The Cultural Politics of In/Difference

Acknowledgements

This publication has been carried out under the auspices of the research project ‘Bodies in Transit: Difference and Indifference’, Grant FFI2017-84555-C2-2-P funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by ‘ERDF A way of making Europe’.

1 Introduction

This collection examines and interrogates the concepts and realities of ‘difference’ and ‘indifference’, and how these have been articulated and represented in Irish political, social and, especially, cultural and literary spaces and production. With this focus in mind, the twelve chapters in this book engage critically in discussions and debates across disciplines that address how intersecting categories of difference – notably, though not exclusively, gender, ethnicity, class, disability, age or nationality – have operated within Irish culture and society, and how they are narrated in literary and cultural texts and contexts. Following Sara Ahmed’s argument that ‘all actions are reactions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others’,¹ this volume will also discuss how indifference emerges, in multiple forms and varied expressions, as a highly problematic reaction towards those subjects whose bodies and experiences are discursively and politically marked as Other, as ‘bodies out of place’ either within the space of the nation-state or across its borders.² Hegemonic discourses of the Irish nation are disrupted by these subjects and their constructed difference and consequently, they become vulnerable to the violence of political, social and cultural exclusion and oppression, forced to constantly ‘negotiate the discursive structures that render [their] bodies Other’.³ Thus, indifference appears in this context, and in the literary and cultural texts ←1 | 2→examined in the chapters in this volume, as a socio-political and also affective response that implies a dual sense that requires appraisal. On the one hand, it openly refers to a lack of care and absence of responsiveness to others who are constructed and consequently felt as ‘different’, be they human or non-human others with whom we share the planet. On the other hand, the term ‘indifference’ can also suggest the assimilation of difference, mainly through its cooptation by dominant neoliberal discourses, a process that in no way alters or erodes the uneven power hierarchies imbued in its operations, and thus perpetuates inequality.

Approaching in/difference as a cultural politics in the sense Sara Ahmed gives to this expression in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, that is, as a form of ‘world making’,⁴ this book seeks to explore the discourses and processes that produce and reproduce what we have dubbed as Ireland’s ‘cultural politics of in/difference’, and its effects both in terms of the material experience of Othered subjects and in their representation in cultural and literary forms. How have categories of ‘difference’ and expressions of ‘indifference’ been integral to the socio-historical construction of Ireland as an ‘imagined community’?⁵ How are they being interrogated and negotiated in the current milieu? What role do cultural and literary texts play in these interrogations and negotiations? How are ‘difference’ and ‘indifference’ narrated in Irish literary and cultural texts? How can these narratives contribute to more just, more responsible, more responsive forms of understanding and working with and across differences? All these questions traverse, in one way or another, each of the chapters in this book and the wide range of issues they address. Taken together, the collection ultimately aims to prove that these are preoccupations that have greatly concerned a number of Irish writers, poets and cultural creators more generally. And it can be in their work that we might find some answers or, equally important, productive ways of posing the key questions that can potentially engender momentous change. Both the writers whose works are examined here and the scholars who study them show in their texts, creative or critical, this ←2 | 3→desire for transformation that we situate within the orbit of what Claire Hemmings defines as ‘affective solidarity’. For Hemmings, this is a form of solidarity that is ‘thoroughly cognisant of power and privilege’ and ‘not based in a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other feels, but on also feeling the desire for transformation out of the experience of discomfort, and against the odds’.⁶

It is this desire for transformation ‘through an engagement with others across difference’ that lies at the root of this volume. And this is also reflected in the theoretical and methodological frameworks the contributors employ in their research, which unequivocally confirm how, as Renée Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó Conchubhair argue: ‘Irish Studies scholarship has reoriented itself in relation to social changes in Ireland over the last several years, embracing theoretical fields including queer studies, disability studies, critical race studies and ecocriticism as crucial interlocutors in a field that has been primarily dominated by postcolonial studies.’⁷ This is a reorientation that is clearly palpable in the different chapters and the authors’ engagement with issues of affect, biopolitics, necropolitics, biocapitalism, globalization, ecofeminism, ageing masculinities, girlhood or citizenship. Furthermore, The Cultural Politics of In/Difference: Irish Texts and Contexts aims at being not only a multi- and interdisciplinary study but also a transhistorical one, as it ranges across literary and cultural production from the 1930s to the present. In this way, the book’s critical focus on in/difference speaks to the contemporary moment by engaging in discussions that consider the past, present and even future developments. In the end, as Elizabeth Grosz claims, ‘[t]‌he past is the virtual which coexists with the present. The past, in other words, is always already contained in the present, not as its cause or its pattern but rather, as its latency, its ←3 | 4→virtuality, its potential for being otherwise.’⁸ And for this potential to be realized, and to give way to otherwise presents and futures, it is essential that we pay attention to the ways in which these works activate and/or engage with strategies of dissent and resistance. Thus, this volume finally seeks to examine the creative alternatives to exclusionary configurations of ‘difference’ and ‘indifference’ that are being articulated in Irish texts and contexts, contributing to our communal thinking and imaginative creation of more effective forms of building community based firmly on the grounds of equity and social justice.

The volume opens with Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides’ chapter ‘Systemic Crime and Social Disaffection in Benjamin Black’s Quirke Series: A Struggle for Difference’, in which she addresses difference not so much as the result of a process of differentiation and Othering, but most powerfully as a call to both see and act differently in order to make a difference in the ways Ireland has (or has not) dealt with systemic inequalities and oppression. She also engages with what she terms ‘social disaffection’, a choice of words that simultaneously calls attention to Ireland’s social indifference towards the most vulnerable, and to the affective cultural politics implicated in it. Through the lens of Slavoj Žižek’s theories in his work Violence (2008),⁹ and making use of Sara Ahmed’s critical insights into the cultural politics of emotions, Pérez-Vides examines two of the seven crime fiction novels known as ‘the Quirke series’, written by the celebrated Irish writer John Banville under the pen name of Benjamin Black. Through an insightful analysis of Christine Falls (2006) and Even the Dead (2015), the author compellingly exposes how these narratives are concerned with the structural nature of the crimes tackled in them, in this case the hideous treatment of women in Magdalene laundries and the illegal trafficking of infants from Mother and Baby Homes, concurrently displaying a consistent critique of the transhistorical indifference to the socio-structural victimization of women that has dominated the Irish milieu. For Pérez-Vides, ←4 | 5→Quirke, archetypical noir investigator, can be said to embody the dialectics of indifference / care that allows Black (Banville) to raise interrogations about the extent to which interpersonal relations may bring about change, ultimately leading, even if not in a completely effective manner, to closer encounters with social justice.

Like Pérez Vides, Loic Wright looks at the nation’s past to explore oppressive gender dynamics that still get reproduced in the present. His chapter, entitled ‘Erin’s Sons and Decent Daughters: The Biopolitics of Rural Masculinities in Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn (1948)’, examines to what extent rural men and their performances of manhood were moulded by attempts to conform to the state-sanctioned ideals of masculinity in the years leading up to the foundation of the Irish Republic. The author addresses these issues by analysing Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn in light of R. W. Connell’s Masculinities and Michel Foucault’s work.¹⁰ Wright’s contribution thus examines the hegemonic masculinities of the men in Cavan in the 1930s as well the correlation between the legislation passed in the preceding decade and the consequent cultures of rigid patriarchal dominance and, in many cases, state-sanctioned misogyny.

Hegemonic constructions of masculinity are also at the core of Chapter 4, ‘Anne Griffin’s When All Is Said (2019): A Different Haunting Ageing Masculinity in Irish Fiction’, in which Asier Altuna-García de Salazar draws upon tenets on ageing and masculinity by providing a close reading of Anne Griffin’s debut novel that reveals how indifferent Irish society and culture have been to these issues. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s views on hauntology, especially mourning and melancholia,¹¹ Altuna-García de Salazar captivatingly manages to reveal a different construction of masculinity informed by age and a haunting spectral melancholia. The analysis of the 84-year-old’s extended internal monologues is complemented with a ←5 | 6→comprehensive corpus of scholarly literature on masculinity in Ireland that makes it easy for the reader to grasp the weightiness of the topic at hand.

It is also our right to laugh that the following chapter vindicates. Aida Rosende-Pérez’s and Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez’s ‘“Girls just wanna have fun”: Female Adolescence and Joyful Insurrection in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing (1999) and Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls (2018–)’ takes the reader on a journey through representations of Irish girlhood. Teenage girls, the authors claim, have been either overly exposed or unseen in Irish culture, which similarly oscillates between positioning them as sign of difference, often connected to the female body and sexuality, and showing an absolute indifference to their actual, embodied experiences. However, according to Rosende-Pérez’s and Jarazo-Álvarez’s analysis, The Dancers Dancing and Derry Girls open new paths for alternative representations of Irish female adolescence, both emphasizing the girls’ bodies in motion, and determinedly challenging conventional associations of teenage girlhood and trauma. The analysis mainly draws on Susan Cahill’s and Caroline Magennis’ work on literary and cultural engagements with (Northern) Irish girlhood, and on Libe García Zarranz’s inspiring formulation of ‘joyful insurrection as feminist methodology’,¹² to ultimately assert the need to ←6 | 7→reconsider the power of ‘having fun’ as a crucial site for feminist rebellion against patriarchal violence in its multiple forms.

The articulations of in/difference in the volume touch upon different preoccupations and the following two chapters look at them from a common theoretical perspective, Achille Mbembe’s critical views on the necropolitical.¹³ In Belén Martín-Lucas’ ‘Death-worlds and Necropolitics of Abjection in Emma Donoghue’s “Counting the Days”’, the author ←7 | 8→suggests that Donoghue’s short story should be read as a critique of the mid-nineteenth century’s cross-border transits from Ireland to Canada forced by poverty and the risk of starvation. Martín-Lucas examines here how Donoghue brings to the fore the necropolitics of both old and current biocapitalism, showing how abjection produces anger, and how the latter materializes in cholera and ultimately in death.