Racial capitalism, hauntology and the politics of death in Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which death can be understood to occupy a formative function in the construction of Irish national identity. The analysis of three distinct moments in Irish history (Plantation-era funerary practices, the Great Famine, and the 1981 hunger strikes) is undertaken with recourse to Michel Foucault’s understanding of race as it is deployed through disciplinary and biopower and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. The continuing concern with history in Irish political discourse is juxtaposed with Derrida’s idea of ‘hauntology’. It will be seen that the act of remembering politically carries with it an ambivalent legacy, exposing the violence at the heart of the establishment of both states in Ireland, while maintaining the potential of emancipatory promise. This promise is itself rooted in the violence implicated in the production of alterity through the historical experience of death.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial capitalism
• hauntology
• race
• commemoration
• Ireland
• violence
• postcolonial
• Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Published for the first time under Elgee’s nom de plume of Speranza as ‘The Stricken Land’ in The Nation, 23 January 1847.

2. Derrida (Derrida 1994, 37).

3. Although Feldman (Feldman 1991, 106) sees the funeral or commemorative act as a shift from the interventionist politics of mass mobilisation to that of commemoration it would be mistaken to draw a fine line of demarcation between the two. For, as we will see, death and commemoration have specifically political aspects and I will argue later that death itself in Ireland has become deeply politicised so to suggest that commemoration is non-interventionist would be absurd.

4. One important exception of this has been the work of Taylor (1989).

5. The Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 were a series of laws passed to institutionalise the separation of the Norman settlers and the native Irish (including restriction on language, dress, marriage, etc.).

6. The Flight of the Earls meant the emigration of most of the Gaelic nobility to other parts of Europe and marked the breakdown of the Gaelic social order.

7. In English: ‘keening’.

8. Consider this poem by sixteenth-century bard Fear Dorcha Ó Mealláin, An Díbirt go Connachta (Exodus to Connacht) (Gearóid 2002, 105–109):

9. Bobby Sands was elected MP for the Fermanagh South Tyrone constituency on 9 April 1981 and Kieran Doherty elected TD for Cavan-Monaghan on 11 June.

10. Indeed when W.B. Yeats was collecting folkloric tales in the early twentieth century he is said to have spoken to women who recounted many tales and when asked if she believed in any of them much to Yeats’ disappointment she laughed and said of course she didn’t. However as Yeats was leaving she ran after him proclaiming ‘But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist!’ (Chakrabarty 2000).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Irish Studies Busteed Postdoctoral Prize.