Response

Abstract

In line with the journal’s titular mandate, this special issue provides productive reflections and amplifications of the deficiencies attendant to canonical Irish–South African relations in general, indicating ways in which these relations can be further expansively and inclusively re-read. Each of the essays here is refreshingly instructive and utilizes an innovative, disruptive approach that paves the way for critically dialogic comparative postcolonial scholarship. Co-editor Coilín Parsons’ injunction, then, that it is time to “revisit the architecture on which Irish–South African comparison is built, and to seek both new methods and archives,” resonates in the different thematic foci and diverse methodological and analytical approaches developed and demonstrated in the issue. Situating these essays within (current) shifting global (identity) politics and realities as this special issue does, renders it not just timely; it points to an otherwise responsive and engaged (re)imagination of established Irish–South African hermeneutic and representative templates and models.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial
• Comparative
• Ireland
• South Africa

Notes

1 Populated by various landmarks and monuments to sectarian violence in the city – especially the Troubles beginning in the 1960s – I was struck by how Belfast gave the impression of being the city that time forgot.

2 Now assuming global parlance, “Amandla” means power or strength and was popularized as an anti-apartheid resistance cry.

3 Here I extend Sarah Nuttall’s delineation of “Entanglement” in her analysis of post-apartheid South Africa as “a condition of being twisted together or entwined” in “complicated and ensnaring” relationships (2009, 1) to include its global, transnational implications/manifestations.

4 See Dubow (1995) and Ignatiev (1995).

5 Also known as Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, the National Executive of Ireland announced in 2013 that the remaining buildings of the Long Kesh/H Blocks prison were to be redeveloped into a peace center. South Africa’s famous, touristic monument to a torrid political history, Robben Island, is both a National Heritage Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

6 Regarding the notion of South African and Irish political, cultural (and literary) exceptionalism, see Lazarus (2004), De Kock (2001, 2005) and Hogan (2016).