Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory

Abstract

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.

Keywords:

• Irish literature and culture
• Northern Ireland
• postcolonial theory
• settler nationalism

Notes

 1. In McGrath, Brian Friel's (Post)Colonial Drama.

 2. Examples would include Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory; McClintock, ‘Angel of Progress’; Dirlik, ‘Postcolonial Aura’; and Parry, ‘Directions and Dead Ends’.

 3. As Benedict Anderson points out, the colonist is the ‘photographic negative’ of the coloniser, and likewise the colonised is ‘a white-on-black negative’. That is, both colonist and colonised emerge as underprivileged binaries in relation to the coloniser and the colonist respectively (‘Exodus’, 315–16).

 4. Anachronistic because in signing the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the 1998 Belfast Agreement the British government acknowledged that it no longer had any strategic interests in Northern Ireland that would prevent them from approving whatever constitutional arrangements the majority of the population of Northern Ireland agreed upon.

 5. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

 6. Although one could argue that unionists have participated in shared governance under the 1998 Belfast Agreement, their reservations about Sinn Féin prevented the full implementation of the shared governance provisions until April 2010.

 7. Examples would include Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory; McClintock, ‘Angel of Progress’; Dirlik, ‘Postcolonial Aura’; Parry, ‘Directions and Dead Ends’; and, in the Irish context, Cairns and Richards, Writing Ireland.

 8. Examples would include Ahmad, ‘Jameson's Rhetoric’; Dirlik, ‘Postcolonial Aura’; Parry, ‘Directions and Dead Ends’.

 9. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; and Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks are classic examples.

10. Examples would include Cabral, Return to the Source; and , The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism. Said's Yeats and Decolonization brings Yeats's Irish nationalism up to the point of liberation.

11. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back is the prime example here.

12. For an excellent example see Singh and Schmidt, Postcolonial Theory and the United States.

13. Quayson, Postcolonialism, 11.

14. Said, ‘Afterword’, 179.

15. Lloyd, ‘After History’, 57.

16. Cited by Singh and Schmidt, Postcolonial Theory and the United States, 23.

17. Simon, ‘Hybridity in the Americas’, 417.

18. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, 7.

19. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 172–9.

20. Eagleton describes the desired outcome of nationalist resistance as a situation in which subject–object relations are replaced by subject–subject relations, that is, where one or one's group is free to negotiate needs and determine self-identity dialogically on equal terms with other subjects (Nationalism: Irony and Commitment, 10–12).

21. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 180.

22. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 80.

23. In his History Ireland review of Ireland and Empire Dan Scanlon captures the shortcomings of Howe's methodological weaknesses very aptly. He describes Howe's book as ‘managerial rather than discursive’; it ‘strings together obiter dicta, ceremonial academic gestures, and opinions in a wordy concatenation of paragraphs and pages that do not themselves amount to a discourse’.

24. Howe, Ireland and Empire, 9.

25. The origins of revisionism are commonly traced to Herbert Butterfield's landmark text The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and a British-trained group of Irish historians who founded the journal Irish Historical Studies in 1937–38. This group included Robin Dudley Edwards, T.W. Moody, and D.B. Quinn. Sean O'Faolain, who used his editorship of The Bell during the early decades of the Free State to attack the conservative, Catholic, Gaelic nationalism that supported the emerging values of those decades, provided a literary counterpart to the early revisionist historians. More recent practitioners of historical revisionism would include F.S.L. Lyons, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Roy Foster, and Conor Cruise O'Brien. O'Brien's States of Ireland (1972) represents one of the most eloquent and forceful articulations of the urgent mood of revisionism. Edna Longley would be a good example of a contemporary revisionist literary critic. A representative sampling of revisionists has been included in volume III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and in Ní Dhonnchadha and Dorgan, Revising the Rising (1991). The most comprehensive sampling appears in Ciaran Brady's collection Interpreting Irish History.

26. For the revisionist positions of Edwards, Moody, Lyons, Fanning, and Foster see their selections in Brady, Interpreting Irish History.

27. O'Neill, ‘Revisionist Milestone’, 219.

28. For this argument see the Williams and Chrisman introduction to their anthology Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, 4.

29. Examples would include The Empire Writes Back, the essays by Alan , ‘Comparative Studies’ and ‘Un/Settling Colonies’, Stephen Slemon, ‘Scramble for Post Colonialism’ and ‘Unsettling Empire’, and Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-colonial Literatures’; and Singh and Schmidt's Postcolonial Theory and the United States.

30. Cleary, ‘“Misplaced Ideas”?’, 35–7; and Whelan, ‘Between Affiliation’, 94. Cleary provides a convenient summary and modification of Fieldhouse's categories (29–32).

31. Fieldhouse, Colonial Empires, 59.

32. ‘“Misplaced Ideas”?’, 35–7.

33. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-state, 4.

34. ‘“Misplaced Ideas”?’, 197–8 n. 76.

35. Literature, Partition and the Nation-state, 10.

36. Said, ‘Afterword’, 178.

37. Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 342, 344.

38. Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 80.

39. Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 59.

40. Nairn, Break-up of Britain, 11.

41. Nairn, Break-up of Britain, 237.

42. Nairn, Break-up of Britain, 189.

43. Field Day Pamphlets on Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said (1988); David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (1988); Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (2003); Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-state (2002); Claire Connolly, Theorizing Ireland (2003); , Celtic Revivals (1985) and A Short History of Irish Literature (1986); Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995); Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (1996); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1995); Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism (2004); and , Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987) and Anomalous States (1993). This list is by no means exhaustive. Other critics and commentators have weighed in on Ireland's postcolonial status over the past few decades, but these are some of the major treatments.

44. In Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History and in ‘Irish Orientalism: An Overview’.

45. In his book, however, Lennon does allude to Bhabha several times and employs his concept of national narration from chapter 8 of The Location of Culture.

46. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 156–7.

47. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 157.

48. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 150.

49. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 140.

50. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 144.

51. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 153.

52. Lennon, ‘Irish Orientalism’, 148.

53. Bowman, ‘Party Piece’, n.p.

54. Purcell, ‘The Illusionist’, n.p.

55. Traditional.

56. Deane, Field Day Anthology, vol. III, 353–62.

57. O'Day and Stevenson, Irish Historical Documents since 1800, 149.

58. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 116.

59. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 119.

60. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 6.

61. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 2.

62. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 14.

63. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 3.

64. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 10.

65. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 8.

66. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 9.

67. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 4.

68. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 112.

69. Paisley, Ulster Crisis!, 8.

70. Perhaps the most famous instance of this trope in a nationalist context occurs in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Joyce's Ulysses where Professor MacHugh recites a 1901 speech by John F. Taylor on the preservation of the Irish language. The portion of Taylor's speech included by Joyce highlights the refusal of Moses and the Israelites to accept the religion, culture, and language of Egypt during their captivity there (116–18).

71. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 126.

72. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 130.

73. Statistics vary according to different sources, but most sources place the participation in the Easter Rising between 1000 and 2000, while more than 60,000 Irish Catholics fought for the British army in the First World War. For a comprehensive view of Irish participation in the First World War see Ireland and the Great War (2000) by Keith Jeffery, and Jeffrey's webpage ‘Ireland and the First World War’.

74. For a comprehensive treatment of unionist parades see Bryan's Orange Parades.

75. For a comprehensive treatment of unionist parades see Bryan's Orange Parades, 183–4.

76. The Somme Heritage Centre.

77. Jeffery, ‘Ireland and the First World War’.

78. In his maiden speech before the British House of Lords in December 1921 Edward Carson threatened to defy any attempt by the British government to include Ulster in an Irish Free State with the metonymy of Ulster's ‘own right arm’: ‘Do you think, after what has happened, that we can trust any Government … No! We will have to trust our own right arm, and we will trust our own right arm’ (Deane, Field Day Anthology, vol. III, 361).

79. Under the metonymy of the militant right arm, the figure of the apprentice boys reappears in different forms throughout unionist history, for example as the Ulster Volunteers in 1912, as the Ulster Special Constabulary, particularly the B-Specials, and as the contemporary paramilitary groups, such as the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the Red Hand Commandos.

80. Deane, Field Day Anthology, vol. III, 362.

81. Pyper is not unique in his claim on nationalist signifiers. Protestants past and present have laid claim to Gaelic heritage. Although this claim is less common today among unionists, who prefer to avoid being associated with Catholic nationalism, it still exists. For example, Ian Adamson's The Identity of Ulster (1982) claims Cuchulain and St Patrick for the Protestant tradition. Adamson's views significantly influenced the Ulster nationalism of the UDA. Ian Paisley, in his 1995 pamphlet with C.A.M. Noble Understanding Events in Northern Ireland: An Introduction for Americans, also claims St Patrick and uses some of the same historical arguments as Adamson to legitimise Protestant claims to Ulster.

82. Over the last two decades of the nineteenth century various institutional discourses of nationalism, such as the Land League movement, the Home Rule movement, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, and the literary renaissance all coalesced to enable Irish nationalists to write alternative narratives from their own perspectives to replace the British narratives about Ireland.

83. Bhabha's notion of hybridity avoids two extreme views of cultural diversity – the liberal notion of multiculturalism, which sublates difference within a hegemonic ethos of tolerant relativism, and radical separatist movements, which resist identification with the hegemonic, universalised Western self by substituting a purified, totalised ethnic self (Location of Culture, 34). Regarding liberal multiculturalism in particular, Bhabha notes how the ethic of liberal tolerance imagines ‘opposition in order to contain it and demonstrate its enlightened relativism or humanism’ (24). For Bhabha, such a strategy can never empower; indeed, it disempowers the ‘non-Western other’ (192).

84. Bhabha's notion of hybridity avoids two extreme views of cultural diversity – the liberal notion of multiculturalism, which sublates difference within a hegemonic ethos of tolerant relativism, and radical separatist movements, which resist identification with the hegemonic, universalised Western self by substituting a purified, totalised ethnic self (Location of Culture, 34). Regarding liberal multiculturalism in particular, Bhabha notes how the ethic of liberal tolerance imagines ‘opposition in order to contain it and demonstrate its enlightened relativism or humanism’ (24). For Bhabha, such a strategy can never empower; indeed, it disempowers the ‘non-Western other’ (192), 38–9.

85. Moriarty, ‘Paisley lays out his vision’, n.p.

86. Moriarty, 'Paisley lays out his vision', n.p.