What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity... more What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope. Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy
Introduction The Shadow of Sean Angry Young Men - Class Injuries and Masculinity From Rocking the... more Introduction The Shadow of Sean Angry Young Men - Class Injuries and Masculinity From Rocking the Cradle to Rocking the System - Writing Working-Class Women Industry and the City - Workers in Struggle Prison Stories - Writing Dublin at its Limits Return of the Oppressed - Sexual Repression, Culture and Class Revising the Revolution: Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry , Historiography, Politics and Proletarian Consciousness Conclusion Bibliography Index
This introductory chapter considers the compelling relationship between home and diaspora for tho... more This introductory chapter considers the compelling relationship between home and diaspora for those who claim an Irish heritage internationally and for those who inhabit the two states on the island of Ireland. It asks what has been swept aside in the cultural and intellectual imaginary of globalised Irishness and explores how The Gathering 2013 grappled with various meanings of Irishness, and with various representations of belonging, amid a deeply troubling and contradictory set of social and economic transformations. Contemporary post-Crash political tensions and long “Decade of Centenaries” (1912–2013) commemorative practices converged during The Gathering 2013 and successive years to problematise how Ireland (North and South) represented itself on a world stage.
Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest.... more Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal c...
Like Sean O’Casey’s socialist workmen in The Star Turns Red (1940), Roddy Doyle’s republican rebe... more Like Sean O’Casey’s socialist workmen in The Star Turns Red (1940), Roddy Doyle’s republican rebel, Henry Smart, is “a helluva lot different” from the “ancient warrior forefathers” of Irish nationalism. An unconventional, irreverent working- class hero, the protagonist of A Star Called Henry (1999) is, like O’Casey’s radicals, pitted against the status quo of Irish cultural mores. He also challenges deeply ingrained notions of Irishness and the nobility or wisdom of political martyrdom. In this chapter, however, I will argue that if Doyle’s fin de siecle work challenges these and other nationalist discourses with a radically unconventional, proletarian history “from below”, it also glibly reasserts many debilitating, hackneyed historical discourses “from above”. This hugely successful novel continues to assert the politically charged themes of marginalisation that have characterised depictions of Dublin’s working class in the other works explored in this study, and Henry Smart’s tall tale continues to elaborate the exclusion of that class from the national narrative in his most recent instalment, The Dead Republic (2010). Doyle rearticulates the paradox of an urban community simultaneously eschewed by and central to the development of the Irish Republic, but he also questions the relevance of political action generally to working-class life. As such, at the end of the twentieth century, and as the most compelling elaboration of Doyle’s literary aesthetic and political ideology, A Star provides for a useful survey of the themes that characterise the most prominent modern author to engage with Irish working-class life.
What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity... more What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope. Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy
Introduction The Shadow of Sean Angry Young Men - Class Injuries and Masculinity From Rocking the... more Introduction The Shadow of Sean Angry Young Men - Class Injuries and Masculinity From Rocking the Cradle to Rocking the System - Writing Working-Class Women Industry and the City - Workers in Struggle Prison Stories - Writing Dublin at its Limits Return of the Oppressed - Sexual Repression, Culture and Class Revising the Revolution: Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry , Historiography, Politics and Proletarian Consciousness Conclusion Bibliography Index
This introductory chapter considers the compelling relationship between home and diaspora for tho... more This introductory chapter considers the compelling relationship between home and diaspora for those who claim an Irish heritage internationally and for those who inhabit the two states on the island of Ireland. It asks what has been swept aside in the cultural and intellectual imaginary of globalised Irishness and explores how The Gathering 2013 grappled with various meanings of Irishness, and with various representations of belonging, amid a deeply troubling and contradictory set of social and economic transformations. Contemporary post-Crash political tensions and long “Decade of Centenaries” (1912–2013) commemorative practices converged during The Gathering 2013 and successive years to problematise how Ireland (North and South) represented itself on a world stage.
Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest.... more Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal c...
Like Sean O’Casey’s socialist workmen in The Star Turns Red (1940), Roddy Doyle’s republican rebe... more Like Sean O’Casey’s socialist workmen in The Star Turns Red (1940), Roddy Doyle’s republican rebel, Henry Smart, is “a helluva lot different” from the “ancient warrior forefathers” of Irish nationalism. An unconventional, irreverent working- class hero, the protagonist of A Star Called Henry (1999) is, like O’Casey’s radicals, pitted against the status quo of Irish cultural mores. He also challenges deeply ingrained notions of Irishness and the nobility or wisdom of political martyrdom. In this chapter, however, I will argue that if Doyle’s fin de siecle work challenges these and other nationalist discourses with a radically unconventional, proletarian history “from below”, it also glibly reasserts many debilitating, hackneyed historical discourses “from above”. This hugely successful novel continues to assert the politically charged themes of marginalisation that have characterised depictions of Dublin’s working class in the other works explored in this study, and Henry Smart’s tall tale continues to elaborate the exclusion of that class from the national narrative in his most recent instalment, The Dead Republic (2010). Doyle rearticulates the paradox of an urban community simultaneously eschewed by and central to the development of the Irish Republic, but he also questions the relevance of political action generally to working-class life. As such, at the end of the twentieth century, and as the most compelling elaboration of Doyle’s literary aesthetic and political ideology, A Star provides for a useful survey of the themes that characterise the most prominent modern author to engage with Irish working-class life.
In a scene from Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), Sean O’Casey is reluctant to leave a pub with... more In a scene from Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), Sean O’Casey is reluctant to leave a pub with friends, to attend James Stephens’ weekly soiree, because he is engrossed in the conversation between a man and a woman there. The woman, a street flower-seller, talks politics, criticising De Valera; the man talks about them both going back to his place, while slyly attempting to unbutton her blouse. “O Gawd,” exclaims a disgusted member of the dramatist’s companions, “let’s go — it’s too revolting”. But O’Casey is enthralled: They led the way from the snug, Sean following slowly. He longed to stay where he was, watching common life unfolding on the bench opposite; smoky life, catching the breath with a cough at times, but lit with the red flare of reckless vigour [ … ] He liked James Stephens, loved him, really, and many fine people assembled there; but they were never themselves.1
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