Another lost cause? Pan-Celticism, race and language

Abstract

Taking its lead from Slavoj Zizek's recent work, this article suggests that revisiting the ‘lost cause’ of Pan-Celticism may lead us to consider some of the unthinking assumptions involved in the contemporary liberal embrace of a multicultural, ‘civic’, nationalism. This article thus revisits what the historian R. F. Foster describes as a ‘forgotten aspect’ of the Irish literary revival of the 1890s: the Pan-Celtic movement. The late 1880s and 1890s was a time when, despite considerable historical, social and cultural differences, the national question in Ireland, Wales and Scotland had a simultaneous impact on the political and cultural life of Britain. Having traced the uneasy relationship between ‘race’ and ‘language’ manifested in much recent literary criticism back, via Paul Gilroy, Raymond Williams and Hannah Arendt, to the Pan-Celtic debates of the nineteenth century, I conclude by arguing that a genuine multiculturalism in the contemporary nations of the British Isles must register the reality of multilingualism. John Koch notes that it is ‘the scientific fact of a Celtic family of languages that has weathered unscathed the Celtosceptic controversy’. This article's return to the lost cause of Pan-Celticism is an attempt to place the question of linguistic difference at the heart of contemporary cultural debate in order to exposes the intolerance of Anglophone multiculturalism.

Keywords:

• Pan-Celticism
• multilingualism
• race
• diaspora

Notes

 1. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.

 2. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 4.

 3. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 2.

 4. R. Williams, Politics and Letters, 384.

 5. Foster, Irish Story, 99.

 6. Mulhern, ‘Britain after Nairn’, 65.

 7. A useful account of this period is offered by Matthew, ‘The Liberal Age’.

 8. On Scotland see Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism. On Wales see Morgan, Wales in British Politics.

 9. Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, 17.

10. Morgan, ‘Radicalism and Nationalism’, 197.

11. O'Leary, Prose Literature, 376.

12. Quoted in O'Leary, Prose Literature, 377.

13. Quoted in O'Leary, ‘“Children of the Same Mother”’, 101, 120.

14. Kiberd, Inventing; Lloyd, Anomalous.

15. Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 31.

16. Regan, ‘W.B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics’, 67.

17. For models of a ‘four-nations’ approach to British history see Kearney, The British Isles and Samuel, ‘British Dimensions’. The notion of a ‘post-nationalist’ phase in Irish historiography comes from Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland.

18. Quoted in Cunliffe, The Celts, 5.

19. James, The Atlantic Celts.

20. Nairn, After Britain, 258.

21. Quoted in Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic, 69. See critiques of McWhiney by Berthoff, ‘Celtic Mist over the South’ and Newton, We're Indians Sure Enough.

22. Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic, 69.

23. Taylor, Circling Dixie, 16.

24. R.D. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, 31–2.

25. Foster, The Irish Story, 99.

26. Ernest Rhys in Wales and William Sharp in Scotland were both attracted to a Celtic cosmopolitanism which they felt could be embraced alongside a belief in the United Kingdom. See my discussion in Ethnicity and Cultural Authority , 152–69.

27. Michaels, Our America, 102. Michaels notes erroneously that there ‘were no plausible parallel “pan-movements” in Britain’ (Our America, 102). On the connections between pan-Celticism and other pan-movements see Löffler, ‘Agweddau ar yr Undeb Pan-Geltaidd’.

28. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 232.

29. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 161, 232, 222.

30. Gilroy, Between Camps, 123–4.

31. C. Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales’, 16.

32. Gregson, The New Poetry, 13, 16; C. Williams, ‘Problematizing’, 15.

33. Gilroy, There Ain't No Black, 49–50.

34. D. Williams, ‘Introduction’ to Who Speaks for Wales, xxxvi–xxxix; Gregson, The New Poetry, 80; Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins, 104.

35. R. Williams, ‘Community’, 27.

36. Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins, 104.

37. R. Williams, ‘Community’, 28, 30.

38. R. Williams, ‘Community’, 30.

39. R. Williams, Keywords, 213–14.

40. R. Williams, ‘Wales and England’, 22.

41. Shell, Children of the Earth, 179.

42. This was a position also adopted by the Welsh nationalist Pennar Davies who regretted that the ‘Anti-Nationalism amongst the Anglo-Welsh’ resulted in a definition of Welshness that relied on ‘racial character’ rather than ‘a developing national life which must be given fair play in the spheres of economics and politics’. See Brown, ‘“The Memory of Lost Countries”’, 84.

43. Michaels, ‘Race into Culture’, 60.

44. Appiah, In My Father's House, 32.

45. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 97.

46. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 97.

47. Quoted by O'Leary, ‘“Children of the Same Mother”, 109.

48. Quoted in O'Leary, Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 378.

49. Gregson, The New Poetry, 38, 73, 13.

50. Brooks, ‘The Idioms of Race’; McGuinness, ‘“Racism” in Welsh Politics’.

51. R. Williams, ‘West of Offa's Dyke’, 34.

52. See J. Edwards, ‘Symbolic Ethnicity and Language’.

53. Thomas, ‘Parallels and Paradigms’, 325.

54. Koch, An Atlas for Celtic Studies, 3.