Wald, SarahHuber, Katherine2022-05-102022-05-102022-05-10https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27152Ireland’s long history as a British colony raises questions in postcolonial studies about race, class, and gender that an ecocritical lens helps to answer. Drawing on literature, film, and archival photography and radio, “Re-mediating Ireland: The Nature of Modernization in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture” demonstrates how Ireland’s wide-ranging cultural representations of modernization and natural resource extraction across the twentieth century revise conceptions of race, gender, class, and postcoloniality amid globalizing environmental justice movements. My initial explorations of land-reform projects after the death of Charles Parnell in 1891 reveal how narratives in documentary photography influenced modernizing fisheries, agriculture, and energy infrastructure. The framing conventions of these photographs rework picturesque depictions of Irish landscapes to visualize what modernity in rural Ireland should look like in the Irish Literary Revival, as well as in Eamonn De Valera’s 1930s policies to decolonize Irish ways of life through the Irish Land Commission. The persisting influence of imperial-era notions of progress on an independent Ireland amid the protectionist policies of the 1930s become the point of saitirical critique in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1940). O’Brien’s novel invokes competing understandings of nature from medieval Irish-language poetry to assert alternative possible modernities existing in the Irish language, music, and material environment. This focus on alternative forms of development persists in Seán Ó Riada’s 1962 radio program, Our Musical Heritage, as mid-century multinational investments rapidly changed rural communities. Edited versions of Ó Riada’s program by Dolmen Press in the 1980s reveal an attachment to fixed understandings of Irish traditions that were at odds with Ó Riada’s original project and that obscure expanding forms of colonialism during the Troubles and environmental threats posed by nuclear power and an early awareness of our current climate crisis. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House (1990) critiques how these fixed understandings of Irishness conceal relationships among neocolonial economic regimes, postcolonial Irish rural modernities, and agential ecological communities, upon which Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s 2010 documentary film, The Pipe, reflects and with which I conclude. Tracing the aesthetics of Irish modernization reframes ecocritical understandings of decolonization and foregrounds the environmental impacts of empire for postcolonial studies.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Cultural studiesEcocriticismEnvironmental justiceIrelandMedia studiesPostcolonial studiesElectronic Thesis or Dissertation