Transatlantic Solidarities:
Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics |
| |
| Michael G. Malouf |
| 280 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 6 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2779-4 • $55.00 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2780-0 • $22.50 |
| New World
Studies |
| February 2009 |
 |
Despite their prominent place in twentieth-century literature
in English, novelists and poets from Ireland and the anglophone
Caribbean have long been separated by literary histories in which
they are either representing a local, nationalist tradition or
functioning within an international movement such as modernism
or postcolonialism. Redressing this either/or framework, Michael
Malouf recognizes an integral history shared by these two poetic
and political traditions, arising from their common transatlantic
history in relation to the British empire and their common spaces
of migration in New York and London. In examining these cross-cultural
exchanges, he reconsiders our conception of transatlantic space
and offers a revised conception of solidarity that is much more
diverse than previously assumed.
Offering a new narrative of cultural influence and performance,
this work specifically demonstrates the formative role of Irish
nationalist discourse—expressed in the works of Eamon de
Valera, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce—in the transnational
political and aesthetic self-fashioning of three influential Caribbean
figures: Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and Derek Walcott. It provides
both an innovative historical and literary methodology for reading
cross-cultural relations between two postcolonial cultures and
a literary and political history that can account for the recent
diversity of the field of anglophone world literature.
Michael G. Malouf is Assistant Professor
of English at George Mason University. His articles have appeared
in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular
Culture,
edited by Diane Negra, and in the journals the James
Joyce Quarterly
and Interventions.
