide that has characterised traditional representations of Ireland, especially since the end of the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw dramatic changes to both rural and urban Ireland. The Celtic Tiger economy and the post-Tiger context have also seen momentous transformations in the Irish landscape. This book analyses the relationship between the rural and the urban and explores the way it is reflected in Irish literature, culture and language from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Among others, the work of John Hewitt, Liam O'Flaherty, Moya Cannon, Paula Meehan, Thomas Kinsella and Eavan Boland is analysed, through a variety of perspectives including cultural studies, linguistics, literary studies and ecocriticism.
n 1997 Irish philosopher Richard Kearney published his seminal work Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, in which he argued for the need to revise the ideas and images that had shaped the understanding of the nation held by most modern Irish citizens. This re-examination of the nation-state was inspired by the influence of national socio-political experiences and by EU membership. In his re-examination of the national political and cultural imaginary, the Irish diaspora, with over 80 million people around the world claiming Irish ancestry, played a crucial role in reimagining the Irish nation as expanding beyond the limits of state nationalism. It is relevant to note, however, that Kearney’s new Ireland did not encourage a re-examination of the homogeneity of Irishness beyond a recognition of the “dual tradition” in Ireland. The ideological certainties on which the paradigm of the Irish nation rested were more evidently contested by the socio-economic and historical changes that Ireland has undergone since the second half of the 1990s. One of the main effects of the economic boom, popularly known as the Celtic Tiger, was the transformation of Ireland from a country of net emigration to a country of net immigration for the second time in its history. The consequent diversity in its social composition has evinced the instability of the nation-state and has effected the need to redefine inherited stable definitions of individual and collective identities. In this context, the work of Hugo Hamilton, Irish-born writer currently living in Germany and with a Gaelic-speaking father and a German mother, is highly relevant. The aim of this paper is to analyse how his two most recent novels, Disguise (2008) and Hand in the Fire (2010), explore the instability of personal and national identities as shaped by specific historical events that generate intercultural encounters with individual, national and global repercussions.
Scholars in globalisation studies coincide in regarding the increased volume and pace of the flow of people as one of the most dramatic changes that society has experienced in the last two decades. The number of migrants has reached peaks never experienced before. However, as globalisation analysts contend, the phenomenon of migration is not new, but what makes it different from previous migratory movements is “the scale and complexity of movement [whose] consequences have exceeded earlier predictions” (Papastergiadis 2000: 2). One of the most noticeable consequences of these transnational migratory movements is the redefinition of a traditional understanding of the nation as “an imagined political community [. . .] inherently limited and sovereign” (1983: 6), whose members regard themselves as sharing the same cultural roots and “an immemorial past” (1983: 11). These traditional definitions of the nation, in which cultural artefacts including literary works play an essential role, are implicitly based on the binary opposition of inclusion of its members of the same kin, and exclusion of those regarded as not sharing the same lore. However, the interconnected processes of globalisation and migration have destabilised these traditional definitions of the nation and, thereby, the foundations of the nation-state. In his novel Netherland (2008), Irish-born, multicultural and American citizen writer Joseph O’Neill presents a diverse group of characters resident in New York, marked by transnational movements, and who see their sense of personal and social identity shaken by the global repercussions of the 9/11 events. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Joseph O’Neill exposes the limitations imposed on individuals by a homogeneous understanding of national identity, inextricably intertwined with definitions of full-right citizenship, and how he suggests ways to redefine the nation and constructs of national belonging by recognising what Homi Bhabha has called the other within ourselves.