Eóin Flannery, ‘Ireland, Empire and Utopia: Irish postcolonial criticism and the Utopian impulse’, Textual Practice 24, 3 (2010).

No abstract, so here is the intro:

The idioms and the methodologies of ‘Utopia’ have always been explicit and implicit in both projects of colonial acquisition and expansion, and in the differential projects of anti-colonial theory and practice. Yet there has never been an adequate commerce of ideas established between the respective contemporary fields of Utopian studies and postcolonial studies. However, in a recent essay in this journal, the postcolonial scholar, Bill Ashcroft, attempted to bridge the theoretical hiatus between the two fields. In ‘Critical Utopias’ Ashcroft essentially provides a literary critical mapping of how ‘the Utopian’ has figured in the literary art of Anglophone colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial crucibles. Ashcroft’s summary Utopian/postcolonial survey takes its theoretical impetus, naturally enough, from a conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno in 1964, in which Adorno adumbrates the repressed knowledge that each individual harbours of a possible Utopia – we know that a better possible world exists, but we are ideologically persuaded that the possible is actually the impossible. In addition to foundational thinkers such as Bloch and Adorno, Ashcroft also enlists other theorists of the Utopian, including Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson. The survey is not confined to theoretical utopias, however, as Ashcroft subsequently traverses a variety of historical times and spaces in divining traces of literary Utopian dynamism in colonial contexts. Invoked in this generous inventory are: Thomas More’s originary Utopia; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – the latter two, of course, are representative of the Utopian colonial project, but are also read as texts that are capable of producing their own Utopian counter-narratives of anti-colonial resistance. In contemporary terms, Ashcroft straddles the Indian sub-continent; Africa and the Caribbean, specifically: Salman Rushdie; JM Coetzee; Edouard Glissant; Aime Cesaire; Derek Walcott; and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Ashcroft’s intervention is distinguished by its concentration on what are, putatively, canonical texts of postcolonial literary studies. And while the species of utopia canvassed by Ashcroft is one that seeks to undermine the naturalised centrality of ‘History’ as discourse, there is an implicit assumption in such a parade of writers of a ‘postcolonial History’, or ‘postcolonial Tradition’ within its literary branch. Regardless of this initial point of contention, the virtue of Ashcroft’s essay is its dedication to the necessary relevance of Utopian literary critical; literary historical; and historiographical strategies to debates within postcolonial studies. Yet, as I have indicated, in this speculative initiative by Ashcroft these critical strategies seem to be predominantly confined to literary horizons and there is little engagement with neo-Marxist critiques within postcolonial studies itself. These features may be consequences of the fact that the range of Utopian theorists referred to may be foundational, but it is not extensive. While the employment of Bloch is naturally instructive and a contemporary Utopian critic such as Tom Moylan is summarily cited, there is no reference to seminal figures within the Utopian field such as: Lyman Tower Sargent; Ruth Levitas; Darko Suvin; Lucy Sargisson; Krishan Kumar; Barbara Goodwin; Gregory Claeys; Raffaella Baccolini and Vincent Geoghegan.

Finally, with respect to the postcolonial aspects of Ashcroft’s piece; the essay commits a familiar error of omission, one that seems to have been redressed in many publications on postcolonial studies but that does persist. The case of Ireland as either a Utopian, postcolonial or Utopian-postcolonial case-study is neither addressed nor alluded to at any stage. Such an oversight is disappointing given Ireland’s protracted colonial history and its exemplary role as an early twentieth century pioneer in anti-colonial theory and practice. Furthermore, Ireland has a distinguished history office Utopian writing, mythology and political philosophy, which would clearly enrich any discussion of the commonalities of the fields of Utopian studies and postcolonial studies. The purpose of the present essay is to respond to Ashcroft’s provocative critical alignment of the Utopian and the postcolonial, and to furnish necessary modifications and supplements to the argument developed therein. With this in mind, my argument will accent the inherently Utopian cast of much of the recent and ongoing literary historical; literary critical; historiographical; and theoretical writing within contemporary Irish postcolonial studies. In providing an effective metacritical survey of these Utopian-postcolonial vectors in Irish literary and cultural studies, this essay will address the implicated interdisciplinary projects that constitute the field of Irish postcolonial studies. The ensuing metacritique argues that not only are some of the major strands of Utopian postcolonial critique focused on interrogating the philosophical limits and lacunae of the contested legacies of ‘Enlightenment’ thought; British imperial discourses; and bourgeois Irish nationalism, but they are also involved in tracking the Utopian energies of subaltern Irish nationalisms and in retrieving the work and reputations of Irish anti-colonial thinkers, writers and activists in light of contemporary international postcolonial theory and activism. At root, the discussion displays the urgency with which postcolonial critics have approached, and attempted to appropriate, the Utopian dynamism of historical Irish anti-colonial thought and action in their own Utopian engagements with the prevailing political and economic conjuncture in Irish society. These projects are by no means homogenous and it is not to be concluded that they are easily woven together as fractions of a sanctioned critical consensus within Irish postcolonial studies. They are representative of a viable critical mass within Irish criticism that accepts the legitimacy of Utopian imagination, and that has gleaned valuable lessons from the historiographical, often subalternist, methodologies of international postcolonial studies. In sum, the present essay has a particular focus on matters that pertain to the utopic in terms of the literary historical and the historiographical within Irish postcolonial studies, and will, one hopes, catalyse future interventions that might engage with other facets of Irish colonial history and postcolonial criticism.