RE-MEDIATING IRELAND: THE NATURE OF MODERNIZATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH CULTURE By KATHERINE M. HUBER A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2022 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Katherine M. Huber Title: Re-mediating Ireland: The Nature of Modernization in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the of Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Mark Quigley Co-Chair Sarah Wald Co-Chair Paul Peppis Core Member Sharon Luk Institutional Representative And Krista Chronister Vice Provost of Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded March 2022. ii Ó 2022 Katherine M. Huber iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Katherine M. Huber Doctor of Philosophy Department of English March 2022 Title: Re-mediating Ireland: The Nature of Modernization in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture Ireland’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- iv 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. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Katherine M. Huber GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Leiden University, Leiden DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2022, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Literary Studies, 2008, Leiden University Bachelor of Arts, Literary Studies (Algemene Literatuurwetenschap), 2007, Leiden University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Postcolonial ecocriticism Environmental justice Studies of literature and the environment Twentieth-century Irish and British literature Twentieth-century African anglophone literature Twentieth-century Caribbean anglophone literature Postcolonial theory Inclusive pedagogies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Graduate Employee, University of Oregon English Department, 2014-2020 Graduate Employee, University of Oregon Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, 2020-2022 Oceans & Society Instructor, Sea Education Association, 2017-2019 (summers) GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS Rose Davis Scholarship and College of Education Alumni Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2021-2022 Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) Research Grant, University of Oregon, 2020-2021 Commendation of Equity and Inclusion in the Teaching of Argumentative Writing, University of Oregon, 2018-2019 Postgraduate Scholarship, International Association of the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), 2019 IRISH Seminar 2018 Tuition Fellowship, University of Notre Dame, 2018 General University of Oregon Scholarship, 2016-2017 vi Steingart Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2014-2015 Jane Campbell Krohn Graduate Fellowship in Literature and the Environment, University of Oregon, 2014-2015 PUBLICATIONS Huber, Katherine M. “‘The Eden of the future…looking like the banished past’: Reading Riparian Agency in Deep Time in Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, vol. 25, no. 1 (2021), pp. 17-32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2021.1893206 Huber, Katherine M. and Hayley G. Brazier. “Teaching the Ocean: Literature and History in the Study of the Sea,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), 1 October 2020, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa131 Huber, Katherine, M. “The View from Mrs. Kelly’s Window: Reframing Agency and Land in the Congested Districts Board Photographs,” Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 55, no. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2020), pp. 95- 128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2020.0018 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is no way I can thank everyone who has contributed to this project. First, I want to thank Professor Mark Quigley and Professor Sarah Wald, whose coursework, mentorship on my comprehensive exams, and comments on countless drafts of unwieldy chapters have guided my thinking and writing to places that were unimaginable to me eight years ago. This project would also not have been possible without the generous support I have had at the University of Oregon (UO). The English Department introduced me to the incredible intellectual mentors I have in Professor Sharon Luk and Professor Paul Peppis. Professor Luk has always challenged my thinking, and I return again and again to what I learned in her graduate seminar to examine the uneven power relations that shape the material world. I am also so grateful for the numerous conversations I have had with Professor Peppis that have made me a more articulate and detailed thinker and close reader. I am also extremely grateful to the Center for the Study of Women in Society, who generously supported my research in the difficult 2020-21 academic year. Additionally, I want to thank the Center for Environmental Futures (CEF) for introducing me to Professors Mark Carey and Marsha Weisiger. I am grateful to them both for offering me numerous opportunities to expand the interdisciplinary scope of my work by inviting me to the Cascadia Environmental History Retreats in 2019 and 2020, as well as to the 2018 environmental history excursion to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, where I had the opportunity to present my second chapter in its very early stages. I have also found incredible support from scholars in Irish Studies. Attending Notre Dame’s IRISH Seminar in 2018 shaped my project, and I am so grateful to Professor Chris Fox and Dr. Catherine Wilsdon for that opportunity. The focus of my fourth chapter came out viii of conversations I had with Dr. Aileen Dillane at the seminar, and much of the archival research for my second chapter was completed during the seminar’s lunch breaks. I would not have been able to complete my archival research in Ireland without the support of the International Association for Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), which sponsored my participation in the 2019 IASIL conference at Trinity College Dublin. I would like to thank all the archivists who made my work possible: Keith Murphy and Barbara Bonini of the National Library of Ireland; Patricia Sweeney and Breeda Brennan at RTÉ; John Rooney at University College Cork; and Grace Toland and Ellen Doyle at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. I am also very grateful to Peadar Ó Riada for granting me permission to view the archival materials of his father. I would also like to thank Dr. Ciara Breathnach and Risteard Ó Domhnaill in particular for graciously answering questions I had about the CDB photographs and The Pipe, respectively. My work would not be possible without the generosity of so many scholars at various stages, and I am grateful to Professors Stacy Alaimo, Lucy Collins, Erin Beck, Eóin Flannery, David Lloyd, and Kelly Sullivan. A special thank you to Bríd Ní Chumhaill and Martin Maguire of the Cloughjordan Ecovillage, County Tipperary, for generously offering me a room to write in as I met and learned from environmental activists in Ireland in the summer of 2019. Finally, I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of my friends and family, especially Sheila, John, and Rebecca Huber, Orlando Aguilar Velazquez, all the Malloys, Kathy and John Morefield, Greg Tuohy, Caroline Olijve, Carmel Ohman, Hayley Brazier, and Gordon Sayre. Thank you Seho Chon for so much love and support throughout the final years of this project. There are so many others who have contributed to this work. I hope you know how grateful I am. ix DEDICATION For Professor Mark Quigley and Professor Sarah Wald, whose generous feedback, patience with me, and willingness to think across the fields of Irish Studies and ecocriticism over the past eight years enabled me to write this dissertation. These eight years presented immense upheavals in life and the world against the backdrop of a global pandemic. I am so grateful to you for remaining the inspiring mentors you are throughout my graduate studies and for helping me do the research that is deeply meaningful to me. I would not be the thinker and writer I am today without you, and I can only aspire to be as supportive a mentor to my own students. I am forever grateful to you both. x TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO RE-MEDIATING IRELAND: THE NATURE OF MODERNIZATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH CULTURE .............. 1 POSTCOLONIAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: IRISH MODERNIZATION AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF EMPIRE ............................................................................. 6 REMEDIATION AND MULTIPLE MODERNITIES: ALTERNATIVE RELATIONSHIPS TO THE ENVIRONMENT ............................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER OVERVIEW: FROM IMPERIAL-ERA LAND REFORM TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FOSSIL-FUEL EXTRACTION ............................................................................................. 15 CONCLUSION: IMAGINING MORE SOCIALLY AND ENVIRONMENTALLY JUST FUTURES ... 18 CHAPTER 2: REFRAMING MODERNITY: DEFYING THE AESTHETICS OF PROGRESS IN THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS BOARD PHOTOGRAPHS ...... 20 NARRATIVE REALITIES: READING RIVAL EXPERIENCES OF MODERNIZATION ................ 22 HIERARCHIES OF PROGRESS: DEVELOPING GENDERED AND CLASSED VIEWS OF MODERNITY ................................................................................................................... 26 SPLINTERED MODERNITIES: TWO DISTINCT VIEWERS GAZE UPON A MODERNIZED LANDSCAPE .................................................................................................................... 39 UNEXPECTED EFFECTS: POWER AND PROGRESS IN THE GENDERED LABOR OF COMMERCIAL FISHERIES ................................................................................................ 50 CONCLUSION: POWER AND AGENCY ACROSS MULTIPLE MODERNITIES ......................... 59 CHAPTER 3: REMEDIATED MODERNITIES: REVISING PROGRESS NARRATIVES AND THE PICTURESQUE IN FLANN O’BRIEN’S THE THIRD POLICEMAN ................................................................................................................... 61 REPRODUCING “THE COLONIAL MINDSET”: NARRATIVE FORMS THAT PERPETUATE POVERTY AS PROGRESS .................................................................................................. 64 UNDERLYING INFRASTRUCTURE: PRODUCING A PICTURESQUE SCENE OF PROGRESS FROM THE ROAD ............................................................................................................. 71 MISGUIDED PLANS: AN OVERDEPENDENCE ON COLONIAL WAYS OF KNOWING ............ 81 THE LIMITS OF DECOLONIZATION: ENACTING DIVISIONS IN TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACETIME ..................................................................................................................... 89 CONCLUSION: REMEDIATING POSTMODERN RELATIONS INTO ENVIRONMENTAL DEVELOPMENT ............................................................................................................... 94 CHAPTER 4: INNOVATING TRADITIONAL MODERNITIES: ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF DEVELOPMENT IN ORALITIES ON NATIONAL RADIO IN SEÁN Ó RIADA’S OUR MUSICAL HERITAGE .................................................................... 97 MEDIA IN LEMASSIAN MODERNITY: LITERARY AND MUSICAL NEGOTIATIONS OF PLACE AND IDENTITY ON STAGE, RADIO, TELEVISION, AND FILM ........................................... 100 “A STAND AGAINST THE ONSLAUGHT OF WESTERN CULTURE”: RESISTING THE LOGICS OF ESSENTIALISM THROUGH IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC .................................................... 104 DESTABILIZING DECOLONIZATION: INVERTING THE HIERARCHICAL LOGIC OF IMPERIALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL IRISH IDENTITIES ........................................................ 112 xi REFRAMING PROGRESS: AN ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY IN IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC ON NATIONAL RADIO .......................................................................................................... 121 NEW MEDIA AND MODERNITIES: THE LEGACY OF OUR MUSICAL HERITAGE IN PRINT AND RADIO ........................................................................................................................... 130 CONCLUSION: UNDERSTANDING MODERNITY THROUGH MUSIC ON THE RADIO: SEÁN Ó RIADA’S OVERLOOKED INTERVENTION ......................................................................... 139 CHAPTER 5: INTERRUPTING NEOCOLONIAL MODERNITY: POST- APOCALYPTIC MODERNITIES OF RESILIENCE IN ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE’S THE BRAY HOUSE ....................................................................................................... 147 “WASTELANDING” PEOPLES AND PLACES: WRITING AND ERASING THE COMPETING HISTORIES OF NEOCOLONIAL MODERNITY ................................................................... 150 MANAGING TIME AND SPACE: THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LOGICS OF EMPIRE ..................................................................................................................................... 159 REINTERPRETING “THE WRITING ON THE WALL”: SITES OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND CULTURAL RESILIENCE ................................................................................................. 167 AFTER HISTORY: NARRATING MORE JUST FUTURES IN THE INEVITABLE COLLAPSE OF NEOCOLONIAL MODERNITY ........................................................................................... 184 CHAPTER 6: MULTISPECIES MODERNITIES: REWORKING ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FOR POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA IN RISTEARD Ó DOMHNAILL’S THE PIPE ......................................................................................... 187 MODERNITY MONTAGE: THE NATIONAL RIGHTS OF MODERNIZING INDUSTRIES ......... 190 SPLINTERED COMMUNITIES: GENDERED CONFLICTS AND RUPTURES IN A MODERN SOCIETY ....................................................................................................................... 200 “THE BOG IS A TECHNOLOGY OF ITS OWN”: MULTISPECIES INTERACTIONS IN POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITIES ...................................................................................... 211 CONCLUSION: DEPICTING POSTCOLONIAL MULTISPECIES MODERNITIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM ................................................................................................... 219 CONCLUSION: THE MULTIPLE PRESENTS OF MULTIPLE MODERNITIES ......................................................................................................................................... 220 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 228 xii Chapter 1: Introduction to Re-mediating Ireland: The Nature of Modernization in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture If many scholarly historians today no longer take progress as their guiding assumption, the development goal is a legacy of liberal empire so deeply embedded in political and institutional structures and practices that it is difficult for postcolonial societies to shake off; indeed, it is what makes postcolonial societies postcolonial. They struggle to ‘move on’ from, even forget, the colonial past to ‘catch up’ and arrive at a long-deferred future marked by freedom and prosperity. But to move only forward in time, to lose the fullness of time, the way the past lives in the present and shapes the future, is itself an inhuman and impossible expectation, given how intimately such societies have been shaped by the colonial past—including the historical imagination envisioning progress towards some developmental end. –Priya Satia Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (264). In response to recent controversies about how to commemorate the centenaries of events leading to Ireland’s partial independence and the partition of Northern Ireland in 1922, the Republic of Ireland’s President, Michael D. Higgins, called for a “journey of ethical remembering” that accounts for how “[c]lass, gender, religion, democracy, language, culture and violence all played important roles, and all were intertwined with British imperialist rule in Ireland” (78). Higgins asserts that Irish people should grapple with the complexity of ongoing histories of colonialism and the hierarchies of social difference to which such histories have given rise even as the Republic of Ireland consolidates its position in the EU in the aftermath of Brexit. Yet such a reckoning with the colonial past and its impact on the present brings into sharp relief the environmental impacts of empire that persist in the Republic of Ireland’s attempts to transcend its colonial past through economic development projects. Since the 1960s, the Republic has invited foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country, privatized national resources, offered multi-billion-dollar tax breaks to multinationals like Apple, and established immigration policies protecting those of Irish descent that uncomfortably echo the British 1 patrials acts. Yet the austerity measures imposed by the Eurogroup, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in 2008 make it unclear who benefits and who bears the burdens of the Republic’s policies to modernize into a seemingly powerful Western but economically subordinate postcolonial nation. As Ireland nears its centenary of partition and postcolonial nationhood, tensions between Ireland’s modernization projects during the first hundred years of the state’s partial territorial sovereignty and its long history as a British colony raise questions about postcoloniality within a neocolonial modernity that an ecocritical lens helps to answer. Such questions include: What are the environmental impacts of empire? What does progress look like for postcolonial nations in a neocolonial modernity of intensifying multinational corporate power and fortifying national borders? Is decolonization possible as the uneven divisions of material wealth established during the era of colonialism continue to reify social hierarchies within and across national borders, both in Ireland and in postcolonial nations that have emulated Ireland’s forms of development? What role have cultural relationships with the environment played in both Irish complicity with and resistance to colonial structures of power and neocolonial economic regimes? To what extent do relationships among material environments, ongoing forms of colonial power, and local community relations between humans and nonhumans in Ireland revise our understandings of postcoloniality in our neocolonial modernity? To answer these questions, “Re-mediating Ireland: The Nature of Modernization in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture” examines how progress narratives in postcolonial Irish contexts impede alternative forms of development—even when ongoing interactions among humans, nonhumans, and their material environments attest to the possibility of 2 different present moments and potential futures than those dictated by colonial and neocolonial power relations. Alternative modernities emerge alongside and in correspondence with everyday consumption habits, like drinking a cup of coffee or tea, or identifying a place by its iconic landscapes, such as the rolling green hills dotted with sheep in rural Ireland. These small but quotidian habits contradictorily demonstrate and obscure the histories of colonialism internalized in modes of consumption and recognition. Persisting colonial histories perpetuate postcolonial realities that are, as Priya Satia puts it, “shaped by the colonial past—including the historical imagination envisioning progress towards some developmental end” (264). Attempts to reach this “developmental end” inscribe modern life and landscapes with relationships that reproduce colonial-era social hierarchies in a neocolonial present. Neocolonial globalized economic regimes maintain geopolitical and social hierarchies as postcolonial nations attempt to transcend the colonial past and obtain the power and privileges that Western modernity promises. This desire to, in Satia’s words, “struggle to ‘move on’ from, even forget, the colonial past to ‘catch up’ and arrive at a long-deferred future marked by freedom and prosperity” is the implicit (and sometimes explicit) “development goal” of many postcolonial nations, including the Republic of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland’s position on the economic and geographic periphery of Europe, as well as its perceived racial contiguity with constructions of whiteness in Britain, facilitate misperceptions of Ireland as having obtained what many other postcolonial nations in the former British empire strive to achieve. Yet intersections of postcoloniality and the environmental impacts of empire establish “the way the past lives in the present and shapes the future” (Satia 264). Indeed, Ireland was a testing ground for 3 British colonial strategies, and many forms of colonization. Settler colonialism and plantation systems in the USA, and forms of partition used in India and Pakistan and Israel and Palestine, were first used in Ireland (195). Additionally, policing systems tested in Ireland were later deployed across the British empire to coerce native populations into the mechanisms of imperial control. These histories materially persist in the modernization projects and historical and cultural contexts across the twentieth century that have had irreversible impacts on Irish communities and their environments. Modernization projects to develop Ireland’s economy and natural resources over the past century provide an opportunity to study the environmental impacts of empire in close proximity to the imperial center. Bringing a postcolonial ecocritical lens to distinct moments of land reform, economic integration, and natural resource extraction in Ireland across the twentieth century reveals the ongoing environmental impacts of empire. It also elucidates modes of resistance to colonial and neocolonial power relations that continue to constrain and erase Irish ways of knowing and forms of self-determination through which Ireland might decolonize to embrace a more socially just future. My project draws on the rich Irish cultural and literary studies of land and power, but it also seeks to bring this history into conversation with broader understandings of belonging, place, indigeneity, and migration in postcolonial ecocriticism, a field which collectively seeks to analyze and foreground viable alternatives to uneven forms of development perpetuated by the ongoing histories of colonialism. Postcolonial ecocriticism attends to uneven histories of development and power effected by colonialism, in the words of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, “to contest—also to provide viable alternatives to—western ideologies of development” (27). My dissertation builds on postcolonial ecocritical 4 conversations through its sustained attention to intersections of gender, power, and land and the alternative modernities that arise alongside colonial power relations. Irish cultural representations of modernization across the twentieth century expose the insidious ways colonial understandings of progress persist in development projects in the postcolonial nation. These understandings of progress disrupt multiple alternative modernities emerging through innovating understandings of the Irish language and traditional cultural practices. “Re-mediating Ireland” addresses the urgent need to draw Irish culture and history into postcolonial ecocritical conversations that make claims about the material impacts of colonization and the possibilities for decolonization in economic and cultural relationships to material environments. Colonial histories permeate understandings of identity and place, as well as interactions with material environments in postcolonial societies. Colonial pasts haunt postcolonial presents in part through the myth of progress embedded in understandings of national sovereignty and independence. Each of my case studies reveals how imperial-era narrative forms continue to structure postcolonial nation formation and modernization in the Republic of Ireland at distinct moments in the twentieth century. Yet my analyses also show modes of resistance that assert alternative relationships to the environment existing and continuing to grow alongside and, at times, in conversation with, hegemonic conceptions of modernity. Through analyzing narrative structures across a variety of media, “Re- mediating Ireland” demonstrates the wide range of cultural relationships to material environments upon which people and communities drew to rework dominant modernization narratives in multimodal forms to envision more socially and environmentally just futures. 5 Postcolonial Environmental Justice: Irish Modernization and the Environmental Impacts of Empire Despite the environmental impacts that the long history of British colonialism has had on the island of Ireland and postcolonial nation formation in the Republic, Irish cultural production is conspicuously absent from postcolonial ecocriticism outside of Irish studies. My scholarship fills this gap in ecocritical research as it builds on the important scholarship of Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon, and Jennifer Wenzel, all of whom examine multiple media and narrative forms across postcolonial cultural production to explore how such contexts and the communities who inhabit them respond to and resist the continuing environmental impacts of empire. In Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019), DeLoughrey analyzes a broad range of postcolonial texts from the Caribbean and Pacific islands to “allegoriz[e] the Anthropocene, arguing that it is vital to bring the theoretical discourse of the global north into dialogue with communities that both are at the forefront of present climate change and its historical survivors” (7). Drawing the theories of Walter Benjamin into conversation with indigenous epistemologies of island communities, DeLoughrey reframes Western understandings of modernity and modernization. In keeping with DeLoughrey’s overarching project, I draw on the complex position of the island of Ireland as both a postcolonial nation and a settler-colonial statelet situated in the global north to expand readings of how empire and innovating traditional practices shape Irish communities and environments. In doing so, I implicitly build on DeLoughrey’s assertions of island texts and contexts as key to understanding colonial histories and their effects on contemporary environmental crises. 6 My readings also draw on concepts like Nixon’s idea of the “writer activist” and Wenzel’s theory of “reading for the planet” to trace the effects of modernization projects. These projects operate in neocolonial processes of globalization that unevenly distribute the benefits and burdens of extraction economies, as Wenzel’s describes: “[g]lobalization often works through localizing risk, harm, or profit” (42). Like DeLoughrey, Nixon, and Wenzel, I examine local case studies in “Re-mediating Ireland” to theorize processes that marginalize and render disposable particular people and places within broader geopolitical hierarchies. Each of my case studies demonstrates how different media shape perceptions of tradition, modernity, and modernization to expose the ongoing environmental impacts of empire embedded in ideas of progress and development as well as modes of resistance to changing relations to the environment. My interpretive approach to reading narrative forms across media offers methods for postcolonial ecocriticism to better recognize the environmental impacts of empire in close proximity to the imperial center. By analyzing cultural representations that resist the development of the environment in ways that harm human and nonhuman communities, my project positions environmental justice in a postcolonial frame to establish context-specific but interdisciplinary and historical methods. While most environmental justice theoretical frameworks emerge from North American case studies and contexts, postcolonial ecocriticism emphasizes geopolitical hierarchies emerging in the wake of empire. Byron Caminero-Santangelo critiques limitations implicit in environmental justice scholarship as a result of its focus on North America while US environmental justice scholars Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster call for more transnational coalitions in environmental 7 justice movements to effect structural change. The theoretical focus of environmental justice scholarship in North American settler-colonial contexts contrasts with postcolonial ecocriticism’s emphasis on geopolitical hierarchies established during the era of colonial expansion and persisting in our neocolonial modernity. Reconsidering Ireland’s wide-ranging cultural representations of land through a postcolonial ecocritical lens reshapes how postcolonial ecocritical and Irish studies scholars imagine environmental, material, and cultural agencies and the media in which they are represented and through which they represent themselves in ongoing and shifting constructions of race, gender, and class. “Re-mediating Ireland” thus presents analytical frameworks for integrating environmental justice into a postcolonial frame. Through examining the environmental impacts of empire and the alternative modernities embedded in environmental and cultural relations and by applying these methods to each of my case studies, “Re-mediating Ireland” revises how we conceptualize race, class, ethnicity, and gender in ongoing histories of colonialism and neocolonial economic regimes. In doing so, my research contributes to a growing body of environmental humanities scholarship within Irish studies. My work builds on the scholarship of Lucy Collins, Christine Cusick, Eóin Flannery, Maureen O’Connor, Derek Gladwin, Malcolm Sen, Tim Wenzell, and Eamonn Wall. Irish studies ecocriticism is also influenced by World-Systems theory, for instance in the scholarship of Sharae Deckard and Michael Paye, who have analyzed the privatization and extraction of Ireland’s natural resources within core-periphery frameworks. While World-Systems theory helps to examine Ireland’s development of natural resources, it does not always heed material agencies and 8 multispecies relationships for which postcolonial ecocriticism accounts. It also does not always directly address how the history of colonial expansion persists in the neocolonial regimes of the current globalized economy. My project expands analyses of power and nonhuman agencies in Irish studies by identifying and theorizing multiple alternative modernities across diverse narrative forms and media in the twentieth century to expose the persisting environmental impacts of empire. The methods of analysis employed in my dissertation align most directly with the ecocritical and materialist approaches of Flannery and Gladwin, whose scholarship has had important impacts on the field of Irish studies ecocriticism, but which has yet to garner a more general and interdisciplinary audience among postcolonial ecocritics outside of Irish studies. In Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History, and Environmental Justice (2016), Flannery builds on the idea that colonial hierarchies persist materially today in how perceptions of land and systems of value have been integrally interwoven throughout Irish history. He analyses poetry, essays, and memoir to establish the utility and potential of ecocriticism as a theoretical framework for Irish studies. Gladwin’s 2018 Contentious Terrains: Boglands Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic examines cultural representations of bogs in Irish prose, poetry, and drama of the late nineteenth century to the present. My dissertation draws on the print-media analyses and narrative approaches of Flannery and the historical scope of Gladwin, but I extend understandings of tradition and modernity to a broader range of media that integrate and challenge narrative forms of modernity and modernization across the twentieth century. “Re- mediating Ireland” thus builds on Irish studies ecocritical scholarship by addressing important questions about Ireland’s uneven forms of development in the wake of empire 9 that include the media through which such development was documented and often resisted. Attending to histories of modernization and cultural relationships to material surroundings reframes the history of colonialism in Ireland, including ongoing forms of colonialism in Northern Ireland after 1922 and the influx of multinational capital into the Republic of Ireland beginning in 1959. In turn, “Re-mediating Ireland” revises understandings in Irish Studies of the role the material environment plays in Ireland’s history as a British colony. In doing so, “Re-mediating Ireland” shows how gender hierarchies insidiously pervade the environmental impacts of empire. Gendered conceptions of land and modernity define natural resources across emerging media in Ireland in the twentieth century. Each case study demonstrates how cultural representations of modernization both assert and challenge gendered social and material relationships to land and the environment. By exposing ongoing gender hierarchies embedded in the environmental impacts of empire, my dissertation reworks how postcolonial ecocritical and Irish studies scholars conceptualize intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in relation to understandings of progress, modernity, and environmental crisis. “Re-mediating Ireland” thus contributes to ongoing efforts to reimagine more just futures that humanities scholarship seeks to offer the wider world. Remediation and Multiple Modernities: Alternative Relationships to the Environment Binary logics of tradition and modernity persist across colonial and postcolonial Ireland. Seemingly past traditions and imagined future modernities continually unfold 10 within the material legacy of colonial and postcolonial development. Modernization projects render the environment into natural resources through ongoing histories of land reform, enclosure, extraction, and property ownership. My examination of multiple media highlights how shifting understandings of Irish traditions and possibilities for postcolonial modernity emerge in apparent opposition but always informing one another in new and old narrative forms and media. On the one hand, understandings of outdated traditions and cutting-edge technologies justify environmental development projects and natural resource extraction in Ireland from the late-Victorian era through the period of unprecedented economic growth in the Republic of Ireland from 1995-2008. On the other hand, my research reveals how entrenched binary understandings of tradition and modernity occlude modes of resistance through which cultural production innovates traditional forms to defy modernization initiatives that would marginalize the Irish language and indigenous cultural practices. The materials I analyze in each case study assert agential relationships between humans and nonhumans that continually unfold across the ongoing environmental impacts of empire as they offer alternative modernities for more just futures. Inflections of gender across masculine modernities and feminized traditions elucidate what I am calling multiple modernities in environmental relations among humans, nonhumans, and material agencies that emerge alongside and in ongoing interaction with the environmental impacts of empire. Modernity is a process of producing borders that delineate systems of value and devaluation on people and places in the legacy of colonialism (DeLoughrey 120). Yet conceptions of modernity and modernization from US-modernization theory privilege narratives in which the nation- 11 state progresses toward globalization in a US-dominated global economy. Different conceptions of modernization, as Mark Quigley and Conor McCarthy separately show, become more prominently in tension with imperial, national, and postcolonial cultural frameworks at different moments in Irish history. The concept of multiple modernities shows that, to quote Sandra Harding, “modernization is not the same as Westernization. […] [M]any other societies around the world have developed their own forms of modernity” (202-203). The multiple modernities that my analyses highlight counter seemingly fixed notions and narratives of progress, tradition, and modernity in decolonizing and modernizing Ireland. The cultural studies and analytical methods I employ expand understandings of how aesthetic forms and modes of resistance permeate narrative forms across multiple media to destabilize imperial-era structural inequalities in local and global relationships with material environments. Documentary photography, print, radio, and film inflect tensions between attempts to decolonize Irish cultural production and the media that were more established in the imperial centers of Britain and the United States. The use of documentary photography in Victorian-era imperial land reforms shaped the aesthetics of what modernity should look like, and these expectations resurface across media in depictions of twentieth-century postcolonial modernization projects. Similarly, publishing, radio, television, and documentary film in Ireland invoke and subvert established forms and media histories developed earlier in Britain and the United States. My use of different media in my case studies consequently reflects the relatively late development of infrastructue that Irish people and their environments experienced over the twentieth century. The different media my project brings into conversation reveals the 12 important role that medium plays in cultural production to interpolate diverse narrative forms and the modernities they come to represent. By elucidating multiple modernities in Irish cultural production across media, my project aligns with the overarching commitment of postcolonial ecocriticism to better understand and to find viable alternatives to the uneven distribution of the benefits and burdens of natural resource extraction and development across geopolitical hierarchies. These interactions between narrative forms and media help to shape understandings of progress and development across conceptions of tradition and modernity through multiple processes of remediation. These processes indicate a three- fold definition of remediation. First, Irish cultural production reworks narrative forms across media to correct modernization narratives that would divide seemingly outdated traditions from future developed environments. These instances of remediation correct dominant progress narratives evinced in official records like the Congested Districts Board photographic archive, which I examine in Chapter 2. Second, remediation also indicates how formal narrative structures emerge across different materials, including different media as well as environments and communities undergoing development projects. Clifford Siskin theorizes this process of remediation as how “in moments of change the older form of reality becomes the content of the new one” (125-126, emphasis in original). As cultural and social relations changed through development projects, Irish communities remediated representational conventions across diverse media, a process I analyze in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman in Chapter 3. In this understanding of remediation, imperial-era progress narratives emerge in new media to establish a 13 continuity between colonial expectations for modern Ireland and modernization projects in the postcolonial nation. Finally, interactions between old and new media give rise to a third process of remediation. The shifting cultural understandings of media in Ireland at distinct moments of Irish modernization histories inform the production of meaning in processes of remediation that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, define: “No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. [New media] refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (15). Bolter and Grusin’s understanding of remediation as “the representation of one medium in another” involves the interactions of multiple media that come into sharp relief in my fourth chapter’s analysis of Seán Ó Riada’s 1960s radio program, Our Musical Heritage. Ó Riada describes oral traditions on national radio at a time when television was becoming increasingly popular across Ireland after the Broadcast Act of 1960. Ó Riada highlights interactions among orality, early assertions of sovereignty on Irish national radio, and new media, like television. In doing so, Our Musical Heritage demonstrates innovating traditional practices in the Irish language and traditional music. Bolter and Grusin’s definition of remediation helps to theorize the complex configurations of modernizing traditions in Ó Riada’s work. Ó Riada’s program shows how orality, radio, and television were interacting at a time when Irish modernization began to intensify and rapidly alter rural Irish-speaking communities often depicted as part of a vanishing past in colonial and revivalist representations. 14 Chapter Overview: From Imperial-Era Land Reform to Twenty-first Century Fossil-Fuel Extraction “Re-mediating Ireland” demonstrates how those most affected by development projects challenge dominant narratives of modernizing fisheries, agriculture, and energy infrastructure. My case studies show multimodal representations of communities that present an alternative to relationships with material surroundings than those promoted by state-sanctioned modernization projects. These alternative environmental relationships give rise to multiple modernities. Analyzing visual, aural, and print media through narrative methodologies, my research reveals how dominant narrative forms were being challenged or reworked to assert rival modern experiences. My second chapter examines photographs taken by the Congested Districts Board (CDB) between 1906 and 1914 of a variety of imperial-era agricultural, land and housing reform, relocation, and fisheries projects. Narrative elements in the photos reveal local resistance to imperial-era agricultural and fisheries reform under the CDB, defying how modernity should look even within the official photographic record and challenging Victorian visual expectations for modern cultural practices and modernized environments. In contrast to modernization projects imposing a singular form of modernity upon people in the west of Ireland, my analysis exposes multiple modernities within the photographic frame that alter our understanding of constructions of class, gender, nation, and environment in early twentieth-century rural Ireland. Building on these multiple modernities, my third chapter explores how picturesque landscapes in postcolonial Ireland become the object of satiric critique in 15 Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1940). Imperial-era depictions of a traditional Irish past informed racializing and gendered understandings of modernity and land reform projects as Ireland moved away from the Anglo-Irish Trade War and the rest of Europe entered the Second World War. In keeping with Sisken’s definition of remediation, O’Brien remediates imperial-era aesthetic forms into the content of the novel to offer a postmodern view of how colonial narrative forms shape expectations for what material realities in Irish-speaking regions should look like after independence. Tensions between modernization and tradition emerge with the rise of national radio and television in Ireland in the 1960s. My fourth chapter explores Seán Ó Riada’s 1962 Radio Éireann program, Our Musical Heritage, at a moment when Irish radio was both modern and retro. Orality, radio, and television demonstrate what Bolter and Grusin define as remediation in “the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (15). Radio was being superseded by the relatively late establishment of a national television network in the early 1960s during Ireland’s intensified international economic expansion after 1959 under Taoiseach Seán Lemass. As Ireland’s media and natural resources were drawn into an economic and culturally European space, Ó Riada’s natural and gendered metaphors assert a strategic distancing from Europe as they create an ephemeral environment for oral cultural practices, such as Irish traditional music. Ongoing economic integration with Europe shifted Ireland towards technology- driven education and emigration during the recession after the oil crises of the 1970s, which combined with early discussions of climate change and a heightened perceived risk of nuclear energy. This complex moment is the premise of the dystopian future in 16 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House (1990), which my fifth chapter analyzes. Ní Dhuibhne invokes earlier narrative forms, like the megalomaniac narration of O’Brien’s novel, to critique emerging forms of neocolonialism that are reframing Ireland’s relationship to territorial sovereignty and anti-colonial resistance during the Troubles, early discussions of climate change, and the prevalence of nuclear energy in Anglo-US and Anglo-Irish relations in the 1980s. While exposing how neocolonial regimes exploit local communities and places within persisting colonial geopolitical hierarchies, The Bray House simultaneously offers a glimpse of dimensions of Irish culture and the material environment that continue to provide protective and enduring spaces in the wake of modernity’s horrific collapse in the novel. Continuing to examine the legacy of colonial economies in geopolitical hierarchies, my final chapter shows how Risteard O’Domhnaill’s 2010 documentary film, The Pipe, uses aesthetics that promote authentic local industries, such as those in the CDB photographs, to align the Irish government with a specter of multinational corporate power. Yet a closer analysis of the film reveals how Ó Domhnaill subversively invokes colonial-inflected romanticizations of Ireland’s underdevelopment and gendered petro-modernities. Filmed primarily on a handheld camera within Ó Domhnaill’s own community, The Pipe follows local resistance against Shell oil company’s liquid natural gas development in Rossport, County Mayo, Ireland. The Pipe’s cinematography, soundscape, and montage expose the ongoing environmental impacts of empire on postcolonial nations while revealing multispecies relationships and nonhuman agencies that challenge neocolonial regimes. In doing so, The Pipe reworks understandings of progress and environmental justice within a postcolonial frame. Heeding postcolonial 17 multispecies modernities in The Pipe revises how postcolonial ecocritical and ecocinema studies scholars read tradition and modernization depicted in postcolonial films. Conclusion: Imagining More Socially and Environmentally Just Futures Understanding the environmental impacts of empire on postcolonial Ireland revises conceptions of race, gender, and class in constellations of power and changing social relations with material surroundings. Including Ireland in postcolonial ecocritical conversations expands the geographic and methodological scope of postcolonial ecocriticism as it helps to address intensifying planetary crises and their uneven impact on marginalized communities across geopolitical hierarchies and ongoing histories of colonialism. By exposing the ways power strategically adapts to occlude modes of resistance, this project bears witness to how multiple modernities in Irish cultural production across the twentieth century imagine more environmentally and socially just futures. Through distinct moments of modernization and Irish media histories, this study highlights how people drew on an array of cultural, material, and environmental resources to resist and offer alternatives to the mechanisms of development that reproduce colonial relations in a neocolonial modernity. Representations of uneven development in twentieth-century Ireland offer new ways of recognizing resistance and apprehending the insidious and often unexpected effects of power. While Ireland is a European country whose emigrants perpetuated settler colonialism across the British empire and whose descendants currently benefit from hegemonic and racist constructions of whiteness, Ireland is also an island comprising a postcolonial nation and a settler-colonial statelet that challenge and nuance 18 theories of race, gender, environment, and power in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice theory. My examination of how narrative forms and media interact with material environments and environmental development projects forces postcolonial ecocritical scholars like myself to reassess the tools through which we examine the environmental impacts of colonial and neocolonial regimes on people, places, and the planet. Many of these tools assume that racial formations Britain and the United States have perpetuated though imperialism in the so-called global south, and consequently, we do not always apprehend the specific ways in which race, gender, ethnicity, and class operate differently in different socio-historical and cultural contexts and in how media inflect meaning differently at specific historical moments. Examining narrative forms across media in depictions of modernization in Ireland shows how sanctioned forms of modernity during imperial-era land reform projects ripple out across social hierarchies and persisting power relations in the twentieth century. It is to these imperial beginnings of the visual aesthetics of modernity and progress to which I now turn in my analysis of the CDB photographic archive. 19 Chapter 2: Reframing Modernity: Defying the Aesthetics of Progress in the Congested Districts Board Photographs Cappagh village did not meet the expectations of the Congested Districts Board (CDB) members for what modernity should look like in the early twentieth century.1 That is, it was missing the slate-roof houses maintained by women’s domestic labor while men worked the surrounding parceled-out squares of land. Expectations of what was recognizably modern shaped how the increasingly prominent field of photography framed people and places. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, photography had come to play a complex role as, at turns, a conveyer of historical and scientific truth, an artistic medium, or a distrusted new technology. Photographs commissioned by the CDB in 1906 documented its projects to modernize land and fisheries in the west of Ireland, including spaces that had yet to be modernized, like the photo View of Cappagh village, Castlerea district, Co. Galway (“The Congested Districts Board Photographic Collection” CDB19).2 Taken from behind an uneven stone wall that forms a line across the bottom third of the image, the photograph of Cappagh village divides the modernity implied by the camera on one side of the stone wall from the village and its supposedly outdated forms of agriculture and ways of life on the other. This temporal division between the diegesis in the photograph and the camera technology indicate, in the words of Mieke Bal, “a double focalization, hinging between internal and external and thus connecting the two 1 The 1891 Land Purchase Act, proposed in the British Parliament by Arthur Balfour, created the CDB, which existed as an independent development agency from 1891 to 1923 (Aalen 140-141, Bartlett 359). The CDB applied agricultural and marine science in western Ireland to modernize agriculture, fisheries, and cottage industries, as well as to redistribute land (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 170, 11). 2 All the photographs analyzed in this article are part of “The Congested Districts Board Photograph Collection” of the National Library of Ireland (NLI), National Photographic Archive (NPA). 20 worlds this work brings together” (163). Although Bal does not examine the CDB photographs, she presents a helpful framework for analyzing competing narratives in visual texts. The double focalization “hing[es] between” the material realities that the photo seeks to represent and the external world in which the photograph is viewed and interpreted. This external world is emphasized by a note on the back of the photo, which explains that “the village of Cappagh […] [was] one of the worst the Congested Districts Board had to deal with in Mayo or Galway” (CDB19). While this note underscores the materiality of the photograph, it also promotes the external focalization from the point of view of the CDB, the photographer, and the unknown author of the note. The note’s interpretation establishes an implicit hierarchy within the double focalization that favors the more omniscient narrative of the external focalizer and obscures complex discursive elements that internal perspectives might reveal. In doing so, the note tells the implied viewer how to read Cappagh village not only in relation to other photographs in the CDB’s collection but also in relation to other places in the west of Ireland. By reading this image in terms of a developmental teleology, ranging from “the worst” to an implied better and best, the note positions the photograph and the actual village within a comparative interpretative framework that separates the viewer from the viewed. Such comparative interpretations allow the implied viewer to monitor the progress that modernization projects are making to draw supposedly outdated ways of life into the CDB’s vision of modernity. These implicit visual expectations for premodernity and modernity indicate how photographic realism shaped perceptions of the material realities captured in the photographs and existing in the west of Ireland. 21 The CDB’s identification of the “worst” forms of poverty and underdevelopment in Cappagh village was based in Victorian-era understandings of realism. The “larger culture of realism,” Jennifer Green-Lewis explains, was structurally dependent upon divisions between the periphery and the imperial center: “Photography’s contribution to instrumental realism was largely to preserve the horizon of bourgeois subjectivity by populating its nethermost regions with groups of persons whose very existence appeared to threaten the boundaries of culture beyond which they were perceived as living” (25, 223). By framing the “boundaries of culture” through a technology that had the “moral purpose […] to relate the truth,” the photo of Cappagh juxtaposes modernity with premodernity to justify the social and cultural implications of the CDB’s modernization projects (4, 223). This implicit temporal division between the premodern and the modern reinforces comparative interpretive practices through which realist aesthetic conventions materially influence lived realities and actual environments. Narrative Realities: Reading Rival Experiences of Modernization The external focalization in the photograph of Cappagh village articulates the larger project of improvement that the CDB and its collection of photographs sought to document, even as the internal focalizations expose a multiplicity of perspectives that reframe understandings of modernization and modernity. While the external focus in many of the CDB’s photos associates the future with the horizon, the photo of Cappagh village lacks this developmental movement toward an implied modernity. This image shows land communally divided through the clachan system in and around the village center. The two roads around Cappagh disappear on either side of the village rather than at a point on the horizon, and they are only partially visible, starting somewhere outside 22 the frame on the right-hand side of the photo. The direction of the roads from right to left subtly guides the external focalizing gaze across the photo in the opposite direction of reading a western text, thereby indicating the viewer is looking back from a point further along in the photographic text. This backwards glance, combined with the absence of a clear direction to the horizon within the photo’s frame, demonstrates the way of life in the village is literally and figuratively going nowhere but back across the material photograph and back in time, a view that many members of the CDB held of the clachan system in the early twentieth century.3 Despite its positioning in the recesses of history behind the wall, the clachan way of life still clearly exists at the time the photograph of Cappagh village was taken. A close inspection of the photo shows people walking along the road, and a young woman looks directly at the camera from a stone wall. This reversal of the camera’s gaze reveals an internal focalizer who undermines the invisibility, or “disembodied point of view,” of the photographer (Green-Lewis 94). The internal focalization asserts that both the viewer and the viewed are in the same place at the same time. The implicit and possibly unintentional cooptation of the camera’s gaze by the villagers ruptures the division of modernity and premodernity that the wall establishes. It also challenges the teleological construction of modernization encouraged by the external focalization and upon which its division of space and time relies. The double focalization “connecting the two worlds” between the external gaze of the implied viewer and the internal focus of those viewed becomes ambivalent. Attending to such instances of rupture in the photographs’ narrative 3 The eradication of the clachan system was an explicit project of the CDB in their efforts to modernize industries and landscapes in the west of Ireland (Bell 176-177; Lloyd Irish Times 40-41; Lloyd Irish Culture 62). 23 construction reveals complex negotiations of agency and relationships to land through the medium of photography. Analyzing narrative constructions of space and time in photographs of rural Ireland taken between 1906 and 1914 of land reform projects led by the CDB reveals rival experiences of modernity and modernization emerging in individual photographs, across the collection, and through the material realities they depict.4 Justin Carville has established the CDB’s dominant narrative of modernity by showing how photography conventions reinforce the CDB’s idealizations of modernization: “Progress was measured in terms of the visual idealisation and aestheticisation of the landscape. Nowhere in the CDB archive is this demonstrated more clearly than in the photographic representations of housing” (“Picturing Poverty” 98-99, 107). Yet the CDB’s vision of modernity occludes discursive complexities in both the visual texts and the material world that is interpolated into the photograph for an outside audience. Bringing a narrative approach to the CDB’s agricultural and fisheries photos builds on Carville’s work to show how, as Bal explains, “the analysis of visual images as narrative in and of themselves can do justice to an aspect of images and their effect that neither iconography nor other art historical practices can quite articulate” (162). The double focalizations in the CDB photographs individually and in relation to one another expose the presence of multiple perspectives on modernity and modernization, both at the time the photographs were 4The CDB photographs were taken by Robert John Welch, J.D. Cassidy, Valentine and Sons, and some unknown photographers between 1906 and 1914, though little has been confirmed about the presentation or reception of the photos. The CDB commissioned Welch in 1914 to document many of their projects, and Welch’s photographs comprise the majority of the images in the NLI collection entitled, “The Congested Districts Board Photograph Collection” (Rouse 19). While Welch is not the only photographer of the CDB’s project, he offered an aesthetic, as Gail Baylis argues, in which people of the western counties are often “situate[ed] […] within the nature that surrounds them” (86). The aesthetic of the CDB’s paternalism and Welch’s implicit objectification of communities in the congested districts contrasts with revivalist aesthetics that idealize an austere but authentic rural Ireland. 24 taken and in their subsequent interpretation by viewers of the lives, traditions, and improvements in the west of Ireland. The multiple levels of focalization within and outside the photographic text recuperate multiple modernities and agencies of people in the west of Ireland in the midst of shifting relationships to material surroundings. The multiple modernities emerging in “The Congested Districts Board Photograph Collection” show how modernization schemes are experienced differently by different people and how the effects of such schemes splinter more singular understandings of modernity and modernization. Doreen Massey conceptualizes spatial organizations as always producing multiple temporalities, “a simultaneity of stories-so-far,” or “[s]pace as the dimension of a multiplicity of durations” (24). The “simultaneity of stories-so-far” in individual photographs and sequences in the collection highlight how those most directly affected by the CDB projects disrupt dichotomies between premodern or authentic traditions as prior to and transcended by the CDB’s particular conception of modernity. The double focalizations in the CDB photographs reveal, in Massey’s words, “[s]pace as the dimension of a multiplicity of durations.” The spatial and temporal elements in the photographs’ focalizations expose processes of representation and assertions of agency that both legitimate the extraction of natural resources and illuminate modes of resistance, which, in turn, counter the erasure of multivalent regional histories. The multiple modernities in the CDB’s archive of photographs expand our understanding of Victorian visual discourse in photographic representations of Irish material environments by challenging divisions of the modern and the premodern, the viewer and the viewed, and the center and periphery that legitimate constructions of progress. 25 Hierarchies of Progress: Developing Gendered and Classed Views of Modernity The narrative of progress in the CDB’s agricultural photographs rearrange people and places in the photos, the archive, and the west of Ireland into constructions of space and time that conform to Victorian understandings of gender roles, propriety, and sanitation. For example, the panorama House on Cloonmore grass farm near Tuam, Co. Galway depicts a man sitting on a pile of rocks on the far left (CDB15, CDB16). From the man, the external focalization follows the stone wall and horizon to an almost identical house behind the first house. The right-hand photo of the panorama shows four additional new houses, barns, and grass fields, giving a uniformity to the landscape that encourages the gaze to move from left to right across the panorama. This implicitly forward movement across the photographic text emphasizes the rationalization of space into parceled-out plots. Although the photo does not clarify who this man is or what relationship he has to the land around him, its external focalization represents him as overseeing a seemingly infinite series of grass farms. In situating the man in the field in front of the new house, the man’s position directs the internal gaze to the new farms and the horizon, metaphorically associating both with the future. The double focalization in this panorama thus presents the modernized landscape under the purview of the man. Women are notably absent from the panorama of the farms near Tuam and many of the other photographs of new farms.5 In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 5 See, for example, John Burke’s improved house in Levally, Co. Mayo (CDB40) and New House of John Commons, farmer and tailor, Ryehill, Monivea, Co. Galway (CDB10). Women generally only appear in agricultural and housing photographs of regions that have yet to be modernized, for example, Cottage of Martin Greavy, Ballintubber, Co.Mayo (CDB28), Members of the Congested Districts Board receiving directions from a local woman (CDB95), and Two women washing clothes outside a stone cottage, bridge visible in background (CDB113). 26 rural Ireland, women’s labor played a prominent role in household and regional cash economies as well as in domestic life (Breathnach “The Role of Women” 82). Ciara Breathnach explains that “female […] engage[ment] in paid labor was considered [indicative] of poverty” and negatively perceived in the Victorian period, but the CDB was one of the few Victorian-era land reform agencies to recognize the economic value of women’s labor (“The Role of Women” 80, 82, 85; The Congested Districts Board 49, 55, 72). Given the CDB’s recognition of rural Irish women’s labor, the absence of women from most of the new farm photographs raises questions about how the focalization in these images negotiates expectations of gender within the CDB’s vision of modernity. In colonial gender relations in the Victorian period, Anne McClintock argues, “the problems of land and labor are rooted in the fundamental question of who was to control the women’s labor” (249). Building on McClintock, Bliss Cua Lim discusses the “sexualization of national-historical time” in visual culture, noting that spatio- temporalities in teleologies of development implicitly “naturalize” gender hierarchies through the erasure of women and feminized traditions from more masculine national narratives (181). The CDB’s photographs indicate a conception of modernity that resolves gendered “problems of land and labor” across competing political perspectives by “naturaliz[ing]” Victorian gender relations in narratives of development (McClintock 249; Lim 181). Bringing McClintock and Lim’s broader assessments of colonial gender hierarchies and visual culture into conversation with the gendered teleology of development in the CDB photographs elucidates how the CDB negotiated political 27 tensions in Ireland in the early twentieth century among a rising separatist movement, constructive unionism, and debates about Home Rule. Although the CDB operated as a politically independent entity, it was part of constructive unionism to the extent that it aimed to show the benefits of remaining part of the British Empire after Charles Parnell fell from favor and subsequently died in 1891 and as the second Home Rule bill was defeated in 1893 (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 31; Aalen 140-141; Mathews 7). The CDB’s constructive unionist vision comes out in its recognition of Cappagh village as “one of the worst the Congested Districts Board had to deal with.” This vision assumes the authority to track improvements in rural Ireland through implicitly comparing this “worst” with other photographs in the archive, like House on Cloonmore grass farm near Tuam, Co. Galway. The double focalization in the panorama of the farms near Tuam asserts that the CDB has accomplished its vision of a modern Ireland, a vision in which Victorian value systems render women’s labor invisible in the agricultural photographs. Despite the prevalence of women’s labor in cash economies, the CDB’s agricultural photographs of modernized farms do not evince appreciation for the necessity of women’s wage labor. Rather, the pictures of new farms demonstrate that modernization projects should eradicate the need for women’s wage labor and facilitate their full-time domestic labor. In House on Cloonmore grass farm near Tuam, Co. Galway, the man’s relaxed position sitting on the rocks asserts a confidence in the potential of the land under this modernized system of management, a system which metaphorizes women’s domestic labor with representations of new houses. The door of the house is open, showing that the house is well ventilated. Properly ventilated homes indicate particular understandings of 28 hygiene and sanitation in the late-Victorian era that the CDB promoted in the west of Ireland, alongside the Parish Committee Schemes, the Lady Dudley District Nursing Scheme, and the Women’s National Health Association (WNHA) of Ireland.6 In tracing the collaboration of the CDB and the Lady Dudley District Nursing Scheme, Breathnach describes expectations for the nurse’s behavior: “Nurses were nearly always female; they were perceived as maternal figures, and the remit of those engaged in the public health- care setting was broadly defined. On entering a household, a nurse was expected to conduct domestic duties, such as cooking and cleaning as well as caring for children” (“Lady Dudley’s District Nursing Scheme” 147). Since women’s wage labor was seen as an indication of poverty by Victorians, nurses working in the congested districts were expected to model domestic roles to establish gendered and socio-economic class standards of sanitation and hygiene. Certain photographs in the CDB collection reflect this transition into a modernity in which imperial agents collaborate with nurses to reinforce Victorian class and gender expectations for rural Irish women inside houses in modernizing regions. The photograph, Lord and lady Aberdeen with nurse, outside house at Geesala, Ballina, Co. Mayo, indicates such intersections of class and gender in the CDB’s vision of a Victorian modernity (CDB56).7 This symmetrical photo centers a single-story modernized house with two chimneys and a slightly opened window on either side of the door. The camera is positioned on the path leading up to the door. Lord Aberdeen looks directly at the 6 Besides the nursing schemes, the CDB collaborated with other initiatives in the west of Ireland, including cooperative programs overseen by the Irish Agricultural Organizational Society (IAOS) and the Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction (DATI) (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 142-143; Doyle 76, 110). 7 Several photographs in the CDB’s collection show nurses presenting class and gender roles for women in rural Ireland. See, for example, Nurse talking to old woman holding turf basket, outside cottage (CDB88) and Nurse visiting a family, Arranmore, Co. Donegal (CDB55). 29 camera while Lady Aberdeen and the nurse appear to confer about something. Any rural Irish women who might come to dwell in this house are nowhere to be seen. The external focalization of the camera traces the path to the entrance of the house, where the nurse stands in the doorway. Her uniform contrasts with the darkened doorway and “was an immediate symbol of middle-class authority and respectability” (Ó Hógartaigh 204). Lord Aberdeen’s gaze on the camera reinforces the line to the house that the path creates, thereby guiding the external gaze to the internal focalization between Lady Aberdeen and the nurse. Their internal focus on each other frames the doorway of the house to show their attention to be inside. The nurse’s position in the doorway presents her work to facilitate and monitor the threshold between the technological advancements that modernization projects were bringing to rural communities under the supervision of imperial agents like Lady Aberdeen and the domestic expectations and social standards the nurse conveys to people within the house. The double focalization emphasizes the liminal role the nurse plays to establish a Victorian modernity through particular class and gender relations. This photo thus documents the structural gender and class relations envisioned by the CDB for rural Ireland in a Victorian modernity at the same time that it suggests the promise of class mobility. Breathnach explains that nurses had a pedagogical role as they worked to improve the health conditions of people in the congested districts: “In areas where nurses, unlike doctors, were accepted unequivocally, they had a twofold position, that of health-care provider and educator” (“Lady Dudley’s District Nursing Scheme” 147). By teaching people in the west of Ireland how to improve their conditions, the nurses model the social and gender roles expected of a higher socio-economic class. 30 Breathnach asserts that “an obvious social and cultural gulf existed between the two classes—the educated nurses and the poor local people” (148). The elevated class position of the nurses above those whom they attended and taught suggests larger class formations that increasingly became part of Lady Aberdeen’s programs in her absence. In 1886, Lady Aberdeen established, as Val McLeish explains, the “Irish Industries Association (IIA), which sought to help homeworkers develop skills in such crafts as lace-making, embroidery, knitting and spinning, and set up shops to sell their products in Dublin and London” (265). Two decades later Lady Aberdeen returned from Canada to Ireland and established the WNHA, which reflected class divisions of the Victorian Order of Nurses that she had founded in Canada: “Most branches [of the WNHA] were run by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and gentry. . . . Some Catholic women took part, although many preferred to join the United Irishwomen, a rural self-help group run by Sir Horace Plunkett” (272-273, 275). Class relations in imperial-era efforts to ameliorate poverty and improve public health entrenched classed and gendered labor roles that are both evident and subtly revised in this photograph of Lord and Lady Aberdeen with the nurse. The gender and class relations in this image offer the possibility for class diversity and mobility for rural Irish people unconnected with the Anglo-Irish elite through the CDB’s initiatives to “teach the people how to cultivate and maximize the output of their holdings” (Breathnach, Congested Districts Board 127). This picture emphasizes the potential to improve economic conditions through lifestyle changes that the nurse imparted inside the house. Improving conditions through lifestyle changes was an aspect of modernization projects that both the CDB and Lady Aberdeen sought to promote in 1906 when the CDB photographs were initially commissioned. While the gender and 31 class implications of the CDB’s initiatives aligned with the overarching aims to ameliorate poverty through modernization under constructive unionism, they also informed how the CDB’s photographs manipulate the double focalization to endorse the promise of class mobility within material realities sanctioned by the CDB’s view of a Victorian modernity in rural Ireland. The CDB photograph of Lady Aberdeen and the nurse emphasize the potential to improve economic conditions through lifestyle changes that the nurse will impart inside the house. These implicit gender and class relations indicate how the CDB’s vision for modernity both acknowledged and departed from Anglo-Irish revivalist aesthetics. Ideals of an authentic Irish tradition preceding colonial development in divergent relations to land, as Gregory Castle explains, historically separated indigenous Irish and Anglo-Irish people along socio-economic and religious lines: “While Roman Catholic writers of the revival period seemed obsessed with the history of their land, to Protestant artists that history could only be, as Lady Gregory insisted, a painful accusation against their own people” (Castle 6). The process of romanticizing material and discursive relationships to place are implicit in settler-colonial pastoral narratives, as postcolonial ecocritics, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, explain: “to assert one’s right to live in a place is not the same thing as to dwell in it or inhabit it; for assertion is possession, not belonging, and dwelling implies an at-homeness with place that the genealogical claim to entitlement may reveal, but just as easily obscure” (82). Both Lady Gregory’s Big House at Coole and W.B. Yeats’s home at Thoor Ballylee materially make a “genealogical claim” to an aesthetic of “at-homeness” that obscures the history of settler-colonialism from Cromwell’s plantation system to the opulence of Anglo-Irish landlords in the eighteenth 32 century. As Anthony Bradley points out, Yeats purchased property emblematic of his idealized notion of an authentic but vanishing Ireland from the CDB: One is inclined to think of Coole, after reading Yeats, as a beautiful estate and countryside, but that beauty was based on the deprivation of many who lived in the region. The government agency from which Yeats had bought the tower at Ballylee, the Congested Districts Board, had been set up to deal with land reform and outdated agricultural practices in the western coastal areas of Ireland (69). By buying Thoor Ballylee from the CDB, Yeats ironically participated in modernization projects that disrupted his own romanticized aesthetic of life in rural Ireland, which eulogized the quasi-feudal order of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the eighteenth century. The CDB photographs reflect this contradiction of modernization and preservation in Yeats’s conception of rural life through romantic images of developed farms. Increasingly empty space and re-divisions of fields accompany images of such a bucolic version of modernity. The photo, Two new holdings in Cloonkeen, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, shows how the reorganization of the houses and land implied a reduction in the number of people living in an area (C29/CDB23). The camera looks out from behind an overgrown wall at two new houses and accompanying barns on a distant hill. A handwritten note on the back of the photo notes: “Originally there were twenty-four tenancies in this village.” Although the CDB was supposed to encourage local prosperity to discourage emigration, its domestic migration schemes reshaped land and photographs according to aesthetics that saw less congested spaces as more sustainable and modern. Although people resisted the CDB relocation schemes, they are invited by photos like this one to step over the wall into the future this photo purports to offer, thereby moving away from the austere poverty associated with the clachan villages (Breathnach The Contested Districts Board 138). 33 The removal of people from villages and the eradication of the clachan system, which people used to communally divide land, was an explicit project of the CDB in their efforts to modernize industries in the west of Ireland.8 While the clachan system is often situated as symbolic of premodernity, David Lloyd discusses that the regions of the congested districts had long been affected by various forms of modernization that led to more innovative divisions of arable land: “Over the previous century, the Irish poor, dispossessed by settler colonialism of the more fertile lands and driven onto the bogs and mountainsides, had developed what is now understood to be a sophisticated and ecologically inventive means of survival” (Irish Times 40). While the CDB positioned the clachan system as outdated, Bell shows that a related system continues to work in Scotland today and suggests the clachan system in Ireland might have been incorporated into modernization schemes if the CDB had stigmatized it less: “CDB officials, like most Irish landlords whose attitudes we know of, were almost entirely dismissive of the rundale system of landholding” (177, 176). Landlords saw the clachan system as causing conflict and inhibiting efficient farming practices, but people in the west depended on it culturally and materially, as Bell explains: “People living in the Irish settlements valued the egalitarian aspects of the system, and were also very attached to the communal living associated with the baile [village]” (177). The clachan system arose out of the impacts of colonialism, but it reveals the way that subjugated populations in Ireland drew on their surroundings and 8 Lloyd describes the enclosure movement in relation to land reform projects in western Ireland as ways of displacing populations: “Improvement demanded the consolidation of landholdings into larger farms on English models, the concomitant enclosure of all but the most marginal wasteland, the turn to labor-extensive grain-farming and grazing, and the eviction of the smallholding tenants” (Irish Times 41). Lloyd later contends that redistribution of land and people in the wake of the Famine undermined oral traditions by eradicating the villages associated with the clachan system, which had sustained local cultural exchange (Irish Culture 62). 34 each other to survive materially and flourish culturally, as the baile supported oral traditions like music and storytelling in addition to facilitating communal land use. The CDB photographs support the erasure of the clachan system through framing implicit progress narratives. Formal elements in the photos assert how old ways of life can be transformed into prosperous grass farms by using existing resources in new ways. In View of flooded areas in the townlands of Cooneen and Knockatee East, Co. Galway, a grassy floodplain or wetland covers the bottom two thirds of the photo up to the sky (CDB17). Cows graze in the distance, but otherwise, there are no animals or people in this photo. The text on the back of the photo states: “Drainage improvements were to be carried out by a deep straight cut in July 1914.”9 The “improvements” made to the wetlands indicate understandings of progress that implicitly feminize the land in order to tame it through environmental development projects that benefit the economy. Such notions of progress reinforce the promises of class mobility through making the wetland into a grass farm. While the photographic frame already encloses the apparently superfluous and unruly wetland, it suggests the imminent, enclosure of the land into a natural resource that will benefit the beef economy and maintain the empty promises of class mobility. Similarly, Frame for a new concrete house on a grass farm in the Castlerea district, Co. Galway is a long shot of a house being built by the CDB (C26/CDB21). The position of the camera in this photo is just to the right and behind a tree on a small hill, looking down at squares on the ground and part of the wooden framing of a new house. The camera’s gaze encourages reading this photo from left to right, following several tree 9 Given that this photo was also taken by Welch, it was probably taken in 1914 (Rouse 18-19). 35 stumps and the old foundation of a building, which has long since ceased to exist given its erosion, to the men who work on the frame of the house. Beyond the house frame, a stone wall leads the eye to enclosed grass fields where animals graze. The “spatio- temporal event,” to quote Massey, articulated in this photograph reveals the benefits of extracting and refining natural resources, such as trees, into “ready-made building materials,” like lumber, which Breathnach noted, were in “short supply” in the west (Massey 24, Breathnach “Smallholder” 186). The misty and implicitly productive grass fields visible in the distance offers a romanticized view of resource exploitation. The latent potential of ecosystems being rendered into extractable natural resources also emerges in the photograph, Extensive marl beds at Moorehall, north east corner of Lough Cara, Co. Mayo (C55/CDB39). This photograph shows a bed of calcium carbonate, which is used for neutralizing the soil pH in agricultural fields. The photo suggests that the supposedly unproductive land in the congested districts can be enhanced by relocating and rearranging the relationship between people as well as between people and natural resources unperceived in traditional ways of viewing the landscape. The CDB archive indicates how as-yet-untapped resources existing in the west are all around if the space is brought temporally into the bucolic future of an implied modernity. Photographs of regions that have yet to be modernized often invert the gender and class roles expected of modernity in the early twentieth century. This inversion asserts the need for the modernization projects that the CDB facilitated. For example, View of congested village of Graigue, Co. Galway, from where migrants were taken to holdings in Graigueachuillaire shows a circular road that presents the villagers’ way of life as a literal and figurative dead-end (CDB7). The six people in the photograph stand in or near 36 two thatched cottages that depict the kind of poverty that the CDB aimed to ameliorate and that Carville critiques as a colonial stereotype (“Picturing Poverty” 106).10 They all offer restrained and serious expressions as they pose for the camera, a countenance which was expected of portrait photography but in this photo may just have been the result of the extended exposures necessary for camera technology in the early twentieth century (Edge 21). The camera is positioned on a rough road that leads into the village and circles around a worn dirt mound at what appears to be the literal and figurative end of the road. No productive farming is visible, and the top half of the photo is just a blank, grey sky.11 The image’s composition emphasizes a vacuity in the direction progress should take in the village. The woman, who has a child holding each hand, seems forced out of the house and into the dead-end, circling road while the men are in the houses, one of whom is holding a child, implying a need for men to care for the children. By associating the men’s labor with childcare in the home while the woman leaves the domestic space of the house, this photo inverts representations of domestic gender roles expected of an agricultural modernity envisioned by the CDB.12 This inversion of expected gender roles offers evidence that population congestion undermines normative Victorian gender and class relations. Connotations of overpopulated and unhealthy houses were implicit in the rationale for creating the CDB 10 The CDB considered houses with thatched roofs uneconomical and unsanitary, so part of their project was to rebuild houses with slate roofs (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 44-45). 11 The sky is inevitably blank due to the camera technology at the time, which did not comprise the light sensitivity or color spectrum to capture the sky in landscape shots until the 1920s and 1930s when exposure meters, flashes, and film sensitivity to a broader range of light improved (Langford 31-32, 54, 72-74). 12 While this photograph best demonstrates narrative elements that invert gender labor roles, it is one of many that depict women and children outside the home in areas yet to be modernized. See, for example, Children playing on rocks in front of stone cottages (CDB97), Girl carrying child on her back (CDB96), Group of school children with teacher (CDB57), Man, woman and children outside a thatched cottage (CDB99), and Dunmore Castle, Co. Galway (CDB18). 37 and in justifying its projects. The sparsely populated regions of the congested districts were nonetheless deemed overcrowded, Breathnach points out, due to too many people living on land that was considered “unprofitable” and in austere, small houses that contributed to the spread of disease (The Congested Districts Board 11, 17, 45; “Smallholder housing” 191-195).13 As Frederick H.A. Aalen notes, assisted emigration was historically one way that government administrators saw of ameliorating such poverty (147).14 In response to rising nationalist concerns that assisted emigration was “legal deportation,” Breathnach explains that relocating people from congested villages within Ireland became an explicit project of the CDB’s agricultural modernization (The Congested Districts Board 168). The photo of the Graigue villagers demonstrates the need to redistribute people onto farms in which men will come out of the houses to 13 Breathnach explains that “The term ‘congested’ is misleading: not all the areas in question were overpopulated. […] In many respects, congestion was a euphemism for relative poverty stemming from an over-dependency on smallholdings (holdings in the congests were on average four acres)” (The Congested Districts Board 11). 14 This problem of emigration intersects historically with the visual discourse in some of the first photographs of the congested districts, which were taken to show the impoverished conditions of the west at a time when emigration was seen as a viable solution by the British government. In the early 1890s, the amateur photographer from Co. Mayo, Major Ruttledge-Fair took pictures for the Yorkshire Quaker philanthropist, James Hack Tuke, who worked with Arthur Balfour in creating the CDB as part of the 1891 Land Act and who was also involved in emigration stimulus projects associated with the 1882 Arrears of Rent Act (Smyth 30, 34; Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 129). Breathnach explains that congestion in rural Ireland in the late nineteenth century largely sought a “Malthusian solution […] to relieve the land of surplus population. Balfour favored this, and indeed both Tuke and Plunkett made strong petitions for emigration schemes, but nationalist opposition viewed these policies as legal deportation” (The Congested Districts Board 168). While the 1891 Land Purchase Act “sailed through the house,” as Breathnach puts it, because the Irish Parliamentary Party was divided after the fall of Parnell, it established the CDB to operate independently of Dublin Castle and to emphasize migration within Ireland rather than emigration (Breathnach 30-31, 138; Smyth 44; Beattie 32). Tuke had visited the west of Ireland during the Famine and was committed to alleviating poverty through economic reforms since, as Breathnach puts it, he “believ[ed] that Irish distress was due to economic and not to political causes” (22). The photographs Ruttledge-Fair took for Tuke are housed in the Tuke Collection at the NPA (Smyth 29; NPA 11 June 2018; Breathnach 16 July 2018). The Tuke Collection depicts the hardships, particularly in Connemara, of survival and of the heavy labor women often bore to contribute to this survival (Smyth 38-39). These photos document to a large extent why modernization and reform were needed as Tuke worked for various political actions to ameliorate impoverished conditions in rural Ireland up until his death in 1896 (Smyth 38, 41-42). Although the photographs comprising the Tuke Collection may have contributed to the foundation of the CDB, they do not document the CDB’s modernization schemes. 38 maintain the land and women will disappear into well-ventilated and clean homes like in the panorama of the new farms near Tuam (CDB15, CDB16). A handwritten note on the reverse side of the photograph of Graigue village indicates that the six people in the picture will be relocated to new houses and farms in Graigueachuillaire: “migrants are being taken to holdings shown in [photos] C4-C5” (CDB3, CDB5). This note foregrounds the external focalization through which the viewer of the material photograph is encouraged to recognize the necessity of migrating the people in Graigue out of their material realities. The gaze of the six villagers on the camera establishes an internal focalization on the modernity signified by the respective positions of the viewer and the photographer outside the photograph and its frame. The external focalization thus materially and discursively relocates the villagers’ internal gaze to the modernity envisioned by the CDB in two photos of new farms. By deferring the internal focus of the villagers in Graigue to the new farms, the external focalization demonstrates a narrative of modernization not only within individual photographs but also through sequences across the collection. Splintered Modernities: Two Distinct Viewers Gaze Upon a Modernized Landscape The photographs of the new farms where the people of Graigue will go are both called A grass farm in Graigueachuillaire, seven miles north of Tuam, Co. Galway, and they demonstrate what modernization should start to look like in the west of Ireland (CDB3, CDB5). Reading the photos together presents a sequence through which the landscape becomes increasingly efficient and rationalized. The first photo shows a partially visible road winding up to new houses on an uneven horizon (CDB3). Although 39 this photo indicates improvements are being made, it seems like a work-in-progress when compared to the second photo. While there are not yet driveways and crops adjacent to the new houses in the first photo, the straight lines of crop rows and driveways in the second photograph run parallel to the road, foregrounding the increasingly straight lines emerging across these two photographs. The second photograph’s formal composition gives the landscape a controlled and uniform structure that matches the grid-like parcels into which the CDB enclosed land (CDB5). The road and the horizon divide the photo into a grid that offers a rationalized space in which people can produce more with less effort. The external focalization follows the road to a point among the new houses on the horizon, thereby guiding the viewer to traverse the vast expanse of grass farms. The creation of grass farms would regenerate the soil and supply fodder to support the beef and dairy industries, which were important agricultural products in Ireland at this time (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 113, 116-117, 124). The composition of each of the photos, as well as the sequence of the two photographs together, asserts a narrative of progress that teleologically moves toward more efficient and rationalized spaces. Approaching the photos’ individual narratives and then putting them into conversation with each other demonstrates how the external focalization often associated with the CDB’s conception of modernity conceals a multiplicity of perspectives. Such a multiplicity of perspectives emerges in the photography of writer and revivalist, J.M. Synge. While Synge is arguably more complex and nuanced in his representations of people and places in the west of Ireland than many of his contemporaries, he offers insight into how revivalist photography engaged with Victorian 40 visual discourse like that of the CDB to deliberate and counter the effects of modernization on local communities and ways of life. Divisions of space and time in photographic representations of an idealized but apparently vanishing authentic Ireland appear in Synge’s photography. Both Bruna and Carville discuss Synge’s photographs of the Aran Islands as what Christopher Pinney called “salvage photography,” which Bruna defines as “a specific use of photography in ethnographic study aimed at visually preserving ethnographic knowledge that is on the verge of extinction” (Carville “Visible Others” 94; Bruna 50). Carville points out that Synge brought modern technologies to the Aran Islands that helped him navigate Edwardian modernity: Taking a camera and a clock onto Aran, he [Synge] brought with him two technological forms of modernity that emphasized in the most extreme way the different temporalities between inland and Island life. Photography, the standard mechanization of time, and cinema, had all initiated the most radical ruptures to temporal experience in the Edwardian era (“With His Mind-Guided Camera” 197). Carville sees Synge’s use of photographic technology as a means to juxtapose his own modernity with what he perceived as primitive on the Islands: “[Synge’s photography] emphasized these technologies and his introduction of them into the Aran Islands as a textual strategy to reinforce his own modernity by primitivizing the pastoral existence of the Islands’ inhabitants” (197). While Synge’s camera facilitated changing habits of looking amidst the modernity of rising tourism on the Aran Islands, it also aided Synge in his desire to document the people and ways of life on the Islands as part of an authentically Irish and pre-modern way of life. Unlike the history of Anglo-Irish photography Carville describes in terms of the “colonial picturesque,” Synge openly discusses the negotiations involved in photographic representation (Photography and Ireland 33). In his 1907 memoir, The Aran Islands, 41 Synge recounts his visits to Inishmaan, the middle island in the Aran Islands, during the last few years of the nineteenth century, and he shows the role that photography was starting to play in shaping realist and romantic representations of rural Ireland. Synge’s descriptions of photographs in The Aran Islands suggest he was aware of the role his photographs would play in constructing the west of Ireland as primitive. While aware of his photograph as a lasting representation of a place and way of life that he wanted to show as authentically Irish, Synge depicts the disagreement he had with a young boy about what clothes the boy should wear in the photograph. Implicitly, Synge admits that his representation of Aran Islanders and their own self representation were not the same: We nearly quarreled because he [the young boy] wanted me to take his photograph in his Sunday clothes from Galway, instead of his native homespuns that become him far better, though he does not like them as they seem to connect him with the primitive life of the island. With his keen temperament, he may go far if he can ever step out into the world (156). The photograph in question shows the boy sitting on top a stone wall in his homespun clothes that fit Synge’s conception of how people from the Aran Islands should look (TCD “Image 29”). Synge’s photograph and his description of it implies that Synge was aware of the difference between himself as viewer and the Aran Islanders as viewed in photographic constructions of rural Ireland. Consequently, Synge’s photography, to use Bruna’s words, “participate[s] in Revival activism in a more oblique way” (64). Bruna contends that Synge’s largely unpublished photographs foreground the communities he photographed to “visualiz[e] Irish national life” in ways that complicate purely objectifying representations of rural Ireland: If, on the one hand, this community of people [in the Aran Islands whom Synge photographed], according to some readings, is arguably objectified and abstracted 42 into a revivalist idea of peasant Irishness, it is, on the other hand, also exalted and empathetically portrayed by Synge through his choice of subjects and his photographic negotiations with locals on the islands (60, 61). Synge’s photographic aesthetic of empathy with community and what Bruna calls his “dialogic practice” in his writing helps frame the critique he explicitly voiced about the CDB’s projects in his Manchester Guardian articles, which were commissioned and published in 1905 (Bruna 83).15 Mathews summarizes Synge’s general critique in the Manchester Guardian of the CDB: “The point is clear: people are more likely to thrive by developing pre-existing native industries than throwing them over for new economic practices of which they have little or no experience or expertise” (128). Synge critiqued the CDB for a lack of empathy or understanding in its neglect of local industries and inability to stop “one of the chief problems that one has to deal with in Ireland,” namely emigration (Synge Travelling 83). In contrast to the Synge’s more nuanced photography of rural Ireland, Carville has documented ideological emphases that consistently emerge in the CDB’s photographic archive through an approach that heeds the aesthetic and historical elements of the photographs. Yet a narrative approach reveals how certain photos in the CDB photographic archive rupture the developmental teleology of gender and class 15 Bruna uses Synge’s prose from the Aran Islands and the Manchester Guardian articles to argue that Synge offers a dialogic construction of rural and Irish-speaking Ireland: “Synge’s artistic choice to construct his informants’ direct speech not only gives authoritativeness to their position but also counteracts previous colonial modes wherein the presence of the subaltern usually had to be sought between the lines” (122). Directly quoting his informants enables Synge, Bruna contends, to construct an image of rural Ireland dialogically. Mathews situates Synge’s complex depictions of rural space as a direct engagement with modernist constructions of the primitive: “If European modernism fetishizes the primitive to redeem a jaded bourgeois existence, Synge is concerned to retrieve and energize the liberational possibilities of Gaelic culture, in order to oppose the unquestioning adoption of metropolitan values and the concomitant dismissal of residual folk practices as disabling and backward” (139). Synge recognizes Gaelic culture and traditions as having valuable contributions to make to a burgeoning national identity in modern Ireland. 43 expectations implied in the CDB’s understanding of modernity. The photo, View from the new dwelling house of Mrs. Bridget Kelly, Lisvalley Vesey, near Tuam, Co. Galway, initially suggests, as Carville puts it, a “picturesque view of the Irish countryside” (CDB2; Carville “Picturing Poverty” 113). A large expanse of grass covers the bottom two thirds of the photo. The horizon, stone walls, and road parcel out a seemingly endless stretch of efficient and productive farmland. A handwritten note on the back of a related photograph states that this view is available to Mrs. Kelly through windows she paid for herself: “Mrs. Bridget Kelly was a migrant from the congested village of Curraghan, Co. Leitrim. The bay windows seen in the photograph were added at her own expense” (CDB1). Carville interprets Mrs. Kelly’s purchase as evidence that she found the CDB’s version of modernization aesthetically pleasing: “The fact that Mrs. Kelly has contributed financially to this visual amenity merely serv[es] to reinforce the idealised visualization of rural space as a signifier of modernisation” (113). Carville’s analysis asserts that Mrs. Kelly’s view exposes “a signifier of modernisation” in a larger teleology of development and class mobility. However, attending to the double focalization in the photograph builds on Carville’s analysis, because it demonstrates additional discursive complexities within the photographic frame that interrupt the CDB’s conception of modernity. A slippage within the double focalization in the photo through Mrs. Kelly’s window exposes tensions between an ostensibly premodern condition that the CDB’s modernization projects sought to replace and an extant rural Irish modernity that precedes the CDB’s interventions and effectively incorporates the opportunities it provides. Unlike the CDB photographs in which the external focalization overwrites or appropriates alternative views to reinforce a particular conception of modernity, the double 44 focalization from Mrs. Kelly’s window reveals two distinct focalizers. The external gaze guides the implied CDB viewer to look out upon a modernized landscape that, in Carville’s words, “reinforce[s] the idealised visualization of rural space” (“Picturing Poverty” 113). This external view is in keeping with the CDB’s overarching project and progress narrative throughout the archive, including in its erasure of the internal perspectives. Yet the internal focalization frames the perspective of one who is typically viewed, that is, of “a migrant from the congested village of Curraghan, Co. Leitrim,” as the anonymous note states (CDB1). This internal view claims an alternative relationship to modernity that is only possible because Mrs. Kelly already skillfully navigates modernization initiatives in her region. Breathnach explains that migration schemes required either capital or land to exchange as people were moved “from small to larger holdings” (The Congested Districts Board 138).16 These requirements suggest that Mrs. Kelly used her financial wherewithal to purchase not only her new house and farm but also the bay windows “at her own expense” to ensure a view framing her own perspective (CDB1). The internal focalization of this image thus asserts an agency that the external focalization in most of the agricultural photographs elides. This photo reveals a double focalization that separates, rather than “hing[es],” in Bal’s words, “the two worlds this work brings together” (163). The rupture in the double focalization interrupts the CDB’s teleological narrative, which relies upon a supposedly premodern condition that modernization projects seek to improve. 16 Besides the photographs of Mrs. Kelly’s view and house, other photographs in the CDB collection indicate how, in Terence Brown’s words, “Irish rural life was characterized […] by a calculating sensitivity to the economic meaning of marriage and […] a political will to achieve individual economic security” (19). See, for example, Mrs Philban's house and farm, Ballymacragh, Co.Mayo, one of the first to be purchased by the Congested Districts Board in Mayo (CDB24). 45 Mrs. Kelly’s view also thwarts the CDB’s expectations for modernity established in other agricultural photographs, in which an external focalization associates a future modernity with the horizon. In contrast, the view from Mrs. Kelly’s windows frames a subtle zig-zag movement that guides the eye both forward and backwards across the photographic text. The stone wall in the distance initially seems to lead the viewer from left to right, reading the landscape like a narrative of development that moves forward in linear time. However, upon reaching the road, the wall intersects with it, and there is no clear direction for the gaze to follow. If the gaze moves away from the window upon reaching the road, it must move back across and deeper into the photo’s diegesis along a curving path, thereby disrupting a clear direction for the rationalization of space to follow. If the gaze follows the road toward the viewer’s position, it comes to Mrs. Kelly’s own point of view, a view around which she chose to frame her window at added cost. This act in which Mrs. Kelly demonstrates her ability to work within the constraints of modernization projects interrupts the CDB’s paternalistic vision of establishing a Victorian modernity in an ostensibly premodern rural Ireland as it also allows Mrs. Kelly to oversee the modernization projects in her immediate surroundings. Demonstrating that the CDB’s projects were improving the lives of people in the congested districts would have been particularly pressing at the time the CDB photographs were initially commissioned in 1906, when it came under review by the Royal Commission on Congestion for Ireland (RCCI). The review was at the request of CDB members who felt curtailed in their ability to ameliorate poverty by legal limitations on purchasing land (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 151-155). After three years, the RCCI increased the CDB’s budget and authority to manage the acquisition and 46 redistribution of lands in the congested districts, concluding in the RCCI’s Final Report that, as Breathnach cites, “great is the difficulty that will beset any body in the work of relieving congestion (involving as it does the shattering the hopes of those who have so long cast their eyes upon the promised land)” (154). The language of the report leads Breathnach to conclude that “the paternalistic image of the board that Horace Plunkett abhorred so much was eventually its saving grace” (154). The imperial burden of the CDB to “shatter[] the hopes of those who have so long cast their eyes upon the promised land” was apparently necessary to establish more modern and therefore supposedly better relationships between people and their immediate environments in rural Ireland. The CDB’s teleology of development purports to draw seemingly premodern places and ways of life into their vision of a Victorian modernity. By 1914, when the photographs of Mrs. Kelly’s view and house were taken by Robert J. Welch, the CDB could document their success of having accomplished this implicitly paternal role of modernizing people and places in rural Ireland. Yet the view from Mrs. Kelly’s windows interrupts the CDB’s success story by foregrounding the unsteady double focalization in which the external and internal focalizations teeter uncomfortably between two distinct viewers: the dominant focus of the CDB’s external viewer on a modernized landscape and the internal view of the rural Irish modernity in which Mrs. Kelly already lives. The photograph captures a moment of this rural modernity through which Mrs. Kelly was able to purchase the windows that frame her view. This purchase shows Mrs. Kelly knew how to negotiate land reform initiatives in her region to actively participate in the construction of the rural Irish modernity that she can monitor from her windows. The existence of this rural Irish 47 modernity counters the CDB’s teleology of development by demonstrating, in Massey’s words, “[s]pace as the dimension of a multiplicity of durations” (24). The view through Mrs. Kelly’s windows evinces the existence of an alternative modernity, one which existed in the view and is also captured in the photograph. The double focalization in the photograph thus exposes the “two worlds” that the view frames, thereby revealing multiple modernities unfolding across the same piece of land. Like the view through the windows, the photo of Mrs. Kelly’s house establishes her as the overseer of her farm and of the men who work on it (CDB1). This semi-low- angle shot is taken from slightly left of the new house, a position that foregrounds the bay windows, and shows Mrs. Kelly in the doorway, with three men, a dog, and a bicycle outside. A low stone wall draws the eye from left to right, thereby moving forward in the narrative text of the image until the wall intersects with the horizon, perpendicular to which Mrs. Kelly stands. This intersection situates Mrs. Kelly’s position in the doorway of her new house as the focal point of the external focalization. Mrs. Kelly leans against the doorframe, and the horizon coincides with her internal focus. The step upon which she stands elevates her above the men. While a man stands facing her, another sits on the step next to the dog. Following Mrs. Kelly’s internal view to the man leading a horse and cart down the driveway draws the external gaze across the photo from left to right, thereby establishing a double focalization in which Mrs. Kelly consents to forms of modernization that the CDB promotes. Yet her relaxed position against the doorframe asserts that she inhabits a liminal space in which she claims her position in the house but will not disappear inside it. The man’s position next to the cart suggests he will remain within Mrs. Kelly’s gaze even if his movement down the road leads him out of the 48 photographic frame and beyond the scope of the external narrative framed by the photographer for the implied CDB viewer. The internal focalization shows Mrs. Kelly to have a more complete and enduring view of the modernization of the west of Ireland than the sanctioned efforts of the CDB. The photo of Mrs. Kelly’s house also reveals a slippage in the double focalization that interrupts the external gaze from overwriting Mrs. Kelly’s internal point of view for an implied CDB viewer. While the double focalization shows Mrs. Kelly is willing to supervise her modernized farm, it also reveals her to refuse what Lim called the “sexualization of national-historical time” at a moment in which particular forms of modernization were undermining the role of women in regional cash economies (Smith 226; Lim 182; Breathnach “The Role of Women” 90, 88, 90-91). This refusal to be subsumed into the CDB’s conception of modernity breaks down teleological narratives of modernization into what Massey has called “a simultaneity of stories-so-far,” and it shows Mrs. Kelly constructs her own version of modernity within the constraints of modernization projects in her surroundings (24). Regardless of whether she stands at her bay windows or in the doorframe of her house, Mrs. Kelly can inhabit modernities that undermine implicit teleological divisions between the premodern and the modern, upon which the CDB’s narratives of modernization relied. The multiple modernities evinced in the photographs of Mrs. Kelly’s house and view subvert gendered and classed understandings of the CDB’s subscription to a Victorian modernity and reveal Mrs. Kelly’s relationship to modernity to be under the purview of her own gaze. 49 Unexpected Effects: Power and Progress in the Gendered Labor of Commercial Fisheries In contrast to the gendered and classed constructions of modernity across rationalized agricultural spaces, the CDB’s fisheries photographs depict communities’ active adoption of commercial fisheries as a natural progression toward modernity, one that depends upon women’s wage labor at fisheries stations while men partake in deep- sea fishing. This seemingly natural transition to commercial fishing was supported by the CDB’s use of scientific evidence from marine biology to recommend particular kinds of development in the west of Ireland, including the types of nets and fishing boats that would be most productive at extracting fish (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 99). Scientific understandings of the fisheries promised economic prosperity, and as Niamh Connolly notes, “the people of Donegal in particular wholeheartedly embraced the ethos of the CDB and the changes it suggested and implemented, with the result that viable fishing communities grew and prospered” (130). Connolly asserts that “substantial social improvement” came from projects in which “piers were built and loans provided for boats, nets, and the necessary equipment” (130). However, Seán Beattie notes that Donegal fishermen had “a desire to cling to the traditional currach and open boat” and resisted full-time commercial fishing: “Estimates suggest that only 6 per cent of fishermen were engaged in fishing throughout the year, providing a supply mainly for the home market” (109, 101). Steam drifters, which allowed for year-round fishing and the possibility of competing with already industrialized fisheries, required an investment that only fulltime fishing could repay (Connolly 143). 50 Given this historical context, it is unsurprising that the CDB fisheries photographs make an implicit call for year-round fishing and the adoption of new fisheries technologies. The CDB encouraged fulltime farming and fishing rather than seasonal migrant labor, which was an important source of income for people in the west at this time (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 111, 117-118). As Breathnach explains: “Western smallholders were guaranteed work on large British and Scottish farms because they worked for a lower wage than native farm workers. […] Surplus children (those other than the inheriting son) migrated seasonally to contribute to the household budget” (118). Such forms of income would need to be replaced by a more vibrant, full-time fishing industry. The active participation of communities to create a full-time commercialized fishing industry was an integral part of the CDB’s modernization projects in different coastal regions of Donegal.17 Photographs of fisheries consequently demonstrate that the road to prosperity in Donegal runs in the direction of fulltime, deep-sea fishing in the waters beyond. One of several photos called Downings pier, Co. Donegal offers an overview of the Downings fish curing station and pier (CDB73). Hundreds of barrels are stacked up as high as the warehouses, and boats are in the bay and tied up beam to beam on the dock. These stocks of supplies, facilities, and boats confirm the potential of this place to grow as a prosperous fishing community. The water, which performs a similar role to the roads and driveways in the grass-farm photos, encourages the external focalization to follow a 17 Despite the CDB’s efforts to commercialize Donegal fisheries, CDB member William L. Micks, notes the “bitter disappointment” of Donegal fishermen as “over 200” British steam drifters might fish off the coast of Donegal at a time (61, 60). This instance of primitive accumulation meant the fisheries in Donegal were in decline by the start of World War I when many of the CDB photos were taken (Connolly “Fisheries” 143-144; Rouse 19). 51 particular direction. When read from right to left, the lines of the photo lead nowhere, as the hill abruptly ends before it reaches its peak at the edge of the frame. Instead, the external focalization guides the gaze in the other direction, toward the economically promising fulltime, deep-sea fishing. In both directions, the viewer must observe the modernized fisheries station that frames the water, thereby positioning modernized fisheries as inevitable. This inevitability of commercial fisheries overwrites possible internal perspectives comprised within the actual space the photograph captures. Regardless of which direction the external focalization takes, modernization projects bringing new technologies to the area will play a role. The implicit encouragement in the photographs to commercialize the fisheries into a fulltime operation situates the choice with people in Donegal while showing that the fisheries are sitting on top of untapped marine resources. This move to position modernization projects as a choice indicates the political climate in which the CDB sought to negotiate a place amongst other movements to ameliorate poverty in rural Ireland. As separatist, constructive unionist, and Home Rule movements in Ireland began to crystalize into distinct political positions in the wake of the Land Wars, organizations emerged alongside the CDB to counter many colonial forms of modernization while postulating alternative and specifically Irish modernization projects (Mathews 2-3). The CDB’s fisheries photos regularly assert the potential of the community to achieve prosperity within a constructive unionist vision. Examining how narrative elements focalize space and time in several photos called Fishing vessels at sea confirms the CDB’s vision that more could be happening in Downings (CDB60). There are few people in these images, and some show no people at 52 all. Despite the pictorial influences these photographs exhibit, the relatively glassy water indicates a lack of wind that would stagnate even the boats with raised sails from moving in any particular direction. These environmental conditions combined with the inevitably overexposed sky above the distant hills draw the eye to an untapped potential both on and below the waterline. The distant hills offer an uneven horizon that dissects the photograph into sea and sky, thereby emphasizing the glossy water of a low-wind day. The composition of the photo establishes an external focalization that forces the viewer to scan the watery space in abeyance of temporality. The atemporal space in Fishing vessels at sea reveals an unresolved tension between modernity and existing ways of life that the people in Donegal themselves must resolve. A solution to this tension between seemingly natural processes and cultural relations is offered in the photo Group of cottages beside the sea, in which the camera looks from a position in a stream that literally flows out to sea (CDB102). The position of the camera frames the turn away from the village toward modernized commercial fisheries as natural. While the stream comprises the bottom third of the photo, the middle third shows several thatched stone cottages, some of which appear to be falling down. This indication of collapse is in keeping with Carville’s argument that the CDB archive foregrounds poverty rather than traditional ways of life to legitimate its modernization projects (“Picturing Poverty” 107). Indeed, the composition of the photo shows that there is nothing beyond the village should the viewer’s gaze move against the stream’s natural flow. This absence of a clear vision of modernity in the external focalization evokes a desire to pivot away from the old houses and turn toward the modernity implied by the camera. 53 The tension between an existing culture and the seemingly natural flow out to sea is structurally dependent upon a narrative of modernization in which there are supposedly only two directions. This bifurcation of time and space is ruptured, however, upon close inspection of Group of cottages beside the sea, which reveals some blurry figures that other photographs in the collection indicate to be a cow and two women standing or walking near the village.18 Even while life is still clearly going on in the village at the time the photo was taken, the external focalization from the stream frames the village in a process of decay, in which the photo blurs the potential agents of internal focalization. This erasure of possible alternative perspectives enhances the implicit call to turn away from the houses in the village and the supposedly collapsing ways of life they contain. The call to turn toward an implied modernity finds a response in many of the fisheries photographs that emphasize women’s wage labor as an integral part of modernizing fisheries. Although many people in western Ireland engaged in both farming and fishing, connections between gendered domestic labor on the farm and gender hierarchies in the wage labor of the fisheries are not made explicit in either the CDB’s fisheries or agricultural photographs. Unlike the gendered constructions of modernization invoked in the agricultural photographs of new farms, women in the fisheries pictures are not metaphorized into houses, because women’s labor in the fisheries took place outside the home. The turn to flow downstream and out to sea thus implicitly promotes gendered labor roles associated with a fulltime fishing industry. Despite the limited work actually available in fish production facilities, gendered labor became the focus of many of the CDB’s fisheries photographs (Connolly 133; De 18 For related photographs, see: Stone thatched cottages with currachs and a cow visible in the foreground (CDB105) and Group of cottages with bridge visible in foreground (CDB101). 54 Courcy 63). Five photographs all called Curing fish, Downings pier, Co. Donegal frame the processes through which gendered labor modernizes the fisheries in real-time (CDB72, CDB49, CDB48, CDB50, CDB71). These five candid photos show a fish preparation table from various angles, establishing a broad overview of the scene that is in keeping with Carville’s analysis of CDB panoramas, leading him to conclude: “The CDB photographic archive is then yet another instrument of the society of surveillance identified by Foucault, invested with power relations that produce a correlative ‘field of knowledge’ of its subject” (“Picturing Poverty” 106). Carville examines how the panorama photos document forms of modernization that endorse the CDB’s vision of modernity and the formations of power it entails. Although the pictures of the fish curing station at Downings Pier are not panoramic shots, their dimensions and various angles institute an omniscient realism through the external focalization to produce knowledge that justifies gendered labor hierarchies in the commercializing fisheries. The general tendency in the photographs is to situate rural Irish women’s labor at the fisheries in supportive but subordinate roles. Yet certain photographs complicate how women’s labor in the fisheries is valued or positioned in socio-economically stratified gender hierarchies. In all five of the photographs, the women are bent over the table while a male supervisor oversees the process, and four of the images position the women literally lower than the man on the two-dimensional surface of the material photograph (CDB72, CDB49, CDB48, CDB50). One photo positions the man as the same size and on the same level as the women, though he still stands on the fish curing table while the women stand on the ground (CDB71). Although this photograph presents the man’s labor as literally and figuratively higher, it also shows a woman who looks directly at the 55 camera as she carries a large basket and drops something into a barrel. In returning the camera’s gaze in an otherwise candid photograph, the woman foregrounds the presence of the photographer and undermines expectations for photographic realism as objective documentation of natural or social processes. Details like this woman’s reversal of the camera’s gaze disrupt narrative conventions established for women and rural spaces in other photographs. The woman’s gaze asserts an internal focalization that both affirms the external focalization on the gendered modernization projects at the fisheries station as it also asserts her agency in teleologies of development that pushed particular subjects to the periphery of progress narratives. This photograph establishes a double focalization in which there is mutual acknowledgement of the viewer and the viewed. Although this double focalization indicates forms of power that Carville observed in the panoramas as surveillance, it also demonstrates the unexpected effects that power relations produce. Foucault analyzes how power evokes assertions of dissent and evasion that, in turn, reify existing power structures in ongoing relational processes (45, 12). These processes inform the interlocked relationship between the photograph’s double focalization and the modernization processes it represents. The photo indicates an implicit attempt to document consent to modernization projects in the fisheries from those actively participating in them. Yet the tensions and contradictions within such a project create space in which multiple forms of agency arise to complicate the CDB’s singular conception of modernization and modernity. Many who were photographed may not have had access to cameras or the material photographs, but they could draw on the mechanics of the photographic process 56 to intentionally or unintentionally interrupt supposedly natural transitions into the CDB’s vision of modernity. Such a disruption is exemplified in two related photographs, Group gathered on Downings pier, Co. Donegal and Downings pier, Co. Donegal (CDB67; CDB47). These images frame the processes of modernization in Downings by showing the burgeoning industry to occlude the material surroundings. In both photos, a group of women stands near the center of the frame, with one woman smiling directly at the camera. In Downings pier, Co. Donegal, the dock has several fishing boats lined up, and some men are working on the boats or the dock (CDB47). These activities indicate the community’s collective participation in the processes through which the material surroundings are overwritten by commercial fisheries. Some people in the photograph do not labor explicitly but all are engaged in some form of activity that contributes to the fisheries. Even two men sitting above the rest, arms folded, seem to oversee the work on the boats and dock, thereby implying their participation in the processes of modernization. These processes demonstrate how the interpretive practices for reading the CDB’s photographs often privilege an external focalization that obscures complex relationships to modernity presented by internal perspectives. Indeed, the bustle on the dock organically takes over the entire frame of the photo and the surrounding space it documents, thereby establishing an external focalization that monitors the expansion of industry as it overwrites preexisting relationships with the material world. Most of the women avoid the camera’s gaze, but the smiling woman’s face is completely visible. Her white apron draws the viewer’s attention to her and to the knitting she holds idly in her hands, indicating the work she has stopped doing to smile at the camera. The leisure the smiling woman flaunts by taking the time to smile for the 57 photograph asserts her ability to counter gendered constructions of labor and their role in modernization narratives. As Sarah Jane Edge notes, smiles were generally avoided in portrait photographs in the Victorian era because it might be seen to invite the mockery of viewers whereas serious expressions elicited respect (21). Neither of these photos is a portrait, but questions remain as to what motivated the woman to smile so visibly at the camera for the duration it took to create these photographs. The woman’s smile interrupts the more disciplined and sober expression she is ostensibly expected to perform based on the faces of the other people, particularly the women, in the images in which she appears (CDB67; CDB47). The woman’s smile establishes an internal focalization that coopts the photographer’s attempt at a quotidian scene that several other candid photographs evince.19 In doing so, her smile counters any possibility of the external focalizer overwriting her experience or of documenting an anonymous glimpse of the everyday lives of a community in transition. The woman makes both photos in which she appears moments of pause. Her smile consequently arrests the processes of modernization for the time it took to take these two photographs. Although the lives and traditions of Irish-speaking populations were changing with the CDB projects, they were not, in the words of Luke Gibbons, “a whole way of life […] pass[ing] into oblivion” (“Mirrors” 336). The woman’s smile disrupts expectations of an invisible and omniscient photographer whose documentation of modernization projects would frame technological changes to the existing fisheries as the supposedly natural next step toward a homogenizing modernity. In re-appropriating the moment captured in the photo, the smiling woman claims a moment to say, as Roland 19 For the candid photographs of this pier, see: CDB45, CDB46, CDB51, CDB68, CDB69, and CDB70. 58 Barthes writes, “only and for certain what has been” (85). That is, her smile asserts the presence of multiple modernities that counter singular conceptions of modernization and assert the potential for multiple perceptions and experiences. The woman’s smile demonstrates that multivalent histories existed and continued to emerge in the CDB’s agriculture and fisheries projects. As a result, her visage establishes an index for the myriad multiple modernities implicitly documented in the CDB photographic archive. Conclusion: Power and Agency Across Multiple Modernities Photographers for the CDB documented how its modernization projects drew on advancing fields of science and technology to change landscapes and material environments, as well as people’s relationships to each other and their surroundings, under the aegis of progress. Analyzing narrative constructions of focalization inside and outside the space and time in which the photographs were taken and viewed reveals how different groups of people perceived and experienced modernization projects differently, thereby indicating rival modern experiences lived by those outside of the sanctioned modernization efforts. The multiple modernities in photos from the CDB archive complicate constructions of realism and modernity in visual texts to demonstrate modes of resistance upon which those photographed drew to assert agency in their relationships to land and the material environment. These assertions of agency in the CDB photographs resist inclusion into idealized economic and technological forms of modernization associated with commercial resource extraction and gendered constructions of modernity. They expose implicit gender and class relations and hierarchies that subtend the project of modernization which the CDB and related land reform projects sought to normalize. 59 Consequently, the multiple modernities in the CDB photographs rework our understanding of Victorian visual discourse, conceptions of modernization and modernity, and the resources upon which people in the west of Ireland drew to negotiate power and agency amidst their changing relationships to the material environment in the early twentieth century. 60 Chapter 3: Remediated Modernities: Revising Progress Narratives and the Picturesque in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (the penname for Brian O’Nolan’s English-language texts) was published posthumously in 1966, but it satirically critiques imperial-era aesthetic forms that persist in the Free State’s embrace of a seemingly authentic, premodern rural Ireland in the 1930s.20 Free-State land and economic reforms sought to modernize Irish landscapes while preserving supposedly more authentically Irish landscapes and ways of life in picturesque precolonial cultural ideals. The Third Policeman critiques how these forms persist in idealizations of poverty and contribute to the erasure of Irish-speaking communities. Written in just five months, from late 1939 till early 1940, O’Brien, scrutinizes the aesthetic forms of picturesque aesthetics and modernization narratives in processes that Clifford Siskin defines as remediation, which occur “in moments of change [when] the older form of reality becomes the content of the new one” (125-126, emphasis in original). Through remediation in The Third Policeman, O’Brien scrutinizes imperial-era aesthetic forms in the content of the novel to satirize the continuation of colonial logics of development in Free-State modernization projects and efforts to decolonize Irish ways of life, economically and culturally. The Third Policeman shows how imperial-era aesthetic forms distort depictions of rural Irish modernities to maintain colonial socio-economic hierarchies in a postcolonial Ireland. Scholarship on The Third Policeman largely examines the novel as a satire of narrative forms that construct perceptions of reality. M. Keith Booker and Keith Hopper 20 Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin) wrote under several pseudonyms, most notably Flann O’Brien for his English-language texts and Myles na gCopaleen for his Irish-language texts. Throughout this chapter, I will refer to O’Nolan by the name under which he published a particular work and use his anglicized name for unpublished material and biographical details. 61 have each pointed out that The Third Policeman is a Menippean satire, in which, to quote M.M. Bakhtin, “the subject moves with extreme and fantastic freedom; from heaven to earth, from earth to the nether world, from the present into the past, from the past into the future” in a quest to comically “expose ideas and ideologues” (“Epic and Novel” 26). The “ideas and ideologues” that Hopper identifies in The Third Policeman show how O’Brien “sets out to undermine accepted conventional modes of discourse by concentrating on their inherent linguistic instability. Metafictions focus on representational form, and eschew ‘meaning’ in favour of poetics, i.e. the ways in which meanings are constructed and transmitted to the reader” (5-6). Hopper theorizes this self-reflexive critique of “conventional modes of discourse” as “metafiction,” which, in turn, lead to “frame- breaking techniques in fiction [that] help us map the inescapable ‘writtenness’ of all constructed reality through self-awareness of literary practices” (157). Hopper shows O’Brien’s novel to defamiliarize literary frameworks through which it becomes impossible to imagine anything exterior to the text. Such literary frameworks reify “the cult of authorship and the tyranny of Cartesian thought,” or the implicit separations between the supposedly real world of the author and the author’s textual representations (Hopper 264). Bringing Siskin’s definition of remediation to an analysis of O’Brien’s novel builds on Hopper by demonstrating how The Third Policeman embraces a postmodern disintegration of the formal separations between the material world and interpretive practices that shape the world. This disintegration registers an Irish environmental consciousness to which O’Brien implicitly points in his remediation of picturesque and modernizing landscapes ripe for economic development into the content of The Third 62 Policeman. Through processes of remediation, O’Brien offers a postmodern novel that documents the agency of material environments while satirically critiquing underlying narrative forms that structure perceptions of the real through colonial subject-object hierarchies. The Third Policeman contests what Siskin describes as, “the premise of […] [the] Enlightenment […] that the world can be known—known because the representations we call knowledge seem to resemble it so closely” (123, emphasis in original). In keeping with Hopper, The Third Policeman defamiliarizes representational strategies that “simulat[e] the real,” but it does so by exposing how aesthetic forms shape expectations for what material realities in 1930s rural Ireland should look like (Sisken 123). The implicit comparisons that The Third Policeman draws between imperial-era aesthetic forms and Free-State ideals of Irish rural life expose colonial hierarchical relationships between viewer and viewed, narrator and narrated, and human and nonhuman or dehumanized communities and material agencies that mark marginalized peoples and places as premodern. O’Brien critiques how such colonial logics continue to structure postcolonial modernization projects through the ongoing positionality of modernizer as an authoritative subject who objectifies rural communities and landscapes. The text shows persisting colonial divisions of an idealized precolonial past and postcolonial sovereign future to ultimately foreclose alternative ways of narrating rural Irish modernities after independence. 63 Reproducing “the colonial mindset”: Narrative Forms that Perpetuate Poverty as Progress The Third Policeman registers a tension between actual environments and their aesthetic representations that was an explicit interest of O’Nolan (O’Brien) in the master’s thesis he completed on Irish language nature poetry, Tráchtas ar Nádúir- fhilíocht na Gaedhilge, in 1935 (Taaffe 222 n. 127; de Paor 197). Having grown up in an Irish-speaking household, O’Nolan regularly visited Gaeltachtaí in Donegal (Cronin 5, 9). He later wrote his master’s thesis at University College Dublin on Irish language nature poetry (Taaffe 222 n. 127; de Paor 197). Taaffe describes how O’Nolan “divides Irish nature poetry into two types — that which solely concerns the natural world, rather than the poet himself, and a later (inferior) poetry in which nature imagery is used to mirror the state of the poet’s mind” (222 n. 127). O’Nolan critiqued poetry that used representations of nature to describe the author instead of depicting the material environment itself. The Irish-language poetic forms that O’Nolan emphasized in his master’s thesis reveal a specifically Irish-language environmental consciousness. Louis de Paor’s analysis of O’Nolan’s thesis asserts that Irish language poetic forms constructed an alternative relationship between the poet and the material environment that is distinct from forms in English language poetry: “[O’Nolan] distinguishes the Celtic Irish attitude from the English perceptions of the natural world, suggesting that where there is a similarity between the two it is due to the pretense of Irish influence in the English material” (197). This Irish-language environmental consciousness differed from English-language poetry, which O’Nolan recognized to mold the material world into a preconceived 64 understanding that the poet held about nature. As Taaffe explains, “O’Nolan approvingly quotes Ruskin on Walter Scott: “He conquers all tendencies to the ‘pathetic fallacy’ and instead of making Nature anywise subservient to himself, he makes himself subservient to Nature…and appears therefore at first shallower than other poets, being in reality wider and healthier” (222 n. 127). Although O’Nolan’s thesis, in Taaffe’s words, “argued that Irish nature poetry had already reached its peak in the twelfth century,” O’Nolan saw many supposedly more modern English-language forms as implicitly projecting aesthetic depictions of the natural world onto actual material environments (46). O’Nolan’s thesis argued that English-language poetic forms perpetuate conceptions of nature in the text that reflect the poet’s own interior mind without actually engaging with the material realities to which the poem purportedly refers (46). By contrast, Irish-language poetry offered O’Nolan ways to recognize how the poet is part of the material world about which the poet writes. Representations of Gaeltachtaí in which the representer objectifies and consequently misrepresents the lived experience of peoples and material environments in rural Ireland remained a concern for O’Nolan during his career as a civil servant. In an unpublished manuscript written nearly a decade after The Third Policeman called “What is the position of the Gaeltacht?” O’Nolan’s critique of Free-State land reforms indicates that independent Ireland continued to rely on imperial-era representations that ignored the lived experience and material realties of Gaeltacht communities. Land reforms, first under the Congested Districts Board (CDB) and later through the Irish Land Commission reveal a continuity across imperial and independence-era expectations for what a premodern or modernized rural Ireland should look like. Both institutions failed to 65 apprehend and address the material needs and lived experiences of Irish-speaking communities. O’Nolan wrote that the CDB “made no attempt to alleviate the conditions of the inhabitants” of “Irish-speaking districts […] recorded on a large-scale map which, though much out of date, is still in use officially” (MS “The Pathology of Revivalism” box 2/folder 43 5-6). O’Nolan goes on to write that land reform policies in an independent Ireland perpetuate such imperial-era policies by associating poverty with a kind of premodern, precolonial authenticity. While land reforms after independence sought to decolonize Irish ways of life economically and culturally, such reforms thwarted innovation in new industries. Such industries, O’Nolan indicates, might have helped Gaeltacht communities to flourish and stay together rather than be undermined through domestic migration and emigration as O’Nolan critiques: Instead of considering the problem de novo and seeing whether the Gaeltacht congests could be given an entirely new way of living, the commission concentrated its attention on trying to patch up a pseudo-agricultural economy compounded of attempts at mixing farming on nearly useless soil, fishing, the sale of turf to islands and migratory absences to labor abroad on other people’s farms (4, 7). The poverty that seemingly traditional industries ultimately produced contributed to seasonal and domestic migration, as well as emigration, as O’Nolan’s manuscript shows through statistical evidence (2). Writing this manuscript in the late 1940s, O’Nolan asserts that land reform after independence implicitly perpetuated poverty because “the status of the Irish language [is] as the badge of poverty as well as of nationhood” (Taaffe 119; MS “The Pathology of Revivalism” box 2/folder 43 5). Representations of Gaeltacht communities as inherently impoverished came to be associated with understandings of seemingly timeless traditions and authentic ways of life in the early Free State land 66 reforms to which a national and postcolonial Irish identity should supposedly strive. O’Nolan critiques persisting ideologies that prevented the Irish Land Commission from looking for alternatives that would bring prosperity to rural communities. Rather, persisting colonial ideologies perpetuated the narrow visions of modernization of imperial-era land reform projects that juxtaposed conceptions of undeveloped and developed regions. The aesthetics of supposedly picturesque underdevelopment or modern developed spaces foreclosed the possibility that Irish-speaking communities might comprise elements of both tradition and modernity that could offer alternative trajectories for modernization through which Irish culture and language and Gaeltacht communities would survive and flourish. O’Nolan’s master’s thesis and manuscript on Gaeltacht policies reflect his decades-long interest in the relationship between reality and representation during ongoing attempts to decolonize through modernization projects in Free-State Ireland. The Land Commission took over projects from the CDB, and the 1923 Land Act ensured that the Land Commission adopted many of the CDB’s understandings of land reform and agricultural and fisheries modernization (Dooley 59-63). Efforts to decolonize through land reforms reflect how the legacy of imperial-era modernization projects was both material and aesthetic. Understandings of what modernity should look like, as I show in my analysis of the CDB photographs in Chapter 2, relied on narrative elements that implicitly categorized regions and ways of life as undeveloped and developed. Besides the formal, developmental narrative elements discussed in the previous chapter, The Third Policeman takes issue with picturesque aesthetics that positioned Irish-speaking communities in a vanishing past to implicitly promote imperial-era 67 modernization projects, such as those of Lady Aberdeen. Val McLeish describes how many of the imperial-era schemes to economically improve cottage industries or enhance hygiene and sanitation in homes through nursing programs were part of programs put in place by Lady Aberdeen: “The Aberdeens represented the crown in Ireland and Canada, and Lady Aberdeen set up organisations to improve health and rural welfare in both places” (259). The Aberdeens were in Ireland for half a year in 1886, Canada from 1893- 1898, and then again in Ireland from 1906 till 1915 (259-260). Yet Lady Aberdeen’s projects exposed ideologies implicit in visual representations and their aesthetic forms, as McLeish explains: What she [Lady Aberdeen] was happy to see as ‘picturesque’ in Ireland, or amongst non-white Canadians, she clearly thought would have been a disgrace — for which she felt personally responsible — amongst white people in Scotland and Canada. The use of this word thus inscribes racial otherness, and her attitude indicates that privately she did not consider Ireland to be an equal partner in the United Kingdom, but a nation of dependent, and probably inferior people. It was in marked contrast to her representations of the new Canadian nation, and the way she described the white settlers of Canada (271). Picturesque aesthetics defined ongoing formations of “racial otherness” that imposed ideas of premodernity and modernity, as well as undeveloped and developed, onto peoples across devolving British colonies. These emerging racial hierarchies indicate the social and economic hierarchies that imperial-era projects entrenched in rural Ireland through the redistribution of land and property ownership after the Land Wars in the late nineteenth century. John Regan asserts, “any chance of real social revolution had been substantially undermined by land reform and the creation of an increasingly conservative peasant proprietorship in Ireland sponsored by various British Governments in the four decades before independence” (377). Land reform projects in Ireland after the Land Wars redistributed wealth to ensure British economic interests, regardless of who governed 68 Ireland amid debates about Home Rule and an intensifying independence movement (Regan 378). Imperial-era land reforms thus established relationships with material environments that constrained Ireland’s agency to decolonize culturally or economically as a result of the land relations shaped during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Picturesque aesthetics appeared under the aegis of decolonization by purportedly preserving an idealized understanding of Irish authenticity. Revivalist expectations for a supposedly traditional authentic past implicitly perpetuated imperial-era romanticizations of Gaeltachtaí as a disappearing way of life. Even as this disappearance was lamented by revivalists, the preservation of a picturesque ideal of the ostensibly vanishing Irish culture and language willfully overlooked how policies preserved the poverty that perpetuated the erasure of Irish-speaking communities through emigration. After coming to power in 1932, Fianna Fáil refused to pass on the land annuities they collected to the British exchequer, thereby taking a moral stance not to pay Britain back for land it had colonized for centuries. Despite a repressed economy during the ensuing Anglo-Irish Trade War, the 1933 Land Act aimed to intensify land redistribution and support small farms and rural lifestyles associated with an idea of authentic Irishness (Dooley 99). As Donal Ó Drisceoil explains, “the thrust of government agricultural policy was the reorientation of production away from the cattle and exports and towards tillage and the home market” (75). Although such a shift might seem to counter imperial-era projects, it maintains the socio-economic hierarchies of the colonial era in an independent Ireland by structurally marginalizing Irish-speaking communities. O’Brien’s The Third Policeman calls attention to how this shift from imperial exports to postcolonial protectionist policies continues to favor picturesque notions of 69 precolonial authenticity that sustain the ongoing marginalization of existent rural Irish modernities in Gaeltacht communities. The novel remediates imperial-era picturesque views of rural Ireland into the text to satirically expose how such views have become the aesthetically pleasing versions of an Irish authenticity in the Free State. O’Brien’s critique of how the Free State and Irish-language revivalists idealized poverty in Gaeltacht communities is one he would continue to pursue just a year after writing The Third Policeman in An Béal Bocht (1941). Published under O’Nolan’s pseudonym for writing in Irish (Myles na gCopaleen), An Béal Bocht satirizes how revivalists took up Irish-language autobiographies, like Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach (1929). Na gCopaleen critiques how Irish-language autobiographies were coopted by revivalists to idealize forms of poverty as authenticity in texts that had already been edited to impose notions of propriety and chastity, which revivalists associated with a pious rural Ireland (McKibben 44). Na gCopaleen did not want An Béal Bocht translated into English, thereby indicating that his audience was Irish-speakers, including revivalists. Through the Irish language na gCopaleen exposes, in Sarah E. McKibben’s words, “the colonial mindset and its strangely similar nationalist obverse, which recycled and perpetuated it,” come to “replicat[e] the inequalities of colonial relations” (38, 47). While An Béal Bocht satirizes “the colonial mindset and its strangely similar national obverse” in revivalists’ reception of Irish-language autobiographies, The Third Policeman offers in English a complex critique of the aesthetic forms of picturesque and modernizing landscapes that led to this mindset. 70 Underlying Infrastructure: Producing a Picturesque Scene of Progress from the Road The Third Policeman uses the road in the text to demonstrate how imperial-era aesthetic forms shape expectations for what the landscapes of rural Ireland should look like. The road infrastructure presents the narrator with a “pleasing picture” of the surrounding landscape as it also maintains binary divisions between the viewer and the viewed (37). As I argue in Chapter 2, the CDB built many roads, and the direction these roads take in the CDB’s documentary photographs indicate spatial and temporal trajectories for the viewer of modernization. Roads that lead from left to right toward a vanishing point on the horizon indicate a literal road to modernity. A developed modernity is the supposedly correct direction: “a good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, not coming back from there” (O’Brien 38). The “air of destiny” that the direction of the road suggests demonstrates the inevitable direction modernity will take. Going in the opposite direction of how a road is intended to progress, however, will lead the traveler to “marvel at the unfailing bleakness” of the implied premodern past (38). The road ironically preserves the premodern past for the viewer, whose position on spatially removes them from the supposedly authentic scene they oversee from the road. A good road takes one out of the “tangled town” of the clachan, or village, but a bad road reveals “the unfailing bleakness” of a premodern past that was paradoxically valued culturally and modernized materially in Ireland in the 1930s. Rationalizing space through building roads facilitated the modernization of housing and agriculture which undergirded part of the CDB and later Land Commission’s rationale for breaking up the 71 clachan system (Bell 176-177; Dooley 159). Prejudices that led the CDB and later the Irish Land Commission to deliberately break up the rundale or clachan system, which they associated with decidedly unmodern ways of life, also disrupted oral traditions, the Irish language, and social relations, particularly in Irish-speaking communities (Lloyd Irish Culture 62; Dooley 159). Such prejudiced habits of looking emerge not only in how the road provides the narrator with picturesque views but also in how the text naturalizes roads as the foundation of civilization, even of an idealized and ancient Celtic civilization. The narrator paraphrases de Selby’s theory that roads are an ancient and natural part of the landscape: “Roads he regards as the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing” (37). The idea that “man has reared” roads throughout time emphasizes their apparently natural reproduction and the need to nurture and care for this underlying, built infrastructure. The narrator goes on to explain that even “the Celts had in ancient times” used the roads, thereby showing roads were already well established in the Celtic people’s own early culture (37). Conceptions of an ancient Celtic people formed a foundation for understandings of postcolonial Irish identity because it indicated a high civilization that preceded colonial occupation. In suggesting that roads are even older than the “the Celts […] in ancient times,” the text parodies through the narrator how imperial-era aesthetics of the picturesque and modernity are uncritically incorporated into postcolonial understandings of premodern and pre-colonial Irish cultures. The narrator confers the national pride associated with being descended from a civilization in antiquity 72 to the road infrastructure itself, a product of British land reforms on the Irish landscape rather than part of ancient Celtic traditions. This parodic conflation of imperial-era infrastructure with an implied antiquity and authenticity of the road exposes a fake dynamism associated with the history of land reform and modernization projects. The roads built during land reform projects indicate forms of progress that do not change but rather entrench the status quo across time and space, as the narrator’s description of the Parish from the road indicates: “I looked blankly and carefully everywhere, seeing for a time no difference between any different things, inspecting methodically every corner of the same unchanging sameness” (157). This sameness satirizes the change implied by developmental narratives and understandings of progress associated with modernization projects, such as the building of roads. The text challenges the implied change of modernization when the narrator realizes that progress and preservation produce meaning similarly everywhere and ironically, at different historical moments, so that “ten minutes or ten years” made no difference (114). The text’s depiction of the constancy of modernization satirically inverts the timelessness that revivalists attributed to Irish traditions. In contrast to seemingly ahistorical forms of cultural authenticity, the text indicates that modernization projects actually produce the same forms over and over again through built infrastructures and their representations of an implied progress. Progress narratives ultimately produce “the same unchanging sameness” in which the narrator “felt that every day would be the same always” (158). The apparent dynamic change that progress is supposed to make shapes the reader’s expectations as well as the lives and realities of peoples and places. 73 This ultimately ahistorical progress narrative emphasizes the implicit division between the viewer and the viewed as narrator looks out at the undeveloped and developed spaces in lands surrounding the road. The sameness of the material environments viewed from the road demonstrates how the land and cultural relationships to the land have already been homogenized by modernization projects. The narrator’s description indicates how the view from the road implicitly forecloses the possibility of an alternative view or alternative modernity. The road facilitates views of picturesque and modernized landscapes, both of which implicitly justify modernization and preservationist projects in the name of progress and decolonization, respectively. By showing the activities surrounding progress to only reproduce structurally similar realities, The Third Policeman exposes how hegemonic expectations of rural spaces interpolate dynamic material environments into static picturesque landscapes that shape expectations for what rural Ireland should look like. By showing the road to shape the narrator’s understanding of his surroundings, O’Brien remediates the underlying forms of seemingly successful progress narratives into the content of the novel. The narrator becomes the viewer of picturesque scenes that position him within hierarchical relationships to his surroundings. These hierarchies reflect how revivalist views sought to fix Irish traditions in time and preserve them under the aegis of authentically Irish ways of life that ironically ensured their ongoing erasure. Like the English-language poetic forms O’Nolan (O’Brien) critiqued in his master’s thesis, the narrator’s observations from the road reveal how “imagery is used to mirror the state of the poet’s mind” (Taaffe 222 n. 127). The narrator’s view mirrors his own state of mind through how the road produces and reproduces the hierarchies of a viewer- 74 subject who subordinates the viewed-object in a picturesque image. Such an image obscures the communal forms of living in Irish-speaking communities and calls for modernization projects that seek to preserve rural poverty. Although O’Brien’s narrator attests to the “fine views of the bog,” the narrator’s view indicates picturesque aesthetics that idealize poverty and position rural Irish- speaking communities within views of a seemingly premodern and inevitably vanishing past way of life. The Third Policeman draws an implicit comparison between the formal aesthetic elements undergirding imperial-era infrastructure projects in a colonial context and Free-State policies materially shaping rural Ireland. Through processes of remediating the picturesque and modernization projects like the road into The Third Policeman, the text questions the extent to which national independence or protectionist policies can alter colonial, socio-economic hierarchies written into the material environment and communities’ relationships to the land. The road infrastructure and the picturesque views it offers in The Third Policeman expose how modernization projects and their aesthetics combine to maintain social and economic hierarchies that continue to subordinate, marginalize, and eradicate rural Irish modernities already present in Gaeltachtaí through multiple generations of imperial-era modernizations. O’Brien’s remediation of the picturesque form into the content of his novel demonstrates how imperial-era aesthetic forms disfigure existent rural Irish modernities in the Gaeltachtaí. The picturesque views from the road shape what the narrator describes as “reality,” in which he sees: “Far away near the sky tiny people were stooped at their turf-work, cutting out precisely-shaped sods with their patent spades and building them into a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart” (86). The position of the people 75 “near the sky” indicates how multivalent traditional practices like turf cutting are manipulated into a two-dimensional picture through aesthetic representational forms. Turf cutting has both strong cultural significance in rural communities and a colonial history of industrial extraction for energy production, as Derek Gladwin explains: “Hand extraction of peat reached its apex in the nineteenth century, after which mechanised peat removal appeared. Despite the level of industiralised production over the last 200 years, around 3,000 people still cut turf by hand” (34). The flattened image of people cutting turf in O’Brien’s novel exposes the narrator’s distorted view of these competing histories of rural life in the Gaeltachtaí by the 1930s. Indeed, the pressures of the economic war with Britain and the start of the Second World War did put pressure on boglands since coal from England was more difficult to get, and many migrated to cut turf during the Second World War (Wills 327). Within this context, the “canopy of lazy smoke […] erected over the chimney” indicates the burning of turf as well as its extraction. The idealized image of turf cutting and burning misrepresents how Ireland’s newly sovereign land is literally dispersing into the air.21 O’Brien points to the promises of Irish independence evaporating through the carefully constructed artifice of idealized rural life that distracts from the material realities such misrepresentations obscure. Rather than engage with the ongoing histories 21 Since the Land Commission documents are not yet available in archives, memoirs like that of Patrick Sammon, who worked for the Land Commission from 1933 to 1978, noted that Bord na Móna, “w[as] actively acquiring bogland throughout the midlands” by the late 1940s (13). This would lead, Sammon explains, to a government push, particularly by Seán Lemass, who worked for the Ministry of Industry and Commerce throughout the 1940s, to create “turf-burning stations […] constructed by the ESB, with the objective of producing electricity which would be fed into the national grid” (40). O’Brien’s description of the distorted landscape in which the bog figures as a commercial source of energy demonstrates trends that were already in motion by the early 1940s. O’Brien’s novel perceptively depicts the bog as a form of specifically Irish energy, something that Bord ná Mona would capitalize on after the war as the Electricity Supply Board’s Rural Electrification Project got underway in 1947. 76 of colonialism and extraction, as well as current realities that were impacting the everyday lives of people in Irish-speaking communities and their environments in the 1930s, O’Brien’s narrator describes a deliberately constructed but superficial scene that lacks the depth and dynamism of material environments and economic pressures in which actual people live and labor. Such scenes are reminiscent of the post-impressionistic paintings of Paul Henry, whose depictions of Connemara emphasize the pictorial elements of the image over any attempt to realistically represent rural Ireland. Henry’s painting, “Connemara Cottages” (1936-37), created just a few years prior to O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, offers a view from the road of thatched cottages and piles of turf stacked in some cases as high as the cottages themselves (Henry). Like the road in O’Brien’s novel, Henry’s road shows the viewer an image of rural Ireland that flattens the material realities of the people who live there into a picturesque scene. Billowing above the village are enormous clouds that cast a shadow over the road where the viewer’s perspective starts. The road guides the viewer’s gaze to sunnier hills and cottages just beyond where the viewer seems to stand, indicating that Henry’s viewer, like O’Brien’s narrator, is on a “good road” that “run[s] swiftly across the flat land and paus[es] slightly to climb slowly up a hill” into the sunny beyond, that is, to a vanishing point which “goes somewhere” and does “not com[e] back from there” (38). Recalling the piles of turf in Henry’s painting, the road in The Third Policeman also guides the narrator’s gaze in a particular direction to see how the piles of turf become “a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart” and “arranged neatly on each side of the road” (86). The scene in The Third Policeman and in Henry’s 77 “Connemara Cottages” both offer picturesque images of authenticity and progress that conceal the extraction of the bog. Yet the remediation of such picturesque images in O’Brien’s novel exposes how such aesthetic forms distort rural Irish modernities. The road guides the narrator’s gaze in a particular direction to see how turf is “cu[t] out [in] precisely-shaped sods with their patent spades and building them into a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart” (86). The text implicitly exposes the irony of creating a “memorial” by destroying the thing it memorializes. Through this irony, The Third Policeman registers how aesthetic forms exaggerate rural Ireland’s culture, language, and traditions into misleading shapes that undermine material realities for people and environments in the Gaeltachtaí. Picturesque aesthetics idealized, indeed even celebrated, rural poverty, to establish divisions of premodernity and modernity that replicate the binary logics and material contexts of colonial-era underdevelopment and later justifications for coerced forms of modernization into a globalizing economy. Free-State land reform projects attempted to preserve a picturesque conception of Irish authenticity that O’Brien’s novel satirically challenges through the narrator’s distorted views. As Hopper explains, the preservationist attitude toward the Irish language came, according to O’Nolan (O’Brien), at the expense of the Gaeltacht communities through relocation and land redistribution efforts: “For Myles [O’Brien/O’Nolan] the net result of the revival’s nationalist agenda was that it had privileged an imagined peasant lifestyle, and through its promotion of this dubious fairytale it had inadvertently enshrined the parochial shibboleths of a conservative order” (31). Efforts to preserve an imagined rural Ireland reveals the persistence of imperial-era 78 aesthetic forms in the Free State’s attempts to culturally and economically decolonize. O’Brien’s remediation of the picturesque and progress narratives into The Third Policeman points out how the Free-State’s policies to rely on imperial-era aesthetic forms that contort lived realities into an imagined authenticity. The flattened picturesque scene the narrator views from the road of the material bog rendered “into a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart” misrepresents rural Irish modernities already present in Gaeltachtaí into “an imagined peasant lifestyle” (O’Brien 86; Hopper 31). Like the irony of memorializing a living bog by extracting it into “precisely- shaped sods,” O’Brien shows picturesque scenes of modernized farms to also erase women from the record.22 The “canopy of lazy smoke […] erected over the chimney” asserts a modernized house implicitly participating in forms of progress that rely on women’s labor and natural resources from the bog concealed within. “[T]he happiness of a coterie of fowls” who are “unrelenting [in the] manufacture of their eggs” depicts feminized labor as literally dehumanized. By describing the hens’ labor of production and reproduction and not representing the domestic labor inside the house, O’Brien points to the way picturesque images of premodern and modern rural lifestyles obscure the subordinated gender roles of women. The text’s recognition of this subordination and erasure of women in nation building is in keeping with Maebh Long’s assertion that O’Brien satirically repeats stereotypes to expose gender hierarchies and does not censor the physical hardships women in Ireland bore, but he does not imagine alternatives (Long 22 This erasure of women’s labor within houses persists in the work of the Land Commission after the 1933 Land Act, which relocated people from Irish-speaking regions in the west to County Meath. As Suzanne Pegley notes, when people from rural communities in the west were moved to the Gaeltacht colonies in Co. Meath, the Land Commission did not even keep track of the number of women: “The Land Commission officials erred in the number of children, perhaps understandably, but it was questionable not to include wives, even for the time” (33). Wives were implicitly considered a necessary part of a man’s farm; women were not seen as independent agents in the work the Land Commission carried out under the 1933 Land Act. 79 156, 161, 166, 185). The narrator “never saw [his] mother outside the kitchen in all [his] life” and “her face was always red and sore-looking from bending at the fire” (O’Brien 7). The text implicitly recalls this scene as the narrator views the idealized landscape in which chimney smoke “indicate[s] that people were within engaged on tasks” (O’Brien 7, 86). Rendering the material and embodied experiences of women and land into metaphors of rationalized space satirically critiques imperial-era expectations for how rural modernities should look to continue in postcolonial Ireland. Like many of the agricultural photographs in the CDB photographic archive, people generally and women in particular are not included. The people in the houses are presumably women, and like the CDB photographs (see Chapter 2), they become metaphorized as homes, apparently “engaged on tasks” that would contribute to a romanticized rural space the narrator describes as “the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at” (86). Bronwen Walter explains how understandings of home and family in Free-State Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s perpetuated the erasure of women from representation: “[T]he cottage in the landscape became a symbol of women, who were absent from the frame yet understood to be present within the walls, essential both to the operation of the enterprise and to the continuation of the nation, fixed yet dispossessed” (20). The view from the road invokes a picturesque image of rural Ireland that dehumanizes female labor as it conceals gendered forms of exploitation within the houses through the metaphorization of women as a rural cottage. Such depictions of women as houses also occurred in the CDB agricultural photographs to connote forms of progress, as I argue in Chapter 2. O’Brien reveals a parallel between metaphorizing 80 women as houses and the bog as “precisely shaped sods” that “memorialize” an imagined past. Through remediating imperial-era forms into the novel, The Third Policeman points to how modernization narratives and the implicitly picturesque aesthetics associated with premodern and modern landscapes are actively shaping postcolonial Irish histories and identities. The focus on rendering forms into the content of The Third Policeman echoes the focus on poetic forms in O’Nolan’s (O’Brien) master’s thesis. Where O’Nolan saw English-language poetry to shape the material world into preconceived images of how the poet-subject identified himself in idealizations of ‘nature,’ the Irish-language poet “makes himself subservient to Nature” in ways that respect agencies in the material and nonhuman environment (Taaffe 222 n.127). The remediation of imperial-era forms in The Third Policeman satirizes the Free State’s policies to preserve and modernize rural Ireland in the image idealized by its colonial oppressor. The text exposes picturesque aesthetics and modernization narratives to sustain colonial hierarchies through representational forms that warp depictions of traditional ways of life in Irish-speaking communities. Such forms sought to eradicate the Irish language and the cultural practices embedded in the Irish language and people’s relationships to land under colonial rule. O’Brien’s remediation of the picturesque and modernization narrative forms into the content of his novel reveals formal elements embedded in the land and perceptions of the land to continue to erase Irish-speaking communities and gendered labor in the Free State. Misguided Plans: An Overdependence on Colonial Ways of Knowing 81 The Third Policeman satirically challenges how picturesque landscapes and modernization narratives distort environments and cultures through attributing authority to misguided plans that structurally maintain hierarchies between the viewer and the viewed, the modernizer and the modernized, the human subject and an objectified material world. One way the text critiques misguided plans is by showing de Selby’s supposedly innovative designs for modern housing to rely on mistaking his “absent- minded practice known generally as ‘doodling’” for “the plans of a type of dwelling he always had in mind and immediately wrote many pages explaining the sketches” (22). Ironically, De Selby’s innovative ideas replicate the conditions of a supposedly premodern past that they purportedly supersede through new science on hygiene. The narrator describes the “therapeutic values—chiefly pulmonary” that de Selby’s “habitats” would apparently provide, because these “habitats” lacked either roofs or walls (21). Many of the hygiene guidelines for what the CDB called “dwellings” (as opposed to de Selby’s more dehumanizing term, “habitats”) did indeed call for more ventilation, but the addition of windows is less extreme than de Selby’s partial houses (Breathnach “Smallholder housing” 195). De Selby’s designs for “habitats” were also “surrounded by a diminutive moat or pit bearing some resemblance to military latrines” (21). De Selby’s idea contrasts with efforts by the CDB to eradicate cesspools of pig or cow urine, which were outside some houses in the congested districts and which Ciara Breathnach points out actually eliminated some bacteria despite the disapproval CDB members had at that arrangement (Breathnach The Congested Districts Board 125; “Lady Dudley” 143; “Smallholder housing” 191-195). 82 A note by the narrator indicates that de Selby’s houses would be “the last place where one would think of keeping cattle,” which suggests that no one, human or nonhuman, would want to live in such houses (21). The irony that de Selby’s modernized housing would actually make conditions worse and replicate supposedly premodern housing conditions subverts the implicit linear time that modernization narratives impose on actual spaces and lived experience. The text invokes de Selby’s confusion of underdeveloped and developed and premodern and modern forms of housing to expose how particular ideas or signs signify progress in a seemingly arbitrary arrangement that strategically maintains social hierarchies rather than promoting change. Indeed, those living in de Selby’s houses would likely be worse off than they were before such improvements were made. By exposing the absurdity of de Selby’s so-called improvements, O’Brien satirizes the supposed improvements preservationist policies made in Gaeltachtaí in 1930s Ireland. In highlighting de Selby’s confusion about what constitutes improvement in misunderstandings of his doodles, The Third Policeman also critiques the socio-cultural value and authority given to misguided notions of progress and forms of scientific expertise that sustain subject-object hierarchies in who writes and who is written. Rather than heed material realities in which space and time mutually constitute each other, de Selby abstracts time and space into discrete and separate points. This act of separation empties meaning out of spatio-temporalities of development and shows ideas of progress to superimpose superficial representational structures onto a dynamic and interactive material world. The severing of space from time emerges through de Selby’s theory of “human experience […] ‘as a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’” (50). 83 To prove his point, de Selby attempts to travel from Bath to Folkstone by “shut[ting] himself up in a room in his lodgings with a supply of picture postcards of the areas which would be traversed on such a journey, together with an elaborate arrangement of clocks and barometric instruments and a device for regulating the gaslight in conformity with the changing light of the outside day” (51). De Selby’s elaborate contrivance ultimately leads nowhere, of course. Instead, it displays de Selby’s confusion of representation with reality, of progress narratives with actual changes that might improve the lives of people in rural Irish modernities. For de Selby, “picture postcards” and the places they represent are interchangeable. The conflation of signifier and signified into a single entity allows de Selby to separate time and space into “a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief” that builds “human experience” as a cherry-picked selection of details that construct a progress narrative. The text emphasizes the confusion of reality with representation when the narrator notes that de Selby’s theory of human experience is derived from his misunderstanding of how cinema works. Having broken film into individual frames, the narrator asserts that de Selby has considered the “strong repetitive element” in cinema to be “tedious,” but de Selby concludes the serial repetition of frames is synonymous with reality, leading him to assert that progress and motion are “illusion[s]” (50). Through these representations of de Selby, The Third Policeman critiques the seemingly transparent access to material reality that documentary photography and film supposedly offer. De Selby ignorantly interpolates the structural elements of imperial space and time into theories he derives from a relatively new medium indicative of modernity. O’Brien thus gestures to how evolving media in the Free State inflect the imperial-era aesthetic forms of modernity and 84 modernization. Cinema was becoming increasingly popular in 1930s Ireland, and it connotes a relatively new and thus modern medium (Rockett et al. 6). De Selby’s misunderstanding of how cinema works highlights this newness as it also exposes how de Selby’s ideas for improvements and encounters with new media sustain deteriorating conditions. The text thus points to how older narrative forms are continually remediated into new media to perpetuate “the same unchanging sameness” (O’Brien 157). The parodic remediation of the older forms into newer media in de Selby’s flawed conclusions critiques how so-called experts perpetuate the formal lenses through which they view the world to maintain a continuity across colonial and postcolonial contexts. The dead narrator’s unwavering faith in de Selby’s ideas even as they contradict his ironically lived experience critiques the Free State’s uncritical acceptance of imperial logics of time and space in land and economic reforms of rural Ireland that produce misrepresentations of Gaeltacht realities. Imperial logics reproduce colonial-era social and material relations through an engrained deference to authoritative, colonial expertise. De Selby’s authority goes unquestioned even as the narrator finds “[h]is theory […] at variance with everything I have learnt myself on a country walk” (50). The narrator’s “country walk[s]” even before death indicate he has learned something from observing his material surroundings on his walks. Yet he privileges de Selby’s authoritative knowledge over the knowledge to which he bears witness in the land. Like the English-language poet that O’Nolan (O’Brien) critiqued in his master’s thesis, the narrator’s relationship to land facilitates a hierarchy between an authoritative subject who objectifies land and the people who live there. This hierarchical relationship between the narrator and his surroundings renders the material environment and the rural 85 communities in the Parish as inert matter or static traditional cultures, respectively, that can be used and shaped into preconceived images that reflect only the narrator, de Selby, and the policemen in the Parish, or by the Land Commission and revivalists in the Free State. Rather than recognize the land and Gaeltacht communities as having agency, the narrator’s interactions with his surroundings reinforce colonial logics, even when these are “at variance with everything” he encountered “on a country walk.” The Third Policeman critiques how these colonial logics insidiously and ridiculously permeate de Selby’s flawed theories and the ways in which such forms of knowledge are deputized to maintain colonial hierarchies in the Parish and the Free State. Such colonial logics emerge in how the policemen maintain socio-economic hierarchies through manipulating material realities rather than attempting to work within the constraints of physical systems. Instead of making themselves “subservient to Nature” as the Irish-language poetic forms did that O’Nolan (O’Brien) admired, the policemen surveil bodily and social boundaries to maintain a picturesque but impoverished and consequently vanishing rural idyll (Taaffe 222 n. 127). People and their bicycles are physically permeable bodies that exchange atoms and become increasingly like one another, a phenomenon that the character Sergeant Pluck describes as the Atomic Theory (O’Brien 83-88). The Atomic Theory is in keeping with modern physics, which shows that boundaries and bodies are not contained. Rather, bodies are in ongoing interaction with one another and their material environments. Such interactions show the characters in the Parish to be part of the material worlds they seek to control through manipulating science and society. The Third Policeman shows how officials and experts, such as the policemen and de Selby, willfully ignore lived experience and material realities to impose 86 and control artificial boundaries within established aesthetic forms for perceiving and representing arbitrary boundaries between bodies and material environments. These boundaries, in turn, strategically maintain the authority of the police and colonial-era socio-economic hierarchies in the Parish. The police preserve poverty in the Parish by ensuring that people and bicycles do not exchange atoms. Pluck patrols the boundaries between bodies and bicycles, even as spending too much time “walking [on a road] fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you” (O’Brien 90). Despite working against the constant encroachment of material agencies in atoms on the people of the Parish, Pluck successfully prevents people who cannot afford more than one bicycle per family from obtaining the means to acquire more bicycles. Pluck explains that the O’Feersa brothers have a lower percentage of bicycle in him: due to the lucky fact that there are three similar brothers in the house and that they are too poor to have a separate bicycle apiece. Some people never know how fortunate they are when they are poorer than each other. Six years ago one of the three O’Feersas won a prize of ten pounds in John Bull. When I got the wind of this tiding, I knew I would have to take steps unless there was to be two new bicycles in the family, because you will understand that I can steal only a limited number of bicycles in the one week. I did not want to have three O’Feersas on my hands (88). The text indicates that Pluck cannot tell the O’Feersa brothers apart from each other or from their bicycles, as Pluck conflates three bicycles with “hav[ing] three O’Feersas on [his] hands.” Despite this ambiguity between the brothers and between the brothers and their bicycle, Pluck actively polices their poverty to prevent them from becoming more like their bicycle. The irony of Pluck policing artificial and seemingly arbitrary boundaries that he cannot observe critiques the absurdity of authoritative forms of knowledge that impose imperial-era progress narratives on Gaeltachtaí. The text critiques 87 how colonial power relations persist through the production of scientific knowledge used to preserve rural Ireland in a picturesque romanticization of poverty. Pluck is only concerned with policing the bodily integrity he recognizes in clear boundaries, thus producing the predefined shapes that metaphorize rural women, the bog, and Gaeltacht communities. In policing preconceived forms of what bodies should be and how places should look, Pluck ironically fails to see the material conditions that would allow the O’Feersa brothers to remain in the Parish. Indeed, he overlooks how the community will be absorbed into other countries through emigration to England, Canada, or the United States, where they could, in Lady Aberdeen’s view, potentially “overcome their difficulties and this would produce the strong characters that Canada needed” (McLeish 270). The fact that the brothers obtained English pounds, or “John Bull,” indicates they were in England, probably for work, as migrating to England seasonally or permanently remained a necessary avenue for impoverished communities in rural Ireland. This policing of poverty in the rural community is in keeping with O’Nolan’s larger critique that “[a]n almost intractable anomaly arises in devising a plan to preserve Irish by economically rehabilitating people whose retention of Irish is to be ascribed to poverty” (“What is the Position of the Gaeltacht?” 6). The text exposes authorities like Pluck to manipulate understandings of material relations to preserve the O’Feersas’ poverty and render them and the ways of life they inhabit into a disappearing premodernity based on colonial divisions of undeveloped and developed peoples and places. Like the memorial of the bog or the metaphorization of women as houses, the preservation of the picturesque image of the O’Feersas’ poverty misrepresents life in the 88 Parish as it erases the O’Feersas themselves. Indeed, the O’Feersas ultimately and ironically only exist in the text through Pluck’s description of them. The aesthetic forms of bodily integrity and impoverished rural lifestyles that the police surveil prevent the self-determination of people and communities to represent themselves. The aesthetics of modernization structurally marginalize and silence rural communities and their relationships to material environments and built infrastructures. The police contain the O’Feersas within the image of picturesque poverty that they perceive as more valuable than the O’Feersas’ ability to stay in the Parish. As a result, Pluck’s work and his description of the O’Feersas overwrite their lived experiences and the dynamic cultural relationships between people and material environments that construct rural Irish modernities. The Third Policeman thus exposes how Free-State authorities produce and reproduce imperial-era aesthetic forms and colonial power relations under the guise of scientific, economic, and social progress that creates distorted versions of material realities. The Limits of Decolonization: Enacting Divisions in Two-Dimensional Spacetime By exposing how the police manipulate material realities to normalize social hierarchies, the text critiques the Free State’s embrace of imperial-era aesthetic forms in its modernization projects. While the Free State sought to decolonize economically and culturally, its conception of progress relied on narrative forms that subordinate the material world into a relatively narrow view of modernity. The Third Policeman exposes how aesthetic expectations of modernity promote hierarchies between modernizing subjects and modernized objects that force an independent Ireland into grotesque versions 89 of what the postcolonial nation potentially could be. In the one scene in the novel that is repeated twice verbatim, the narrator claims that he “had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling” and that he “had never seen a police station like it” (52-53, 198-199). The repetition of this passage in the middle and end of the text exposes how the narrator has seen the very “unnatural and appalling” scene innumerable times, but he has been conditioned by habits of looking to see it each time anew. Indeed, Long notes that the narrator tells the story in the past tense, indicating that the narrative might not even be the first repetition of the story (77). Like picturesque scenes the narrator sketches at other moments, this repeated scene exposes the two- dimensionality in which imperial-era forms distort representations of rural Ireland. The narrator experiences these repetitious and grotesque representations as uncanny, thereby exposing how imperial-era forms haunt the Free State’s attempts to decolonize through land reforms to preserve Irish-speaking communities and idealized traditional ways of life. By distilling the forms that promenade as economic or social progress in attempts to culturally decolonize Irish traditions, O’Brien’s remediation in The Third Policeman challenges the underlying structures of development that were entrenching social hierarchies in 1930s Ireland, which O’Nolan (O’Brien) saw to perpetuate the ongoing erasure of Gaeltachtaí through Free-State land reforms. The processes of remediation in which O’Brien critically reframes the picturesque and modernization narratives in land reform, scientific authority, and police surveillance expose what Priya Satia theorizes as the “institutional stickiness” of “the disciplines and modes of thought that enabled colonialism” (269). In doing so, The Third Policeman shows the limits of decolonization 90 within the constraints of imperial-era aesthetic forms that perpetuate hierarchies of an authoritative subject over objectified people, places, and the relationships between them. The sanctioned, colonial view of modernity implicitly enacts spatio-temporal divisions of the present into a premodern past and an implied future modernity. The transition from this past into a postcolonial future is understood as progress toward a supposedly more socially, economically, and technologically advanced way of being. Yet these spatio- temporal divisions implicit in progress narratives overwrite lived realities and guarantee the erasure of unsanctioned modernities, like those emerging in the Gaeltachtaí. In doing so, they maintain a colonial modernity through embracing subject-object hierarchies in which the writer reveals only his own mind in his depictions of material environments, a structuring relationship that O’Nolan (O’Brien) critiqued in his master’s thesis. O’Brien (O’Nolan) implicitly invokes the more relational creation of communities and their environments that he noted in Irish-language poetic forms in his master’s thesis by exploring in The Third Policeman the liminal spaces where meaning gets made from the seemingly infinite possibilities symbolized by the omnium. Although “one of the customary dimensions was missing” in the Parish’s built infrastructure, this seemingly “missing” dimension is inhabited by Policeman Fox, who works and lives literally in the liminal wall space between the “natural order” outside and the cultural interior of the rancher Mathers’s Big House (188). Fox possesses four ounces of the mysterious omnium with which he “calmly mak[es] ribbons of the natural order, inventing intricate and unheard of machinery to delude the other policemen, interfering drastically with time to make them think they had been leading their magical lives for years, bewildering, horrifying and enchanting the whole countryside” (188). The liminal space Fox inhabits 91 in the wall and the omnium he possesses indicate the potential for new forms of modernization, representation, and decolonization between Irish cultural relations and dynamic material environments. This space in the wall demonstrates the potential for subverting implied hierarchies between the poetic subject and the material environment and embracing the more Irish-language environmental consciousness that co-constructs the subject within material constraints rather than seeking to dominate the omnium and the material agencies it represents. Although The Third Policeman implicitly points out this potential of alternative structuring relationships within aesthetic forms, the novel ultimately shows Fox to perpetuate the hierarchical forms that maintain an authority who controls the material world. Fox only uses the elusive omnium and the potential of his in-between office “to delude the other policemen” and manipulate their perception of time and space, “interfering drastically with time to make them think they had been leading their magical lives for years” (188). Through Fox’s manipulation of the other policemen and the policemen’s struggle to enforce artificial social boundaries on dynamic material environments and cultural relations, Fox embraces his power to create and recreate divisions between the maker and the made, the viewer and viewed, and the past and the future. Such divisions entrench structural elements of the picturesque aesthetics and modernization narratives in which past, premodern spaces are preserved in a colonial modernity that structures the material, economic, and cultural constraints of the postcolonial nation. The structuring relationships in which a subject-authority dominates an objectified other, be it omnium or the Irish language, emerge in Fox’s despotic 92 manipulation of space and time in the cabinet in eternity. The cabinet can produce any object the narrator and policemen might desire. Before “the articles” take known shapes, they have “no known dimensions” nor “an essential property of all known objects,” thereby indicating endless potential that is never realized (135). Indeed, the narrator clarifies that “their appearance […] was not understood by the eye,” and he can only know and describe what he already knows and has the vocabulary to articulate. His inability to recognize the objects leads to a lack of language. This inability to identify the omnium’s material shape leads the narrator to conclude that it “was in any event indescribable. That is enough to say” (135). The text shows the matter in the cabinet to have the agency to silence the narrator, which, in turn, interrupts even Fox’s attempts to control the material world. O’Brien draws an implicit comparison between how Fox appropriates the omnium and how revivalists appropriate Irish-language life and culture in the Gaeltacht to create delusions and distortions of Irish authenticity under the Free State. The infinite possibilities of the omnium and the meaning it might make indicate aesthetic forms in which the subject-poet is subservient to the world about which they write rather than imposing preconceived images of what nature should be onto material environments depicted in texts. The omnium’s silencing of the narrator points to material agencies and possible futures that might emerge out of the Gaeltachtaí and the aesthetic forms the Irish language has to offer, such as those O’Nolan (O’Brien) studied just a few years prior in his master’s project. Rather than engage with a poetic subject position that collaborates within material constraints and changing cultural relations, the narrator, de Selby, and the 93 policemen try to manipulate material agencies into preconceived images that reflect only their own colonial understanding of the world. By contrast, the structuring relationships implicit in an Irish-language environmental consciousness and aesthetic forms show Fox, the other policemen, and the narrator to lack the conceptual tools to apprehend or know anything outside the preexisting and exploitative colonial structural relationships they have internalized and consequently inhabit and reproduce. As a result, their observations, interpretations, and consequent actions further embed colonial relations implicit in the picturesque and modernization narratives in which the maker subordinates his material surroundings to fit preconceived notions reflecting only the status quo. Through remediating such forms into The Third Policeman, O’Brien scrutinizes the structuring relationships through which the Free State’s efforts to preserve Gaeltachtaí ensures the ongoing misrepresentation and ultimate eradication of rural Irish modernities. Conclusion: Remediating Postmodern Relations into Environmental Development The Third Policeman responds to Ireland’s marginalized cultural and economic position in emerging geopolitical hierarchies by exposing the underlying relationships that formally structure material realities and their representations in historically specific ways. These structuring relationships emerge through developmental narrative forms that informed land-reform projects after the Land Wars, and they persisted in understandings of reality in print and visual culture in ways that influenced how rural Ireland was modernizing in the 1930s. The Third Policeman draws on processes of remediation to satirically expose how formal structures repeat imperial-era understandings of 94 development in a postcolonial Irish modernity. By exposing the Free-State’s overdependence on imperial-era forms that entrench hegemonic understandings of modernity and modernization, as well as colonial-era social hierarchies, O’Brien’s novel refocuses the reader’s attention on structural elements through which alternative forms of representation could potentially emerge for cultural and environmental revitalization and decolonization in the late 1930s. In doing so, O’Brien’s text seeks to establish specifically Irish cultural forms for producing material and discursive texts in the Free State that resist how the forms of old and new imperial centers were being remediated into the content of independent Ireland by the start of the Second World War. As Clair Wills shows, negotiating a postcolonial Irish identity “in the absence of indigenous Irish versions of progress [where] becoming modern […] seemed hopelessly entangled with importation from abroad” revealed pre- established forms into which Irish cultural production, as well as the Irish nation-state itself, had to fit (304, 30). Those who attempted to modernize Irish cultural production found themselves ignored in the larger literary and film markets of Britain and the United States. As Wills asserts, “the attempt to create a new, modern, and national film, theatre, and literary culture, to put the centre of cultural gravity in Ireland rather than England, meant turning away from an international audience. The sense of being ‘cut off’ in Ireland spoke a fear that no one outside Ireland was listening, or no one who mattered” (307). The idea “that no one outside Ireland was listening, or no one who mattered” indicates the rising cultural hegemony of the United States and Britain in which Irish cultural formations played only a peripheral role if they played one at all. The insularity of protectionist economic policies and neutrality during the Second World War did not 95 decolonize the imperial-era land reforms that the Free State ostensibly sought in its assertions of territorial and resource sovereignty. Rather, tensions between insularity and the ongoing cultural influences of Britain and the United States continued to inform modernization efforts in the emerging Irish nation. 96 Chapter 4: Innovating Traditional Modernities: Alternative Forms of Development in Oralities on National Radio in Seán Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage23 Seán Ó Riada’s influence on how Irish music should sound in Irish modernity is hard to overstate. The Irish traditional music revival of the 1970s onwards built on Ó Riada’s work, with internationally renowned groups such as The Chieftains drawing members and arrangements directly from Ó Riada’s earlier group, Ceoltóirí Chualainn, which only performed in Ireland and did not travel abroad. Ó Riada’s traditional and more Western compositions also did not escape the notice of prominent Irish writers, such as Brian Friel, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Seamus Heaney.24 Damien Keane contends that “music remains a potent symbol in Irish poetry,” particularly for Ó Riada’s “immediate male poetic contemporaries” (270). Keane points out that “Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Seán Lucy, and Pearse Hutchinson have all written elegies for him [Seán Ó Riada], as has the younger Seamus Heaney” (270). Male writers in Ireland implicitly recognized the formation of a masculine-inflected modernity that fostered innovation and dynamism in postcolonial Ireland. This recognition reflects mid- century debates about what kinds of economic and cultural development Ireland should preserve or modernize after the protectionist economic policies of its early decades. Ó Riada’s work on national radio reveals tensions between feminized traditions and a masculinized modernity in shifting conceptions of Irishness and postcoloniality as 23 This chapter would not have been possible without the generous help and support of the RTÉ Sound Archives, Peadar Ó Riada, the University College Cork Seán Ó Riada Collection/Bailiúchán Sheáin Uí Riada collection, and the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA). I would also like to thank Dr. Ailleen Dillane for seeding the idea for this chapter in our conversations at the 2018 Notre Dame IRISH Seminar. 24 Besides the direct influence Ó Riada’s group Ceoltóirí Chualainn has had on groups such as the internationally known The Chieftans and rise of the Irish music revival in the 1970s with groups like The Bothy Band and Planxty, Peadar Ó Riada, in correspondence with the author on June 12, 2019, pointed out that Van Morrison and U2 have also given credit to Seán Ó Riada as an influence on their music. 97 economic policies moved away from protectionism and toward attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country after 1958. Despite Ó Riada’s prominence as an Irish musician on Irish national radio and television as well as the stage, Ó Riada initially held no special interest in Irish traditional music. Indeed, he performed and composed several different types of music throughout his life, including classical, jazz, and showband music in Ireland and Europe (Ó Canainn 9, 15, 17). Some of Ó Riada’s more famous compositions, such as Hercules Dux Ferrariae, are based on the modernist, twelve-tone system from Arnold Schoenberg (63- 64). After working on films for Gael Linn, including Mise Éire (1959) and Saoirse? (1961), Ó Riada increasingly came to value the Irish language and traditional music in the late 1950s. He spent time in Dún Chaoin (Dunquin) with Thomas Kinsella and increasingly felt Irish traditions had an unruptured continuity there (Ó Canainn 32-40; The Rolling Wave 18 Dec. 2011; Kinsella 67). Ó Riada recognized certain Gaeltacht areas in his performances and in his fourteen-episode 1962 national radio series Our Musical Heritage as comprising indigenous populations that cohered culturally and had the potential to form political coalitions to represent the importance of their culture nationally in the contemporary moment. Although Ó Riada is a prominent figure in the history of Irish music and broadcast media who influenced some of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, Ó Riada’s work has not been analyzed in scholarship as rigorously as literary figures like Friel, Kinsella, and Heaney. Moreover, little scholarly work on Ó Riada’s 1962 national radio program, Our Musical Heritage, exists, and no extended analysis has been made of the program, even in more sustained studies of Ó Riada’s work. Scholars have generally used 98 Our Musical Heritage as an example of insular or bounded conceptions of cultural tradition. Joe Cleary juxtaposes Our Musical Heritage with resistance to cultural conservativism in the Pogues (Cleary 296). Richard Pine situates the ideas in Our Musical Heritage as Ó Riada’s “idiosyncratic beliefs about Irishness,” and Harry White summarizes the radio program as stemming from “the worst traditions of defensive, jingoistic insularity” (Pine Music and Broadcasting 271; White 136-137, 141). Although these assessments recognize a dogmatic tone Ó Riada used in the program, further examination of the complex and often intentionally contradictory assertions of identity, history, and traditions in Our Musical Heritage expose an active renegotiation of understandings of nation, progress, and cultural identities as the Republic of Ireland opened up to world markets and Northern Ireland entered the Troubles.25 Instead of an insular, bounded, and fixed cultural tradition, a closer reading of Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage within the socio-historical context of 1950s and 1960s Ireland reveals alternative paths for cultural modernization to take through innovating dynamic oral traditions, like Irish music. Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage strategically draws on the aural medium of radio to reimagine oral traditions in Irish culture as dynamic, ephemeral, and modernizing practices at a moment when geographies of decolonization, media landscapes, and national resources were beginning to be redefined in relationship to a global economy. Later iterations of Our Musical Heritage at the 25 Scholars’ critique of Our Musical Heritage is perhaps analogous to Heather Laird’s assertion that critiques of essentialism in the work of Daniel Corkery often indicate current theoretical approaches in postcolonial studies more than the historical and cultural moment in which they arose (13). Laird discusses why Corkery is perhaps not taken up as a postcolonial scholar himself, given some overlap with early postcolonialists, including Frantz Fanon: “Given the present-day dominance of a poststructuralist strand of postcolonial studies that is characterized by an undifferentiated disavowal of all forms of nationalism and a corresponding exaltation of liminality, hybridity, ambivalence and multiculturality that results from colonialism, it is perhaps not surprising that doubt might arise about Corkery’s suitability to this scholarly field” (13). 99 twenty- and fifty-year anniversaries of its first airing demonstrate changing understandings of identities and traditions, from indigenous Irish cultural practices to more cosmopolitan communities in European and international economies. These shifts in conceptions of identity during the Troubles and in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger continue to draw on the aural ephemerality of radio and recordings to foster dynamic and ongoing innovations in traditional Irish music as intrinsically modern and modernizing, ideas asserted by Ó Riada in 1962. Ultimately, a closer examination of Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage revises current and historical definitions of tradition as implicitly fixed or static as it also reframes Ó Riada’s complex career as playing a prominent role in redefining Irish cultural traditions and identity during early Lemassian modernization projects, definitions that influenced Irish identity formations across the second half of the twentieth century. Media in Lemassian Modernity: Literary and Musical Negotiations of Place and Identity on Stage, Radio, Television, and Film A series of letters from Brien Friel to Ó Riada at the end of 1967 through 1968 demonstrate ongoing collaborations across media and artforms for negotiating narratives of identity and place in Ireland in the 1960s. In Friel’s first letter from 8 November 1967, Friel explains meeting Ó Riada years ago when Friel’s play The Enemy Within was produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1962. Friel describes his admiration for Ó Riada’s work, noting how he has “an intuition that our attitudes to the country that made us are very close” (BL/PP/OR 185 1). This similarity in “attitudes to the country that made [them]” is a primary reason why Friel wanted to “produce something in cooperation” 100 with Ó Riada, asking if he would like to make “a folk opera? A profane oratorio? A musical? Have you ever thought of something like this? Have you ever thought of an Irish drama-with-music?” (BL/PP/OR 185 1-2). Ó Riada conducted orchestral pieces from Mozart and Grieg, as well as a piece he composed himself, during the intervals of Friel’s The Enemy Within, performed at the Queen’s Theatre in 1962, indicating that Ó Riada had probably thought about combining drama with music before. Indeed, Ó Riada’s earlier work on films like Mise Éire (1959), Saoirse? (1960), and the feature film adaptation of J.M. Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World (1962), all show Ó Riada’s ongoing engagement with different forms of history, literature, and music across media. Yet Friel’s comment shows he favored stage productions over the range of media in which Ó Riada was willing to work, including collaborating on an Irish music opera with Friel. While Friel and Ó Riada discussed possibilities, including a musical version of Brian Merriman’s eighteenth century poem, The Midnight Court (Cúirt an Mheán Oíche), which Friel noted they both found “too cerebral” for drama, the letters and early drafts that Friel includes in later correspondence show that Friel and Ó Riada began but never finished a production called Grania about Grace O’Malley (BL/PP/OR 185 19- 23).26 Friel’s articulation of how their “attitudes to the country that made [them] are very close” positions the often misunderstood figure of Ó Riada alongside Friel and other writers and artists of the mid-century who grappled with shifting conceptions of postcolonial Irish identities during the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement, at the start 26 Reasons why Friel and Ó Riada never finished the opera are not entirely known, though letters between Friel and Ó Riada, as well as Michael Emmerson, the founder of the Queens University Festival, indicate that the logistics of the production they envisioned were financially difficult (BL/PP/OR 185 14-15). 101 of the Troubles, and as the Republic of Ireland increasingly turned toward international markets. The period in which Friel and Ó Riada corresponded about Grania was a time of intense change in Ireland as early Lemassian modernization got underway on the cusp of the Troubles. After the historic meeting between Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and Taoiseach Seán Lemass in January 1965, the 1965 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement precipitated in Ireland’s entry into the EEC in 1973 (Kennedy 118). These political events indicate tensions between understandings of a traditional cultural identity and emerging economic relations in an implied postcolonial Irish modernity, which was associated with particular artforms and media. In 1960s Ireland, television increasingly connoted economic development through new modernization policies while national radio had once been indicative of national sovereignty. Policies under Lemass aimed to promote Ireland as a forward-thinking and developed independent nation with a wealth of resources. Lemass, in Horgan’s words, “wanted the new television service to present, and perhaps even in part engender, an image of Ireland as a progressive, scientifically inclined, modern industrial nation” (Broadcasting 28). Already in 1953 when Lemass worked in the Ministry of Commerce, he famously asked about the national radio station: “how’s the hurdy-gurdy?” (Horgan Irish Media 73; Pine 2RN 176). This notion of national radio as the mouthpiece of parochial folk music indicates the perception of Irish traditional music as facilitating a conservative understanding of cultural preservation through protectionist economic 102 policies that had not brought prosperity or cultural decolonization to Ireland after independence.27 Yet both radio and television were seen as less artistically significant than stage productions, like plays, operas, and musical performances. Indeed, Friel critiqued Ó Riada’s focus on national broadcast media as a disservice to his talents, particularly when Ó Riada seems to have lost interest in the Grania project by the end of 1968: “If you are filling your life with TV and radio work, […] may I suggest that this is a total waste of your real talents and energy. You should be composing […] You are an artist – not a TV link man on genteel programmes” (BL/PP/OR 185 29). Although Friel takes issue with Ó Riada’s focus on national broadcast media and their audiences, his criticism and concern for Ó Riada’s career highlights larger frameworks that were available for discussing art and tradition in Ireland. Ó Riada’s oeuvre both invokes and challenges these frameworks to provide a multivalent approach that destabilizes imperial logic and hierarchies persisting in popular understandings of cultural traditions and high art. Friel’s comment overlooks Ó Riada’s explicit choice to promote new forms of Irish traditional music on popular media, like national radio, thereby altering perceptions of both traditional music as premodern and national radio as an outdated medium. Indeed, many of Ó Riada’s programs on national radio would challenge ideas of tradition as a fixed practice associated with particular gender and class connotations. In particular, Our Musical Heritage renegotiates fixed 27 Early national radio under 2RN could not keep up with the BBC radio orchestra, which was a source of political tension around state-led radio policies and funding. Jazz was seen as immoral by the conservative state, which fostered conceptions of authentic Irish culture as rooted in moral value systems approved by key figures in the Irish Catholic hierarchy, most notably the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (Pine 2RN 153, 165). 103 understandings of tradition as fluid, dynamic, and serious artforms that have the potential to imagine alternative forms of national development and modernity. “A stand against the onslaught of Western culture”: Resisting the logics of essentialism through Irish traditional music Tracing Ó Riada’s work through his 1962 national radio program Our Musical Heritage and the history of national radio in Ireland reveals the role music played in constructing understandings of Irishness. When Ó Riada’s fourteen-episode program, Our Musical Heritage, aired for the first time, Ireland was turning away from protectionist measures and efforts to culturally and economically decolonize as it moved toward economic expansion through multinational capital and European integration. In the early 1960s, to use Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy’s words, “state resources [were being used] to attract foreign investment and to base policy on an export strategy” (8). The effects of T.K. Whitaker’s 1958 report on economic development shifted Ireland away from attempts to decolonize through territorially bounded understandings of cultural revival and land redistribution based on De Valerian conceptions of Irish identity. Although the protectionist policies of the first decades of Irish independence failed to stop the need for emigration out of rural and largely Irish-speaking communities, European economic integration positioned those communities as regions ripe for development under a singular conception of modernity. Throughout these changes, national radio played an important role in modernization projects. After independence in 1922, modernization projects initially were intended to assert national sovereignty in state-led efforts to decolonize culturally and materially. The 104 1927 Shannon Scheme of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and the ESB’s Rural Electrification Project starting in 1946 brought electricity and plumbing to rural Ireland (Morash 129; Shiel The Quiet Revolution 18, 29). Concurrently, the Land Commission, which took over from the Congested Districts Board in 1923, worked to redistribute land and move people onto more viable farmland until shortly after Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973 (Dooley 194). These material modernization projects had a cultural counterpart in the establishment of the national radio station, 2RN, in 1926, which would become Raidió Éireann.28 After 1932, national radio under Taoiseach Eamonn de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government aimed to make 2RN “one of the chief agents in the legitimation of the modern Irish state” (Pine 2RN 34). De Valera’s government strove to intensify the work of the Land Commission to foster small family farms seen as indicative of a traditionally Irish way of life and to revive the Irish language and culture, as I discuss in Chapter 3. 2RN was intended to represent Irish identity in the early decades of the Free State through Irish cultural programming. Although establishing the national radio service formed an assertion of sovereignty after independence, the Irish state’s autonomy was constrained by international regulations for radio wavelengths that were being drawn up by the European Broadcasting Union and even the League of Nations between 1922 and 1924 (Pine 2RN 38-39, 42).29 Ireland’s radio broadcasting capability was consequently still under the 28 2RN became Raidió Éireann when national broadcasts were consolidated under Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) after the Broadcasting Act of 1960. 29 Ironically, the first radio broadcast in the world was during the 1916 Rising when Irish Volunteer Fergus O’Kelly took over the Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy and began announcing the Irish Republic via a transmitter without an operable receiver (Morash 125-130; Pine 2RN 11). Christopher Morash notes the ingenuity of this event: “While it might seem obvious to us today that seizing the local radio station is the first thing any self-respecting rebel should do, it took a considerable act of imagination to make use of the new medium of wireless telegraphy in 1916” (127). Actual radio stations began emerging in the UK and the USA in the early 1920s, as Morash goes on to describe: “In the month that the Anglo-Irish Treaty was 105 purview of Britain when 2RN was launched in 1926: “Since all Irish radio allocations remained within the remit of the British Post Office, the designation of ‘2RN’ was decided in London” (40). Although 2RN signifies, as John Horgan points out, “to Erin,” a nationalist name for Ireland, parameters for national radio in Ireland were included in the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty: “British negotiators, conscious as ever of Ireland’s place in the scheme of imperial defense, had included a clause […] restricting the right of the new government to establish radio stations with a capacity for broadcasting outside the national territory” (Irish Media 18, 15).30 Though the legacy of colonialism in broadcasting constraints from outside Ireland persisted, the first 2RN broadcast was a speech in Irish by Gaelic League co-founder, Douglas Hyde, on January 1, 1926. The announcement was primarily, as Horgan explains, “in Irish (after an introduction in English ‘for any strangers who might be listening in’)” (Irish Media 18). The launch of 2RN thus used the medium of radio to resist imperial pressures and carve out an anti- colonial space where a specifically Irish language and culture could flourish. This assertion of a uniquely Irish identity on national radio through Hyde’s speech inverted colonial hierarchies to privilege the Irish language over English, a move that echoed anti-colonial ideas about the Irish language in the 1920s, for example, in the writing of Daniel Corkery. Valuing the Irish language, to use Heather Laird’s words on Corkery, “challenges the dominant narrative of Ireland’s cultural past by constructing an alternative narrative of a cultural past that it omits […] [and later calls] into question the signed—December, 1921—a new radio station began broadcasting in the US almost every day. The following month, in January, 1922, the Marconi Company made the first English broadcast at Writtle, and by November of 1922, the BBC was on the air in England” (131). 30 These restrictions also became a point of contention when De Valera wanted to radio broadcasts to reach the Irish diaspora in the late 1930s and later in the early 1990s when commercial radio began to be regulated in Ireland (Horgan Broadcasting 14; Horgan Irish Media 18, 126; Morash 186, 194, 206-207). 106 nature and value of the cultural past that [the dominant narrative] documents” (6). Corkery’s ideas on the Irish language in the 1920s contextualize Hyde’s 1926 speech on 2RN and the initial role national radio was to play in cultural and language revival. As Ireland moved away from protectionist economic policies, however, what cultural preservation even meant was widely debated implicitly and explicitly on national radio. Different forms of music found a place on national radio, from traditional and céilí bands to Western classical, jazz, and showband music (Pine 2RN 150, 153, 171-174; White 133).31 The place of Irish music in Ireland and how broadcast networks should promote particular forms of music was unclear in the 1950s and 1960s. A January 1951 article in The Bell by renowned Irish art-music composer Brian Boydell reveals how understandings of music promotion in national broadcasting relied on seemingly opposed notions of an ever-evolving art music and the fixed cultural practices of traditional or folk music. Boydell notes that “by far the greatest power in the field of professional music is the broadcasting service, which holds a large share of the responsibility for the future of Irish music” (25). Boydell laments a stagnating Irish art music (as opposed to Irish traditional music) due to “the national characteristic of thinking in terms of the past” (21). This failure to cultivate forms of Irish art music on broadcast media hindered music training at school and conservatoria levels in Ireland, according to Boydell, thereby undermining “a public who will listen to the performances” and forcing musicians and composers to look abroad to further their careers (23). A respectable and respected 31 My claims about 2RN pertain to the politics around the national radio station as perceived and documented by government representatives and agencies. Very little information exists about audience numbers or perception at this time, except for the 1981 occasional paper, “Irish Radio Date 1926-1980” (ISSN 0332-3137), which is (as far as I can find) only available at the RTÉ Archives. I would like to thank Patricia Sweeney at RTÉ for helping me to locate this source (25 September 2019). 107 national radio orchestra would go a long way in reinstating interest in Irish music, Boydell asserts, something that is only financially possible through “hav[ing] broadcasting vested in an independent corporation” (26, 25).32 Boydell’s article demonstrates a persistent division between art and folk music in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Irish art music was perceived as a more cultivated form of music that could continue to develop and engage internationally through Western classical music while Irish traditional music was not considered a serious artform and was seen as mostly a local practice. This division between art music and traditional music implicitly informs debates about the role music should play in Irish cultural modernization as the Irish economy shifted toward international markets after decades of protectionist economic policies. These debates occurred on, through, and about national radio on a variety of programs, many of which Ó Riada contributed in the 1950s and 1960s on different kinds of music types, including traditional, jazz, and Western classical music. Just a year after Boydell’s article appeared in The Bell, Ó Riada graduated from University College Cork (UCC), and he became Assistant Director of Music at Raidió Éireann in 1953, a position he held until 1955 (Ó Canainn 24). Despite his relatively short time with a salaried position, Ó Riada wrote and produced radio programs on various kinds of music throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in addition to composing and arranging music for film and television programs. While continuing to compose, perform, and teach various kinds of music at 32 In this same issue of The Bell, Michael Farrell critiques Radio Eireann’s “‘funking’ discussions on controversial issues” (55). Farrell concludes with a list of issues that “Irish Radio has never discussed,” including “Legal Adoption, […] Censorship, The County Managership System, Secondary Education, The Report of the Committee which investigated Amendment of the Criminal Law—or even, say, public complaints about the Administration of so many of our Public and semi-Public services” (59). 108 UCC from 1963 until his early death in 1971, Ó Riada’s innovations in Irish traditional music reflect tensions between conceptions of Irish modernity and tradition in relationship to European cultural and economic integration. Through his experiences with Gael Linn and in the Gaeltacht on the Dingle Peninsula, Ó Riada came to understand Gaeltacht communities as having indigenous cultural traditions that should, to use the words of Ó Riada’s former student and well- known musician and musicologist, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, “‘mak[e] a stand’ against the onslaught of Western culture” (12).33 Ó Súilleabháin, explains that while Ó Riada’s contemporaries, including John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, sought to integrate non-Western musical traditions into Western music, Ó Riada aimed to “avoi[d] […] [the] Western classical tradition in favour of the development of a ‘native Irish classical music’ out of the soil of oral-tradition music in Ireland” (2). Ó Riada saw Gaeltacht communities as having dynamic cultural traditions that could not be understood through frameworks for studying Western classical art and music. Aligning Ó Riada alongside Cage and as a successor to Schoenberg indicates Ó Riada engaged with Western European music. In contrast to his contemporaries, however, Ó Riada attempted to decenter Western music rather than have it absorb alternative and non-Western forms. Ó Riada aimed to move, “Gaelic culture out into a new field of vision that would reposition Ireland in the context a world of music rather than within European tradition” (Ó Súilleabháin 5). Rather than be overwhelmed by Western forms and frameworks for understanding music, Ó Riada 33 Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin is the founder of the Irish World Academy of Music at the University of Limerick in 1994. He also produced A River of Sound, a television program from BBC in 1995 on how music is always changing and exchanging with other cultural traditions (Reiss 154-155). This program attests to ongoing debates about tradition and innovation that began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s and continue today. Scott Reiss asserts that the intense social changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger perpetuate struggles to maintain tradition or to innovate (153). 109 asserts Irish traditional music as having its own complex and developed system. The system of Irish traditional music could influence forms of music that were valued in 1960s Ireland as more modern and artistic, such as jazz or classical or showband music. Ó Riada’s parallel but different approach to Cage and Stockhausen indicates an attempt to counter fixed understandings of tradition that framed Irish art and traditional music in binaries of Western development and supposedly premodern practices. Ó Riada’s reframing of cultural traditions in this way in the 1950s and 1960s resisted forms of nationalism that idealized cultural traditions within a vanishing past. Musicologist Harry White argues that the literary revival fixed Irish traditional music as a symbol of anti-colonial struggle that persists today (155). But Ó Riada identified such conceptions of Irish traditional music to subscribe to colonial binaries in which oral traditions were situated as pre-colonial cultural practices. This positioning of Irish oral traditions as precolonial relied on linear forms of development. Ó Riada recognized these Western forms of development as undergirded by an imperialist logic implicit in Western music that was at odds with the dynamic and innovative artform Ó Riada apprehended in the Irish traditional music of Gaeltacht communities in west Kerry. Ó Riada sought to theorize modern forms of development based on Irish traditional music rather than Western music. Ó Riada’s theorization offers an alternative to imperial logics of either reviving supposedly premodern traditions or embracing Western modernization. Both ways of asserting sovereignty situated cultural traditions in the past. Indeed, revivalist nationalism and Lemassian modernization relied on conceptions of a supposedly premodern past that modernizing Ireland respectively either threatened or promised to transcend through economic development projects in the 110 1960s. Viewing Irish traditional music as a symbol of the past allowed for a shift toward an implied modernity under Lemassian modernization schemes in the 1960s that Ó Riada saw as actively working against existing rural modernities in Gaeltacht communities. Ó Riada’s work indicates that Irish traditional music was only deemed a symbol of the past because the frameworks for understanding Western music in the classical tradition were inadequate for recognizing the complexity and ongoing innovations in Irish traditional music and other oral traditions. In Ó Riada’s view, Irish traditional music needed to be seen as completely separate from Western classical music and approached through a different lens. In the first episode of Our Musical Heritage, Ó Riada claims that “[Irish music] is, indeed, much closer to some forms of Oriental music than to European music” (Episode 1 3:38- 3:44). This assertion points to the repetitions and modalities in Irish traditional music as well as oral traditions that may indeed make Irish traditional music more akin to certain forms of music outside Europe’s classical traditions. Ó Riada also compared Irish traditional music to other indigenous cultural practices around the world. Ó Súilleabháin describes how at a concert at UCC, Ó Riada “explained that this group [Cór Chúil Aodha] had come from the West Cork Gaeltacht just as American Indians might appear from their reservation to perform for ‘outsiders’. The ‘Pale’, he explained, had now progressed to cover almost all Ireland with the exception of such small Gaeltacht areas as Cúil Aodha and others” (12). Ó Súilleabháin remarks that the group was “exclusively male” and that “Ó Riada was positioning himself with indigenous population groups globally” (12). Ó Riada’s group maintains particular narratives of a masculine-inflected 111 modernity as it also inverts the colonial hierarchies that would feminize indigenous practices to legitimate a turn toward economic and environmental developments. Ó Riada asserts that “The ‘Pale,’” or the area in and around Dublin where imperial control and culture are assumed to be hegemonic, is overwhelming what he identified as modern indigenous Irish traditions. This contrast between a seemingly ‘civilized’ eastern region and seemingly undeveloped western Ireland suggests that Ó Riada felt an independent Irish nation was re-colonizing Gaeltacht communities through government initiatives. While Gaeltacht communities did not become part of global indigenous movements, Indigenous and civil rights movements occurring in the United States and Northern Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s most certainly would have informed Ó Riada’s comparison.34 Ó Riada thus draws on national and international identity formations to assert cultural resistance to Western forms of economic development and modernization in his appeal to a national audience about the value of Irish traditional music for modernizing postcolonial Ireland. Destabilizing Decolonization: Inverting the hierarchical logic of imperialism in postcolonial Irish identities Ó Riada’s radio programs of the 1950s and 1960s invoke and challenge the implicit gendering and trajectories of progress in understandings of a postcolonial national modernity in mid-century Ireland. Ó Riada’s reluctance to work for international 34 A history of comparisons between marginalized populations in Ireland and indigenous groups in the United States exists. Most notably is the donation the Choctaw people gave to Irish people during the Famine and the Irish State’s establishment of a third-level scholarship in 2018 specifically for Choctaw people to recognize their support during the Famine (Lynch). Irish people also donated over two million euro to the Navajo Nation during the COVID-19 pandemic (McGreevy). 112 “fame and fortune,” as Michael Emmerson put it in a 1968 letter to Ó Riada, stemmed perhaps from Ó Riada’s recognition of implicit class divisions in musical traditions that were seen as more or less developed (BL/PP/OR 185 17-18). These divisions identified local traditions as a sign of poverty and internationally integrated artforms as more advanced. In turn, these hierarchies of art produced for the more educated middle and upper classes an idea of progress in which local folk traditions would develop through incorporation into Western art, thereby drawing on the same logic that European economic integration would supposedly help the depressed Irish economy. In 1955, Ó Riada wrote a radio program under his anglicized name, John Reidy, called “The Armchair Time-Traveller” that implicitly asserts how the categories for “art” and “folk” music hinder recognition of innovation and cultural exchange in different types of music. The program described the influence (or lack thereof) of Russian folk music on the work of classical composer Igor Stravinsky. Reidy implies that Stravinsky’s class position would have put him at a far remove from folk traditions, a situation he notes is analogous to the role of Irish folk music on Irish composers, presumably such as himself: As Russia, in those days, was still largely uncivilized, there was little or no tradition of Russian art-music, outside that of the ‘Five’, who had not yet ceased to be prophets in their own country. A music student, therefore, would have had to rely mainly on the work of established foreign masters. The influence of folk- music as a factor to be reckoned with, is almost impossible to assess in Stravinsky’s upper-middle-class circumstances. In short, the situation was not very different from that obtaining in Ireland today (BL/PP/OR554 17). Reidy’s description of Russia as “still largely uncivilized” and “the influence of folk- music as […] almost impossible to assess in Stravinsky’s upper-middle-class circumstances” demonstrates Reidy’s recognition of class divisions between different 113 kinds of music internationally. His assertion that this situation is “not very different from that obtaining in Ireland today” reveals ongoing class divisions in art and folk music categories. Like the Irish language, Irish traditional music was associated with impoverished rural regions of Ireland. Ó Riada’s program on Stravinsky shows how these implicit class divisions between folk and art-music traditions require “the music student […] to rely mainly on the work of established foreign masters,” which was a situation that Reidy himself probably experienced just a few years prior when he was studying at UCC.35 Almost a decade later, Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage ruptures fixed categories of art and folk musical traditions that persisted along class lines by intentionally inserting contradictory and fluid conceptions of tradition and modernity. The start of Ó Riada’s 1962 Our Musical Heritage series demonstrates the inadequacy of current frameworks for defining or talking about Irish traditional music. The first of fourteen episodes defines Irish traditional music as “the untouched, unarranged, undiluted, un-Europeanized, unwesternized, un-dressed-up, naked, orally transmitted music. Orally transmitted music” (Episode 1 0:34-0:48). The repetition of “un” to list what Irish traditional music is not combines with the negative connotations of an implicitly “[t]ouched, [a]rranged, [d]iluted, […], [d]ressed-up” European art-music. Although Ó Riada’s opening definition on Our Musical Heritage indicates that Irish traditional music is an authentic form of art music, it only defines Irish traditional music as not unauthentic. This definition exposes 35 Ó Riada/Reidy wrote various programs for Raidió Éireann in the late 1950s, including reviews of books on jazz and Classical music, as well as “Bypaths in Music,” a 1957 three-episode series with each broadcast showcasing a different European musician in history from sixteenth century Venosa, eighteenth century Germany, and late nineteenth century France (BL/PP/OR554 97-118, 119, 125, 132). He also wrote a children’s program called “You’ll enjoy this music” in 1957 (BL/PP/OR/ 554 (189-218)). 114 the inadequacy of Western frameworks for understanding Irish traditional music. By breaking down these frameworks in his initial definition of Irish traditional music, Ó Riada asserts the need for alternative ways to understand Gaeltacht traditions and communities that he saw as being actively undermined by Lemassian modernization projects in the 1950s and 1960s. Ó Riada draws on the aural ubiquity of national radio by the early 1960s to compare the “orally-transmitted music” Irish folk music with “rich and comparatively untouched pastures” (Episode 1 0:08-0:18). The assertion that Irish traditional music is a “rich and comparatively untouched pasture” inserts an oxymoron of environmental and colonial history into the text. This oxymoron metaphorizes Irish traditional music as an “untouched pasture,” which, in turn, connotes a longer history of gendered modern agriculture and pastoralism. Through this oxymoron, Ó Riada invokes a dynamic history implicit in Irish traditional music. This history corresponds with epistemological shifts from the medieval era through the Renaissance. Caroline Merchant explains that “while the pastoral tradition symbolized nature as a benevolent female, it contained the implication that nature when plowed and cultivated could be used as a commodity and manipulated as a resource” (2, 7, 8). A feminized nature was a disorderly abundance requiring cultivation in a masculine modernity. This gendered modernization of nature into pastoral space in Ireland recalls the history of deforestation. Ireland experienced one of the most intense episodes of deforestation in Europe during the seventeenth century and was subsequently used as a pasture for an industrializing England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (“History of Forestry”). Yet it also obliquely connotes the Ulster Cycle in Irish mythology and 115 Mebh’s initiation of the cattle raid in Táin Bó Cúailnge to obtain as much wealth as her husband, Ailill, an act that complicates gendered constructions of pasturage and material wealth that Western history associates more generally with the Renaissance (Welch 551- 552). The oxymoron of an “untouched pasture” is both colonial and pre-colonial, a contradiction that destabilizes the idea of a fixed understanding of tradition or authenticity as pre-modern. In using this term, Ó Riada positions Irish traditional music as a dynamic historiographic archive of both human and nonhuman histories. In keeping with Merchant’s descriptions of gendered divisions of a feminine natural space that is ordered through a masculine-inflected modernity, Leith Davis explains the ways in which music was gendered to establish Irish traditional music and the island of Ireland as feminine and anti-modern. These gendered conceptions of Irish music and Irish space positioned Ireland as part of a feminized premodern past. The implicit understanding of Irish culture and land as underdeveloped contrasts with the supposedly more masculine modernity in nation states like the USA, where many Irish people emigrated: “The image of tradition—in this case, a feminine Ireland—must be preserved because the articulation of the state of modernity depends upon the existence of a premodern state from which it has emerged” (26, 211). Besides a feminized nature being tamed by an implicitly masculine pastoral idyll, supposedly pre-modern traditional practices were feminized while modernized nation-states took on a masculine connotation. Historically, the way to pursue this teleology from a feminized past into a masculine modernity in Ireland was to emigrate, and intense emigration in the 1950s justified national shifts away from economic protectionism. Davis notes that “emigration 116 as it is depicted in nostalgic songs becomes a process of reaching a more mature masculine and progressive state of modernity” (211). By the early 1960s, however, instead of emigrating away from a feminized, premodern state, the idea was that Ireland would become a masculinized modern nation itself through Lemassian modernization projects and European economic integration. Rather than gendering Irish music on national radio as representations of a nostalgic and feminized past that national modernization projects transcend, Ó Riada asserts a masculine-inflected and innovating modernity in the formal structures of traditional Irish music. Ó Riada invokes gender metaphors to position the tradition of Irish music as already part of a masculine inflected modernity in a national space, namely, the radio. Although analytical terms for both poetry and music draw on gender metaphors, Ó Riada’s regular use of gender metaphors to describe the stresses and style of the music simultaneously and consistently inverts (rather than subverts) colonial gender hierarchies that persist in particular understandings of tradition and modernity. He notes the “virile rhythm” of flute players and laments attempts to revive the harping tradition, which, according to Ó Riada, have led it to become an accompaniment instrument with “feminine drooping musical figures” instead of the “vigorous masculine music” he attests traditional Irish harping must have been when it still existed (Episode 13 23:52-24:45). Similarly, he describes the “strong masculine ending” to “Sliabh na mBan,” a sean-nós song about a group of United Irishmen defeated in Co. Tipperary during the 1798 rebellion near ‘The Women’s Mountain’ (Episode 10 19:00; Episode 3 23:20).36 Although these inverted gender hierarchies maintain patriarchal discourses undergirding 36 This sean nós song, “Sliabh na mban,” is based on the poem by the same name, and it is different from the possibly more popular song, “Slievenamon.” 117 rival notions of modernity, they also rupture Lemassian understandings of modernization in Ireland in the early 1960s that would position both radio and traditional music as less modern. Ó Riada’s use of a masculine-inflected modernity in Irish traditional music implicitly critiques modernization projects occurring under the Lemass government through the song “Sliabh na mBan.” Besides broadcasting “Sliabh na mBan” to demonstrate forms of sean-nós singing, Ó Riada replays the recording of sean-nós singer, Nioclás Tóibín, performing the song at the end of the final episode in the series, thereby giving the final word on Our Musical Heritage to the dynamic aural broadcast of the sean-nós tradition. The continuous changes in ornamentation of sean-nós singing demonstrates the fluid and socially negotiated practices through which Irish music and culture modernize. Letters from Tóibín and Comhar Cultúra Éireann to Ó Riada in 1962 indicate that Ó Riada commissioned the recordings of Tóibín for the program for which Radio Éireann paid (BL/PP/OR554/131, 138). This commercial transaction indicates that Ó Riada used his work with Radio Éireann to financially value Irish traditional music and musicians, as well as provide a prominent position for a recent recording of an ongoing and still innovating traditional practice. The economic and cultural value that Ó Riada gives to Tóibín’s performance of “Sliabh na mBan” on national radio in 1962 undermines conceptions of Irish traditional music as premodern or part of a vanishing past. In contrast to a modernity moving away from attempts to preserve a feminized past to developing a masculine-inflected modern nation, Ó Riada indicates Ireland already is or has the potential to be modern through innovating traditions rather than Western forms of development. 118 This critique of a reliance on international forms of development also emerges in Ó Riada’s use of “Sliabh na mBan” in the final episode. Ó Riada recites the final stanza of the poem associated with “Sliabh na mBan” before broadcasting Tóibín’s version of the song. This stanza critiques the United Irishmen’s alliance with the French in the 1798 Rebellion. The French allies are prevented by a storm from landing their ships with Wolfe Tone, and the speaker calls into question the United Irishmen’s dependence on the French. The speaker would be happy if the French were indeed coming to help restore the rights of the “Gaeil bhocht” or “poor Irish,” and the speaker notes that “Sé an síorscéal go bhfuil a dtriall ar Éirinn [It is the eternal story that they are bound for Ireland]” (“Sliabh na mBan” Cranford Publications; McCague).37 The speaker then uses the conditional tense to question the veracity of this story that the French will help Irish people: “Dá mba dhóigh liom féineach go mb’fhíor an scéal úd / Bheadh mo chroí héadrom le lon an sceach [If I thought that story were true / My heart would be light as a blackbird in a hawthorn bush].” The speaker does not believe the French alliance with the United Irishmen will help Irish-speaking communities. Although the 1798 Rebellion failed to establish Irish national independence, the speaker’s doubt does not extend to the success or failure of the United Irishmen’s actions. Rather, it calls into question a subordinating reliance on foreign aid, both in the dependence of the United Irishmen on the French in 1798 and the dependence of Lemassian modernization on foreign direct investments and European economic integration. Ó Riada states before reciting the last stanza of “Sliabh na mBan,” that “We have too long been looking for help from elsewhere” (Episode 14 23:55-24:00). This 37 I would like to thank Irish language instructor and Fulbright Scholar, Orla McCague, for helping me with the translation of this stanza. 119 final word from Ó Riada and the critique the poem delivers of a futile and denigrating dependence on foreign saviors indicates that Irish people should look to Irish cultural traditions for models of development. Ó Riada’s emphasis on the final stanza of the song and poem questions the story of Lemassian modernization to help the “Gaeil bhocht,” thereby demonstrating an alternative Irish modernity in the lived experience of Gaeltacht communities and their ongoing practice of sean-nós singing. Ó Riada’s notion of an alternative modernity reframes the aural ubiquity of Irish national radio as a space of resistance to international forms of development that seemed to overwhelm local traditions. Ó Riada’s examples of land agitation implicitly criticize alliances with foreign powers at the expense of Gaeltacht communities in the early 1960s when Lemassian modernization projects were altering rural life, culture, and environments through foreign direct investment in Ireland’s state resources, including good farmland. Changes to people’s relationships to land and their expectations for land acquisition in the 1960s implicitly emerge in several of Ó Riada’s references to land agitation in the eighteenth century. Ó Riada offers translations of some songs that refer to the eighteenth-century agrarian social movement, the Whiteboys (na Buachaillí Bána), to protest oppressive rents and evictions imposed on tenant populations. Relatedly, in one of the episodes on piping, Ó Riada offers a recording of Tomás Reck playing an air on the pipes, “Lament of Stalker Wallace,” a Whiteboy who was caught and hanged for his land agitation activities (Episode 6 19:00). Columns that Ó Riada wrote for The Irish Times also critique economic integration with Europe, most notably, the satire of Ireland joining the Common Market, “F-F-F-Foreigners.” This piece was written by Ó Riada in January, 1962, and it uses a the 120 motif of a pub conversation to respond to “aon scéal agat?” or “do you have a story?” (BL/PP/OR/645 61-64). These examples, as well as Ó Riada’s use of “Sliabh na mBan” after his final words on the program that “we have too long been looking for help from elsewhere,” indicate a resistance to “foreign” models of development, whether they come from Europe or even from state-led efforts towards national modernization in Irish- speaking communities (Episode 14 23:50-24:00). Rather, Ó Riada promotes Irish traditions as forms of progress that can flourish. Through financially valuing cultural practices, like Tóibín’s sean-nós singing on national radio, Ó Riada asserts a material shift in the focus of modernization in Ireland. Forms of modernization and modernity are implicit in Gaeltacht traditions, Our Musical Heritage indicates, and should be heeded nationally rather than erased by fetishized notions of tradition or a modernity defined largely by geopolitical hierarchies coming out of the Second World War. The way Ó Riada values oral traditions on national radio reframes modernity and specifically Irish forms of progress as ongoing innovations in cultural practice on the periphery of national and international notions of development. Reframing progress: An alternative modernity in Irish traditional music on national radio The oral traditions of Irish traditional music were seen as in danger of being overwhelmed by international economic modernization projects, including new media, cultural tourism, and resource development in the early 1960s. Such projects, Luke Gibbons shows, idealize Irish environments for industrial development and romanticize Irish cultural traditions into a static symbol of a lost civilization. Gibbons explains that 121 romanticized images of Ireland as an empty rural landscape have been promoted by both the Irish Development Authority (IDA) and the tourist board, Bord Fáilte, to advance economic development: “The implication here is that the dynamic image of Ireland as a high-tech paradise projected by the IDA is somehow incompatible with the image of Ireland as an unspoiled romantic paradise promoted by Bord Fáilte. […] [Yet] IDA promotional material […] actively perpetuate[s] the myth of romantic Ireland, incorporating both modernity and tradition within its frame of reference” (Transformations 86). These romanticized representations of Irish rural space as both a container of a premodern cultural past and an empty space ripe for development. They consequently justified national modernization projects that emulated forms of development that Ó Riada critiques in Our Musical Heritage. Ó Riada associates certain forms of development with European art and environments. Ó Riada emphasizes that “Traditional Irish art never adopted the Greco- Roman forms spawned by the Renaissance, which have indeed become the basis of European art. I refer specifically to the European notion of ‘development,’ a development which moves in a rising crescendo of tension with its end being a crisis, the resolution of which produces catharsis” (Episode 2 0:33-0:55). The space and time of what Ó Riada calls “the European notion of ‘development,’” implies a series of steps going from “tension” through “crisis” and ending in “catharsis.” The linearity implied by these phases of development signifies a teleology of development that outlines a singular path to modernity. This singular notion of modernity elides alternative routes for modernization to take as well as the potential for multiple or alternative modernities. 122 According to Ó Riada, Irish traditional music offers alternative forms of progress in the logic and structure of the tunes through ongoing ornamentation. In contrast to linear forms of development that Ó Riada associates with European art, Ó Riada describes Irish traditional music as a circular form of progress that is “fundamentally more realistic” because it “corresponds with real life” (Episode 2 2:58-3:01). Ó Riada asserts that this shape of Irish traditional music is analogous in shape to planetary systems, such as the rotations of the Earth: Every day the sun rises, every day it sets. Every day possesses the same basic characteristics, follows the same fundamental pattern, while at the same time each day differs from the next in its ornamentation of events. The particular events of each day are, to the basic pattern of days, as the particular ornamentation of each verse of a song is to the basic pattern of all the verses of that song (Episode 2 3:05-3:33). A single ornament in a song or tune contributes to an ongoing and dynamic tradition of Irish music that corresponds with “real life,” as Ó Riada vocally stresses on the radio program. The repetition of “fundamental pattern[s]” positions elements of Irish traditional music as part of a larger set of relations analogous to planetary systems. These fundamental patterns are based on three types of practice: “the variation principle,” “internal logic,” and “direct expression.” The variation principle implies that no two verses of a song can be sung the same way (Episode 1 21:44-23:12). Internal or interior logic, Ó Riada explains, is implicit in the form of Munster songs where a select set of intervals create the tune and can be varied using melismatic, intervallic, or rhythmic variation (Episode 3 5:57-7:15). Finally, Ó Riada details a concept called direct expression. “Direct expression” relies on the performer’s personal style within the aesthetic conventions of ornamentation in Irish traditional music (Episode 12 1:17-2:01, 2:30-2:40). 123 These three elements of Irish traditional music, according to Ó Riada, allow performers and the audience to draw on the tunes to socially negotiate cultural histories, practices, and conventions through ongoing innovations of ornamentation practices. The emphasis on the articulation of events through ornamentation in Ó Riada’s analogy reworks understandings of history as a linear sequence of events to a circularity that organically builds on each repetition over time. In contrast to the “European notion of development” in which events might fall into categories of “tension,” “crisis,” or “catharsis,” Ó Riada’s description of the role of ornamentation in the more circular structure of Irish traditional music situates events as part of ongoing interactions that have no beginning or end. Instead of leading to the product of “catharsis,” they draw on the resources of a given historical moment and the material surroundings to articulate their existence and assert agency. Ó Riada describes this process of articulating events through the practice of ornamentation as “the progress of tradition in Ireland,” and he compares the ongoing practice of ornamentation to a river: “You might compare the progress of tradition in Ireland to the flow of a river. Various foreign bodies may fall in, or be dropped in, or indeed thrown in, but they do not divert the course of the river, nor do they stop it flowing; it absorbs them, carrying them with it as it flows onwards” (Episode 1 2:08-2:24). The “progress of tradition in Ireland” is a seemingly never-ending flow that pushes back on teleological constructions of linear time through incorporating elements from surrounding material and cultural environments, “carrying them with it as if flows onwards.” While it indicates a kind of assimilation of ideas and influences, the “progress of tradition in Ireland” also demonstrates a dynamic and ongoing change implicit in Ó 124 Riada’s understanding of tradition that pushes back on understandings of tradition as fixed or static cultural practices. These ongoing and socially negotiated cultural conventions are implicit in the music itself and demonstrate alternative forms of progress. Ó Riada draws on particular recordings, like the Irish Folklore recordings of the Traveller (Mincéir) uilleann piper Johnny Doran, to offer “a continuous stream of every-varying music” that exemplifies a form of progress for the oral tradition of Irish music (Episode 7 26:30-26:33). Doran’s performance of the tune develops the tradition through innovations within shared cultural practices, which Ó Riada articulated as the variation principle, internal logic, and direct expression. The interaction between the performer, audience, and socio-historical context asserts a resilient form of music that develops in and through any and all potential material or cultural constraints. Ó Riada’s understanding of ornamentation in Irish traditional music reveals “a continuous stream of ever-varying music” that demonstrates an alternative modernity in the music itself through its constant innovations within the constraints of a specific historical context. The distinctions Ó Riada draws between “the progress of tradition in Ireland” and “European notions of development” on Our Musical Heritage indicate tensions between valuing process over product that inflect understandings of tradition and modernity. National shifts toward European economic integration operated on a logic of development to produce prosperity. However, the complex and contradictory history of modernizing land and culture in Ireland implicit in Ó Riada’s examples of Irish traditional music splinter conceptions of development in favor of a more multivalent notion of “the progress of tradition.” The ornamentation of Irish traditional music draws 125 on a shared set of aesthetic practices that operate through and consequently also assert an alternative logic for modernity. These ornamentation practices collectively innovate across a spectrum of exchange, from individual expression to wider regional and historical contexts. The music itself becomes what Guy Beiner termed a “social memory,” or “a process by which members of a community negotiate the identity of the society with which they are affiliated in relation to its past” (28). For instance, some of the piping and fiddle examples that Ó Riada offers mimic sounds of animals during hunting. In an example from the famous piper, Seamus Ennis, playing part of the tune, “The Fox Chase,” known as “The Lament for the Fox,” Ó Riada describes “You hear some very peculiar to piping effects in it [the tune], such as the imitation of the sound of the hounds yelping, the sound of the hounds barking, and so on” (Episode 6 27:22-27:49). Similar examples are given with the fiddle, where Johnny Doherty plays “The Fox Chase” and Patrick Kelly plays “The Foxhunter’s Reel,” both of which Ó Riada notes “imitat[e] all the sounds of the chase” (Episode 8 10:50-10:54). Like the oxymoron of the “untouched pasture,” these imitations of nonhuman sounds in a foxhunter’s chase indicate longer histories in which traditional practices of ornamentation modernize alongside and through complex histories of class, imperialism, and environmental management. Yet the example of fox hunting, which is largely associated with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, refers to a type of sport hunting in which killing the fox simply asserts dominance over the land, as the fox is not eaten. This assertion of dominance conjures up the complex history of class identities in Ireland that are closely associated with colonial projects. Fox hunting recalls eighteenth-century Ascendancy opulence, which historically 126 is in juxtaposition with the oppressive effects of the Penal Laws. The incorporation of the sounds of the fox hunt in Irish traditional tunes how music was, in Davis’s words, “involved in a dynamic relationship that began well before the eighteenth century. This relationship was transformed, however, by two interrelated phenomena that occurred during the eighteenth century: an increasing interest in the consumption of leisure and the growth of the printed music industry” (26). The history of Irish music in print media defined and divided music along class lines that have persisted in various iterations of folk and art music. Davis explains that “critics have tended to encourage the division of music of Ireland before the eighteenth century into two entirely separate traditions, setting up rigid boundaries between the ‘hidden Ireland’ of the Gaelic world and the Anglo-Irish world” (24). Ó Riada’s examples of the fox hunting tunes undermine the idea of “two entirely separate traditions” by showing Irish traditional tunes to replicate the sounds of an Ascendancy sport to dominate the landscape. In addition to collapsing categories dividing “the Gaelic world and the Anglo- Irish world,” Ó Riada’s example draws listeners’ attention to the nonhuman sounds of the fox hunt that fracture an emphasis on a single sound or view into multiple auralities and perspectives. The tunes include, “the hounds yelping, the sound of the hounds barking” to “imitat[e] all the sounds of the chase” (Episode 6 27:22-27:49; Episode 8 10:50-10:54). By encompassing the aurality of the hunting dogs, Irish traditional music emphasizes an aural experience of the entire context rather than focusing on a particular sound or sight associated with prestige or class. Ó Riada’s examples indicate that the frameworks through which Irish traditional music is historically categorized are reductive and 127 incomplete. Indeed, his examples indicate that these categories obscure the rich and complex histories captured in the form, content, and practice of performing the tunes and songs themselves. Ó Riada also drew on traditional music to write a brief history of fox hunting. Around the same time as Our Musical Heritage aired, Ó Riada wrote a column for the Irish Times entitled “Fox and Hounds,” in which he examined Irish-language songs to trace the history of hunting in Ireland. Ó Riada contends that Gaelic hunting ended with the surrender of John O’Dwyer in March 1652 at the end of the anti-Cromwellian war: “The boar-hunt, the wolf-hunt, the stag-hunt – all gone, all finished, ‘with O’Leary in the grave.’ All that remains is foxhunting” (BL/PP/OR/645 60). Ó Riada inverts literary representations of music by drawing on W.B. Yeats’s poem, “September 1913,” to describe that “Romantic Ireland’s [been] dead and gone” for longer than Celtic revivalists had previously envisioned; indeed, such an Ireland may never have existed as the nostalgic and vanished representation of a precolonial past. A history derived from musical sources reveals not a vanishing or dying culture as understandings of literary representations would suggest. Rather, using music as historiography reveals a rich history that continues to innovate as it changes over time. Fixating on particular representations of Irish traditional music in particular pieces of literature or in popular conceptions overlooks the histories it contains, as Ó Riada’s article goes on to show sound to be a form in which historical memory persists. This use of music as a historiographic method recalls Corkery’s notion of a “hidden Ireland,” or histories that often go unheeded due to the medium or form in which they exist (Laird 5). 128 By drawing on the songs and tunes as historical evidence, the imitation of the sounds of the hunt demonstrate the “progress of tradition in Ireland” (Episode 1 2:08- 2:24). Heeding the various components of tunes and songs, such as the “The Fox Chase,” “The Foxhunter’s Reel” and “Sliabh na mBan,” ruptures an understanding of history as linear and transcendent. Instead of a framework for understanding music that recognizes “a development which moves in a rising crescendo of tension with its end being a crisis, the resolution of which produces catharsis,” Ó Riada implicitly calls for a more comprehensive aural experience that hears and recognizes rival historical perspectives, both human and non-human, all participating in the ongoing negotiation of the tune through continuous ornamentation and variation (Episode 2 0:33-0:55). Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage thus demonstrates Irish traditional music to have innovated as a cultural practice for centuries and that continues to modernize through the ubiquitous but still relatively new medium of radio. The program formally and semantically pushes back on Lemassian forms of modernization that draw on the premodern-modern binaries that indicate a turning away from a feminine premodern past to inhabit a masculine modernity. Ó Riada’s intentionally fluid and contemporary articulations of Irish traditional music assert “the progress of tradition in Ireland” as an alternative modernity (Episode 1 2:08-2:24). This “progress of tradition in Ireland” challenges on national radio the understandings of national identity that would relegate traditional practices to a premodern past in an implicitly imperial logic promoting particular forms of economic modernization. 129 New media and modernities: The legacy of Our Musical Heritage in print and radio Subsequent iterations of Our Musical Heritage revised and reframed the content, thereby demonstrating shifting understandings of the role of music and broadcast media in defining place and identity during the Troubles and after the so-called Celtic Tiger. In 1982, the Dolmen Press worked with Ó Riada’s friend and renowned poet, Thomas Kinsella, to produce a substantially revised version of Our Musical Heritage with a selection of the recordings on accompanying LPs. The Dolmen Press grew out of the ongoing cultural negotiations of modernity and tradition after the Second World War. Beginning in 1951, a time when most Irish writers had to look abroad for publishers in England or the United States due to a dearth of Irish presses, the Dolmen Press founder, Liam Miller, was dedicated to fostering a specifically Irish literary scene emerging from the 1950s onwards. The press published the early work of and cultivated lasting relationships with poets, such as Kinsella and John Montague (Harmon 11). Dolmen Press’s shift from a literary focus to music in the revised version of Our Musical Heritage in print and LP reveals the influence that Ó Riada had on many Irish writers, including Kinsella. Yet this version of Ó Riada’s program also exposes the ways in which Ó Riada was memorialized were sometimes at odds with the historical dynamism he saw and promoted in Irish traditional music. The dynamism and political engagement Ó Riada recognized in Irish traditional music was embraced by many musicians in the Irish music revival of the 1970s. Albums like the 1978 H-Block, produced by activist and musician Christy Moore, indicated specific ways in which the Irish traditional music revival was aligning itself with forms of anti-colonial cultural formations in Irish history and anti-authoritarian politics associated 130 with folk music internationally, particularly coming out of the 1960s in the United States. H-Block asserts a solidarity between performers of Irish traditional music and republican political prisoners held in the Maze Prison in County Down, Northern Ireland. On this album, various Irish musicians (all men) perform traditional tunes and original songs that protest the treatment and criminalization of political prisoners. Tunes on the album, such as “Repeal the Union” or “The Rights of Man,” indicate the longer history of traditional tunes referring to moments of struggle, such as the Act of Union in 1801 and the cultural role of the French Revolution in Irish independence movements, respectively. These tunes were both performed on the album by flute player, Matt Molloy, who was asked the following year to join The Chieftains in 1979 (“Biography”). The presence of these tunes on H-Block demonstrates the cultural relevance of traditional music in contemporary struggles and alliances during the Troubles’ violent contestations of persisting colonial hierarchies in anti-Catholic forms of discrimination in Northern Ireland. Such a cultural relevance echoes examples, such as the story of foxhunting, that Ó Riada invoked on the Our Musical Heritage radio program to show Irish traditional music as both a model for historical change and a source of historiography. The album also includes original songs that describe protests by prisoners that led to the hunger strikes resulting, notably, in the death of Bobby Sands in 1981. For example, Mick Hanly’s song “On the Blanket” depicts the cruel treatment of prisoners in the Maze when they demanded to be treated like political prisoners and wear civilian clothes instead of prison uniforms, which visibly marked them as perpetrators of criminal offences. This use of Irish traditional music during the Troubles to support republican 131 movements demonstrates a complex, dynamic, and multifaceted cultural role for Irish traditional music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Such a dynamism would have been in keeping with Ó Riada’s understanding of Irish traditional music as a resource for documenting and understanding historical events through cultural practice. Moreover, the album draws on the ways in which Ó Riada inverted gendered narratives of a masculine-inflected modernity through its all-male performers.38 H-Block implicitly draws on elements in Ó Riada’s own understanding of the cultural relevance and active engagement of Irish traditional music with specific historical responses. This musical response in the late 1970s to intensifying violence, surveillance, and crisis in Northern Ireland thus reveals Irish traditional music to innovate cultural practices to politically participate in, as well as record specific events, occurring during the Troubles. In contrast, literary responses to the Troubles implicitly invoked work in Western classical traditions and explicitly drew on the legacy of Ó Riada after his death. The 1979 Dolmen Press publication, Fifteen Dead, by Kinsella, includes elegies to Ó Riada that appear after Kinsella’s “The Butcher’s Dozen,” which decries the injustice of Lord Widgery’s report on the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry. The report discriminatorily legitimates the murder of thirteen Civil Rights activists by paratroopers during a peaceful demonstration in Derry on January 30, 1972, or “Bloody Sunday” (53-58). Kinsella had “finished, printed, and published [“The Butcher’s Dozen”] within a week of the publication of the Widgery Report” (58). The poem expresses the acute anger at the injustice of the report, and, at moments, speaks directly to England: “England, the way to 38 The Fair Plé movement is a recent and positive reaction to the gender hierarchies implicit in narratives of modernity and the history of Irish traditional music: https://www.fairple.com 132 your respect / Is via murderous force, it seems; / You push us to your own extremes” (17). The poem’s rhyming lines in an AABB sequence are out of sync with the syntax of the sentences. The uneven syntax and rhyme formally assert a tension between competing systems. The injustice of the Widgery report outlined in Kinsella’s poem draws into sharp relief competing cultural conceptions of Irish identity that were challenged by the national lines drawn across the island of Ireland. The Troubles tested the Republic of Ireland’s assertion of a thirty-two county nation, because, as McCarthy explains, “while the Republic may assert its right to represent the entire nation, it also, in the exercise of that right, is compelled to recognise the Border, militarily, diplomatically, legally, in defence of its own sovereignty” (64). The Republic had to recognize the Northern Irish state to respond as a modern European nation to the violence of the Troubles. Indeed, the Troubles in Northern Ireland altered the Republic’s assertions of territorial sovereignty and its associated cultural identity through forms of violence that required international negotiations on security between Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The raw outrage in “The Butcher’s Dozen” contrasts sharply with the elegies Kinsella wrote for Ó Riada that subsequently appear in Fifteen Dead. The two poetic sequences that Kinsella wrote about Ó Riada after his death are “A Selected Life” (1972) and “The Vertical Man” (1973). These elegies offer a brief, single-stanza snapshot of Ó Riada playing a bodhran in 1962. The following poems present more extensive contemplations of the memory of Ó Riada. The second and third poems in “A Selected Life” describe Ó Riada’s wake and burial. “Vertical Man” was conceptualized during a kind of solitary second wake for Ó Riada that Kinsella had in his home in Philadelphia on the anniversary of Ó Riada’s death on October 3, 1972 (72). Tidying up after a day 133 working on an elegy for John F. Kennedy called “The Good Fight” (1973), Kinsella describes how he unexpectedly set the photograph of Ó Riada on the album, Vertical Man, next to Ó Riada’s death mask and a cast of his left hand, which Kinsella had in his possession, thereby “making a little altar” (72). Drinking Bourbon and listening to Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Kinsella explains how he came up with this elegy for Ó Riada, which became the poem, “The Vertical Man” (72). Kinsella’s poem is named after Ó Riada’s album Vertical Man, which itself draws on W. H. Auden’s poem for Christopher Isherwood for its title (73). The Vertical Man album, released in 1969, reveals the importance of Ó Riada to prominent Irish writers, like Kinsella, Montague, and Heaney. The album comprises poems from writers including Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and John Montague set to “a number of [Ó Riada’s] songs and the orchestral Hercules Dux Ferraiae,” which was Ó Riada’s tonal composition based on Schoenberg’s tonal system (73). While the “genesis” of “The Vertical Man” poem is, as Kinsella puts it, “one of the strangest of any poem [he had] written,” the poem’s form draws “on the poem [by Hans Bethge] used by Gustav Mahler in the opening movement of Das Lied von der Erde, or “the song of the Earth” (72, 73). These intertextual references between Western European musical and poetic traditions demonstrates Kinsella’s association of Ó Riada’s work with both Western classical forms for music and literature. The republication of Kinsella’s four poetic sequences together in the Fifteen Dead Dolmen Press collection in 1979 demonstrates the entanglement of cultural, political, and social crisis of the present which Ó Riada’s life and work recognized and attempted to counter. Positioning “The Butcher’s Dozen” alongside poems commemorating Ó Riada and John F. Kennedy in 1979 situates Ó Riada as a historical figure whose death is 134 indicative of the start of a crisis of modernity. Yet “crisis” was a formal part of European development, against which Ó Riada pushed through alternative models of progress that he saw in Irish cultural traditions. Inserting these elegies to Ó Riada in the middle of Fifteen Dead, between poems documenting Kinsella’s anger at the murder of the non-violent activists in Derry and commemorating Kennedy after his assassination, centers Ó Riada between Irish and international struggles. Kinsella’s focus on the ways in which the memory of Ó Riada was taken up in the unstable decades after his death and during the Troubles thus reveals the splintering of possible ways of interpreting Ó Riada’s life and work while fixing his legacy in the words on the page. This splintering of possible interpretations of Ó Riada’s life and work with both Western classical and Irish traditional music ironically memorializes Ó Riada’s promotions of alternative forms of modernization in Irish cultural traditions. Like Ó Riada’s position in Kinsella’s Fifteen Dead between national and international political engagement with the Troubles and Kennedy’s assassination, respectively, this later Dolmen Press publication reveals tensions between fixed understandings of supposedly premodern traditions and innovations in modernity that were increasingly debated in the 1980s and 1990s. This Dolmen Press publication of Kinsella’s poems consequently indicates ways in which the 1982 Dolmen Press edition of Our Musical Heritage responds to this period of social, political, and cultural upheaval by formally fixing Ó Riada’s program in text and on LPs. While the publication of Our Musical Heritage by Dolmen Press was certainly a recognition of Ó Riada’s lasting influence on Irish writers, the altered text, order, and selected recordings attest to changing conceptions of Irish identity, place, and 135 modernity. These changing understandings of identity and place in the modern world are most notable in the elision of numerous historical references. The Dolmen Press version of Our Musical Heritage omits references to historical events pertaining to land agitation or revolution. For example, Ó Riada translates the song, “Donnchadh Bán,” sung by Connemara singer Darach Ó Catháin. The song, as Ó Riada explains, is a sister’s “sad, bitter comment” on Donnchadh’s capture and subsequent hanging for his participation in the Whiteboys, na Buachaillí Bána (Episode 2 23:20-25:00). The song is on the LPs accompanying the printed version of the Dolmen Press edition, but only a brief introduction to the song exists, noting its title and that it “exemplifies the best features of the Connemara style” (34). Later in one of the episodes on piping, Ó Riada offers a recording of Tomás Reck playing an air on the pipes, “Lament of Stalker Wallace,” who was also one of the Whiteboys, na Buachaillí Bána (Episode 6 19:00). This recording and Ó Riada’s description of the story of Stalker Wallace are completely absent from the Dolman Press publication. Perhaps most notably, however, is the complete absence of “Sliabh na mBan,” the song that Ó Riada describes as “probably the most popular song to come from this region [the Déise Gaeltacht],” because “this song of the 1798 rising would move a stone to tears” (Episode 3 23:05-23:31). Moreover, Ó Riada played this song twice on the program, including to end the entire series. While the Dolmen Press publication implicitly asserts the relevance of Irish traditional music in cultural shifts occurring alongside the Troubles, it also memorializes Ó Riada’s original program and its understanding of a dynamic and modernizing Irish traditional music as part of a previous era. This contradictory cultural role of Ó Riada as representative of both innovating and 136 preserving Irish traditional music indicates a temporal tension in understandings of Irish cultural history as a dynamic present dependent on fixed understandings of the past. The 1982 Our Musical Heritage adaptation by Dolmen Press was produced at a moment when Irish traditional music was becoming increasingly recognized as a form of ethnic music internationally, a market trend that would lead to the creation of categories like Celtic and World music by the late 1980s and early 1990s. In contrast to Ó Riada’s conception of Irish traditional music as a dynamic practice, representations of Irish traditions as fixed cultural practices of a bygone era ironically legitimated economic modernization and resource development projects even as they implicitly deliberated how to preserve or revive musical traditions in the 1990s onwards. Seeming to carry on Ó Riada’s original project of “the progress of tradition in Ireland” at the start of the Celtic Tiger, Ó Súilleabháin founded the Irish World Music Academy at the University of Limerick in 1994 and produced the debated BBC television program, A River of Sound, in 1995, about how music is always changing and exchanging with other cultural traditions (Episode 1 2:08-2:24; Reiss 154-155). These assertions of cultural exchange and practice in debates about how much Irish traditional music can and should change emerge out of the Irish music revival, which Ó Riada’s innovation and valuation of Irish traditional music greatly influenced. Yet tensions between innovation and tradition intensified, as ethnomusicologist Scott Reiss explains, during the social changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger (153). Such cultural trends and debates have arguably informed musical forms and industries that are now global in scope, with Irish music concerts, sessions, and festivals occurring around the world. 137 Musicians and cultural studies scholars often trace the Irish music revival back to Ó Riada’s work with Ceoltóirí Chualainn and on national radio. In 2011 and 2012, RTÉ’s The Rolling Wave, hosted by Peter Browne, rebroadcast the entire series of Our Musical Heritage.39 The rebroadcast attests to particular understandings of Ó Riada’s influence on Irish traditional music and radio from the Irish music revival of the 1970s until today. During The Rolling Wave, Ó Riada’s original broadcasts are framed by conversations between Browne and renowned Irish musicians, including Ó Riada’s son Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes, Emer Mayock, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. As fiddle player, Dermot McLaughlin, notes, Ó Riada established a “critical vocabulary” for talking about Irish music at a time when it was not, as other musicians on the program point out, considered as advanced or artistic as jazz or classical (The Rolling Wave 29 January 2012; 8 January 2012; 20 November 2011; 26 February 2012; 4 March 2012).40 Ó Súilleabháin points out how Irish traditional music was not considered an artform worthy of consideration for arts council funding in the 1960s (The Rolling Wave 4 March 2012). The interviews reveal that while representations of Ó Riada and his work often draw on prevalent conceptions of fixed traditions that seemingly cannot change, these representations are countered by analyzing the examples of the dynamic and innovating traditions that Ó Riada demonstrates in his compositions and radio programs. Tracing the legacy of Ó Riada’s influence on Irish traditional music and Irish writers through the Dolmen Press adaptation and the rebroadcast of Our Musical 39 I would like to thank the RTÉ Sound Archives and Patricia Sweeney for enabling me to hear these programs. 40 During the rebroadcast of Our Musical Heritage in 2011 and 2012 on RTÉ Radio 1’s music program, The Rolling Wave, Dermot McLaughlin, who is a fiddle player and former director and board member of the Irish Traditional Music Archives (ITMA), said “Even in 2012, we’re still some way away from a critical vocabulary for talking about Irish traditional music. So in 1963, he’s ahead of his time” (The Rolling Wave 29 January 2012). 138 Heritage thus exposes some of the contrasting ways in which Irish poets like Kinsella and Irish traditional musicians, such as those recorded on Moore’s H-Block, engaged with political events, nationally and internationally. In doing so, it foregrounds the important influence of Ó Riada’s life, work, and legacy on Irish cultural production in the second half of the twentieth century. Conclusion: Understanding modernity through music on the radio: Seán Ó Riada’s overlooked intervention Ó Riada’s original broadcast of Our Musical Heritage articulates alternative understandings for tradition that complicate scholarly understandings of Ó Riada’s life and work, as well as the role of Irish traditional music in shaping social relations in material histories, from Lemassian modernization to the Troubles. Examples across Ó Riada’s oeuvre indicate forms of modernization in the 1960s with which Irish people listening to Irish national radio might engage. The original broadcast of Our Musical Heritage presented a specifically Irish conception of progress through the dynamic practices implicit in “the progress of tradition in Ireland” (Episode 1 2:08-2:24). Ó Riada’s conceptions of Irish traditional music arose alongside complex histories of colonialism, postcolonial identity formations, and oppositional or fixed understandings of Irish cultural traditions. These formations both invoke and push back on imperial logics of essentialism to assert ephemeral environments of “orally transmitted music” that recognized the ways in which Irish traditional music destabilized complex social and material interactions and relations across history. Through intersections of music and radio in the 1960s, alternative paths for Irish modernity emerge in Our Musical Heritage 139 that continue to inform the ongoing innovation of Irish traditional music across media today. Ongoing negotiations of cultural identity during European integration and the Troubles drew on both the past and the present. The negotiations of tradition and modernity in national identity formations have been widely studied in literary writers, like Kinsella and Friel. Although Friel and Ó Riada never finished their opera, Grania, Friel did write a play about Hugh O’Neill, a character which would have played a formative role in Grace O’Malley’s transformation in the unfinished opera. Friel’s later play on O’Neill, Making History, was first performed in 1988, and it exposes the way in which the past is crafted to speak explicitly to current events and understandings of identity. Like Ó Riada’s reframing of Irish traditional music, Friel’s Making History engages the idea of an indigenous cultural practice as being internationally recognized. Yet these cultural practices are selectively curated to reveal more about the present than the past. For example, the character of Archbishop Lombard in Making History writes the history of Hugh O’Neill, but Lombard’s version of O’Neill is as a national hero rather than the complex and deeply human character the play itself depicts him to be. While the character of O’Neill appeals to Lombard to tell the truth about him and give his “New English,” Anglo and Protestant wife, Mabel, a more prominent role in the history, Lombard dismisses O’Neill’s requests as not being what future Irish people will want from their national history: “all those ladies you chose as your wives – splendid and beautiful and loyal though they undoubtedly were – well, they didn’t contribute significantly to – what was it Mabel herself used to call it? – to the overall thing – wasn’t 140 that it? […] But in the overall thing, Hugh…How many heroes can one history accommodate?” (336). Lombard ironically reveals in his erasure of women as agents of Irish history how Anglo-Irish Mabel contributed to Lombard’s own way of thinking about “the overall thing,” or the history of Ireland. Moreover, the character of Mabel explicitly tells O’Neill not to ally himself with the Spanish, saying “Spain is using you” (297). This warning implies that a different history would have taken place if O’Neill had listened to Mabel and not allied himself with foreign powers, something Ó Riada critiqued, for instance, in columns in The Irish Times and through the song, “Sliabh na mBan,” in Our Musical Heritage. Friel’s later play thus reveals a shift in Friel’s thinking that brings him closer to assertions of identity formation that Ó Riada’s work revealed in the early 1960s. In 1968, it is hard to tell if Friel recognized the complex exchanges and influences shaping the history and culture in the same way that Ó Riada did, despite his “intuition that our attitudes to the country that made us are very close” (BL/PP/OR 185 1). Friel describes the complicated tensions arising in national identity formations in the late 1960s in one of his last letters to Ó Riada about their unfinished collaboration on Grania: We should implicitly encourage the analogy with any modern emerging state – a tribal country on the verge of discovering its national identity, fighting for its material and spiritual life against a powerful country that is convinced it is God- directed. And against this backdrop, small groping lives are lived in wonder and misery and joy and dedication and meanness (BL/PP/OR/ 185 23). Friel assumes the “discover[y]” of “national identity” in the “tribal country’s” struggle “for its material and spiritual life” in a way that indicates the ongoing construction of cultural identity within the material constraints of modernity and forming a geopolitically recognizable nation states. While this assumption is not at odds with Ó Riada’s 141 understanding of Irish traditional music as a cultural practice that emerges relationally within particular customs and historical contexts, it marginalizes what Ó Riada’s frameworks foreground, something that Friel seems to recognize later through the character of Lombard in Making History. In the leadup to the Battle of Kinsale in the play, Lombard tells O’Neill that the Pope supports the Irish resistance to the English, and Lombard asserts how this means “that we are no longer a casual grouping of tribes but a nation state united under the Papal colours” (291). Lombard’s character exposes precisely the formations of national identity that Friel initially seemed to want to foreground in Grania. In contrast, Making History uses Lombard’s character to critique formations of cultural essentialism. Mabel and her apt warning to O’Neill complicate these formations of cultural essentialism as the play explicitly writes her out of history because of her different ethno-religious background and gender. Both Friel and Ó Riada ultimately seem to have seen the formation of an Irish nation to be less about “discovering […] national identity” than about a long history of cultural interaction, competition, and integration. This shift in Friel’s thinking about formations of Irish national identity supports some of the ideas he may have been forming in the late 1960s. Such ideas suggest why he may have wanted to collaborate with Ó Riada, whose work ruptures frameworks that would essentialize Irish cultural practices and national identity. Some of the examples Ó Riada offered on Our Musical Heritage explicitly demonstrate the interrelated material histories through which Irish traditional music dynamically emerged and continues to innovate. For instance, Ó Riada credits Carl Hardebeck for helping to preserve Irish music: “Hardebeck, though a German, brought to 142 Irish music an understanding and a musicality which were conspicuous at a time when the academic study of Irish music was practically unknown. […] They stimulated interest in the study of Irish music at a time when such an interest was badly needed” (BL/PP/OR 554 24; Episode 1 6:30-7:00). Ó Riada’s clause, “though a German,” complicates predominant conceptions of Germany’s relationship to Ireland in the early 1960s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ireland’s depressed economy enabled foreign nationals to purchase land when Irish people could not, which led to the 1965 Land Act (Dooley 182). In the years leading up to the 1965 Land Act, there were, to use Mervyn O’Driscoll’s words, “countless questions about land sales to ‘foreigners’, chiefly identified (and frequently incorrectly) as ‘Germans’, put by backbenchers and Opposition TDs in Dáil Éireann during the 1960s” (529). Although most land purchases by foreign nationals were by English and American buyers, popular concerns about Germans in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s arose through international critique from US and British governments, which indicated fears about Ireland’s moral allegiances in their neutrality during the Second World War (O’Driscoll 538, 529).41 This example articulates on national radio that Irish traditional music was historically recognized and valued internationally in the eighteenth century. This pushes back upon revivalist understandings of, in Davis’s words, “the Gaelic world” as premodern. It also indicates ongoing cultural interactions that continue to shape Irish cultural traditions. 41 This situation was complicated, as O’Driscoll explains, by a “flaw in Irish legislation which permitted foreign national to buy property in Ireland without having residence qualifications” (534). This ended up being the case for some former Nazis who had been acquitted by the Nuremberg trials, for example, Otto Skorzeny (533-534). While the nationality of land purchases was not recorded, the Irish cultural imaginary believed many people and companies from England and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) were buying up agricultural land, concerns that were addressed to a degree in the 1965 Land Act, which required residence of seven years prior to purchase (531, 538). 143 Ó Riada’s thinking on these interrelated cultural histories emerge also in an unpublished manuscript from 1969 where Ó Riada articulates some of his concerns at recent events in Northern Ireland. Ó Riada describes his idea of Ireland as thirty-two counties, but he asserts that the Troubles are not about ethno-religious divisions, noting that “the Protestants of the North are not our enemy; they, too, are Irishmen. Any group of people living in this country for over three hundred years is surely to be regarded as Irish” (BL/PP/OR/250 2). Ó Riada’s implicit assertion of multiple Irish ethnicities, or groups with shared cultural practices, across the island of Ireland reframes fixed constructions of tradition and atavistic understandings of ethnicity as dynamic producers of rival narratives of place, territory, and history that comprise a nation. This idea is in keeping with assertions Ó Riada made about the Irish language on Our Musical Heritage in 1962: “such foreign influences as were felt were quickly absorbed and Gaelicized […] Norman, Latin and English loan-words were absorbed into the Irish language, and henceforth treated as though they had always been Gaelic words, submitting to Gaelic declension, conjugation, etc.” (Episode 1 1:33-1:38, 1:45-1:57).42 Ó Riada indicates that cultural formation is a form of assimilation over time that does not erase cultural differences between groups even as they form one language. Such tensions among rival conceptions of tradition, national identity, and ethnicity thus existed simultaneously in the fragmented aural practice and performance of Irish traditional music on national radio. The medium and content of the original Our Musical Heritage 42 Given that the Northern Irish state reached an impasse about the Irish language in 2017, Ó Riada’s assertion of Irish identity as a kind of melting pot of a Gaelic ethnic identity would not have been welcome by many Northern Irish Protestants in the 1960s and 1970s or even today in many areas of Northern Ireland. 144 series demonstrates the ongoing cultural negotiation of Irishness that refused definitions of fixed tradition or identity even as it seemed to assert them in the 1960s. The more popular rather than artistic venues that Ó Riada chose associate understandings of highly complex and developed artistic forms within Irish traditional music and national radio, both of which were seen as less important than more internationally recognized forms of art. Yet Ó Riada drew on this ubiquitous aural medium to assert alternative forms of progress in the practice of Irish traditional music that would emphasize the mundanities of everyday life rather than the grand narratives of national struggle, something Friel would do with Making History but sought to avoid in Grania. Studying Ó Riada’s life and work consequently helps us to better understand shifting constructions of national and cultural identity in Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. These dynamic formations of place and identity recall Ó Riada’s words that “the particular events of each day are, to the basic pattern of days, as the particular ornamentation of each verse of a song is to the basic pattern of all the verses of that song” (Episode 2 3:05-3:33). The “fundamental pattern[s]” of cultural survival emerge in their ongoing practice rather than in the transcendent moment of “discovery” of a national identity or in the “catharsis” moment of a piece of music. Ó Riada’s alternative understandings of the role of Irish traditional music in the ongoing and organic construction of cultural identity and material histories reframe scholarly understandings of essentialist or atavistic notions of Irish cultural identity. Upon closer inspection, Ó Riada’s work revises the definitions of nation and tradition that we still invoke to conceptualize formations of self-determination in Ireland today. In doing so, it 145 also reworks scholarly conceptions of Ó Riada, aligning Ó Riada’s work in music alongside prominent literary figures like Friel and Kinsella. 146 Chapter 5: Interrupting Neocolonial Modernity: Post-Apocalyptic Modernities of Resilience in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House In contrast to alternative forms of development that seemed possible in the decades after independence, modernization projects of the late twentieth century establish the context for the nuclear disaster in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s eco-apocalypse novel, The Bray House (1990). The story extends political and social conflicts of 1980s Ireland into a future twenty-first century. Amid early discussions of the climate crisis, proliferating nuclear technologies, and the Troubles, the text calls attention to how the history of colonialism is transforming into a neocolonial modernity through geopolitical hierarchies of an integrating Europe. The Bray House begins after nuclear disaster has killed nearly everyone in Ireland and covered the island with a layer of radioactive dust. Adding a discursive layer to the nuclear fallout is Ní Dhuibhne’s unreliable, megalomaniac narrator, Robin Lagerlof, a Swedish expert in “archaeo-anthropology,” which is an amalgamation of training from her mentor, Per Bishop, in archaeology and her own notion of anthropology, which she describes as a “pseudo-science that any intelligent person can learn in a week” (79). Using her own pseudo-scientific framework, Robin seeks to be the leading authority over the memory of Ireland and Irish culture, a position that highlights ongoing binary logics in which a modern author asserts expertise over a very recent Irish past. The nuclear explosion and the subsequent obliteration of Ireland emerge in the novel as structurally dependent on the continuation of colonial histories of uneven development, displacement, and material and cultural dispossession in an emerging neocolonial modernity. Robin’s overbearing presence in the text depicts a neocolonial worldview that relies on reductive stereotypes of Ireland’s relationship to its colonial past 147 and the violent contestations of colonial occupation during the Troubles. Through Robin’s narration and the coating of nuclear fallout blanketing the entire island of Ireland, The Bray House demonstrates how neocolonial discourse masks subordinating colonial power relations through incomplete and outdated understandings of territorial sovereignty and technological expertise upon which neocolonialism structurally relies. In doing so, the novel critiques the Republic of Ireland’s focus on foreign direct investment (FDI) after the 1960s as actively entrenching the material impacts of empire to facilitate a neocolonial modernity in 1980s Ireland. Yet beneath the layers of toxic ash and Robin’s neocolonial discourse, Ní Dhuibhne reveals dynamic cultural relationships with the material environment that indicate the possibility of more just futures. Despite the explicit references in The Bray House to environmental degradation and threats to sovereignty posed by nuclear power and climate change, scholars have yet to explore these elements in Ní Dhuibhne’s novel through an ecocritical lens.43 Analyzing The Bray House through postcolonial ecocriticism builds on postcolonial readings like those of Derek Hand and Beth Wightman to reveal Ní Dhuibhne’s critique of neocolonial economic regimes in 1980s Ireland. Postcolonial ecocriticism facilitates an analysis of uneven development and alternatives to such development in The Bray House. These 43 While scholars like Susan Cahill and Jesse Bordwin analyze elements of materiality in the novel, including the body and the objects Robin documents in her excavation report, respectively, others like Carol Morris, Elke D’Hoker, and Jacqueline Fulmer have focused on how formal elements like genre, narrative voice, and folkloric storytelling in The Bray House engage with feminist theory and perspectives to resist patriarchy. The overt intertextual references in the novel to Robinson Crusoe are examined in separate analyses by Derek Hand and Beth Wightman to critique discursive colonial structures, which Constanza del Río draws out in her use of psychoanalysis to illuminate the imperialist agenda in the novel’s critical representations of ethnography and anthropology. Although Gerry Smyth asserts that The Bray House develops ecocritical themes through its explicit references to environmental degradation, Smyth does not analyze these themes in his overview of contemporary novels. 148 alternative forms of development in the novel reveal ways of knowing embedded just below the surface of the seemingly obliterated landscape and Robin’s flawed logic. Indigenous feminist scholarship helpfully elucidates the novel’s critique of ongoing colonial and neocolonial hierarchies that obscure an underlying cultural consciousness embedded in the land itself. As my analysis will explain, Ní Dhuibhne points to colonial contexts in Ireland in which indigenous Gaelic peoples were forcibly removed from their homelands. These contexts bring into sharp relief alternative and oppressed ways of knowing that reverberate in Irish understandings of place and history in the 1980s. While colonialism in Ireland and ongoing forms of settler colonialism in the Americas are not commensurate, I draw on Indigenous scholarship in keeping with Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill’s assertion that Indigenous theories offer important forms of knowledge for studying non-Indigenous historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on Qwo-Li Driskill, Arvin et al. write “that those who are generally supportive of Indigenous causes but feel that their research has nothing whatsoever to do with Indigenous issues may need to reassess what Indigenous theories are actually concerned with. […] [S]uch theories are much more expansive than many non-Indigenous peoples have been led to think” (27). It is in this vein of valuing the important forms of knowledge that Indigenous theories offer to critique colonial and neocolonial understandings of land as property and sovereignty as territory that I draw on Indigenous feminist theories and scholars in this chapter. Reading Ní Dhuibhne’s text through postcolonial ecocriticism and an Indigenous feminist lens reveals an underlying cultural consciousness embedded in the land that demonstrates alternative and multiple modernities emerging alongside histories of 149 colonialism and neocolonial economic modernization. Ultimately, The Bray House evokes dimensions of specifically Irish cultural consciousness persisting in material environments. In doing so, the novel imagines more just futures in the protective spaces the land and its memory offer in the wake of neocolonial modernity’s horrific collapse in the novel. “Wastelanding” Peoples and Places: Writing and Erasing the Competing Histories of Neocolonial Modernity The nuclear disaster in The Bray House engages with fears Irish people had about nuclear energy facilities in Britain that intensified in the 1980s. Combined with heightened awareness of the destruction nuclear facilities could cause after the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986, nine different accidents at the nuclear processing plants Sellafield (originally called Windscale) and Calder Hall in Cumbria, UK, leaked radioactive materials into the Irish Sea during 1986 (McDermott 191).44 These apparently unrelated incidents built on a history of skepticism in Ireland about the safety of Sellafield (Windscale) since its creation in the early 1950s, about which the Republic of Ireland had little say during Anglo-US relations after the Second World War. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL) researched acceptable levels of risk of nuclear contamination on public health before Sellafield (Windscale) began depositing radioactive material into the Irish Sea in June of 1952 via a two-mile, double pipeline, a practice that continued through the late twentieth century (McDermott 97, 181). The Windscale fire of 1957 established early concerns about the risk of nuclear energy as nuclear technology began 44 I would like to thank Dr. John Conlan, a fellow participant in the 2018 Notre Dame IRISH Seminar, who first pointed out to me the prominent role Sellefield played in the Irish cultural imaginary in the 1980s. 150 to play a surprisingly prominent role in Anglo-Irish politics pertaining to modernization projects and potential economic integration with Northern Ireland before the Troubles. The politics around nuclear technology and energy in Ireland inflect debates about how the Republic of Ireland should position itself as an independent nation in emerging geopolitical hierarchies during the Cold War, European economic integration, and anti- colonial and civil rights movements occurring in Northern Ireland and globally. In the 1960s, Seán Lemass initiated economic modernization projects that indicate conceptions of political autonomy shifting from territorial boundaries to international flows of finance capital. After nearly fifty years of political impasse over partition, which established Northern Ireland in the six northeastern counties of the island and the Republic of Ireland in the remaining twenty-six counties, Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and Taoiseach Seán Lemass met in January 1965. At this historic meeting between the two heads of state, O’Neill and Lemass apparently discussed a joint nuclear power station near Lough Neagh (McDermott 118).45 Lemass’s meeting with O’Neill recognized Northern Ireland as a separate state, which indicates shifting conceptions of national autonomy in the Republic of Ireland that implicitly rework Ireland’s relationship to its colonial past through its subordinate position in neocolonial economic regimes. While mid-twentieth century forms of anti-colonialism, civil rights, and national independence movements occurred throughout European and US colonies and settler-colonies, including in Northern Ireland, the globalizing economy and decentralized networks of capital 45 This echoes sentiments that Lemass had expressed in an early speech as Taoiseach to the Dáil in July of 1959, where he suggested the possibility of a joint nuclear power facility between the Republic and Northern Ireland as a way of furthering economic collaboration between the two countries (Kennedy 105- 106). Nuclear power in Irish politics was seen in the 1960s as a way of meeting increasing energy demands, which arose when various industries, including mining and tourism, heightened electricity consumption (Shiel The Quiet Revolution 200, 201, 210, 235, 243, 251). 151 established neocolonial geopolitical hierarchies that continued to unevenly distribute the benefits and burdens of extraction economies. By the 1970s and 80s, atomic energy had become a topic of intense political debate and social activism in Ireland, and this activism was in ongoing conversation with the civil rights and social justice movements in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. The environmental movement in Ireland grew in the 1970s, and Greenpeace became increasingly active in Ireland in the 1980s as fears about nuclear contamination from Sellafield potentially causing leukemia or Down’s syndrome pervaded the Irish cultural imaginary, though not enough scientific data existed to confirm these fears.46 The proposed Carnsore Point nuclear facility in Wexford, promoted by Liam Cosgrave during the oil crises of the 1970s, was never realized due to protests, including resistance from prominent Irish musicians and activists like Christy Moore (McDermott 121; Ferriter 531; Sweeney 144-145, 151). Although Lemass’s modernization occurred under the more pro-republican party, Fianna Fáil, Liam Cosgrave was of the conservative Fine Gael party, and he promoted of nuclear power throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s to expand the Republic of Ireland’s economic ties with Britain and the United States. The proposed Carnsore Point project echoes politics of Cosgrave’s father, William T. Cosgrave, whose 46 Although research was being done on survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan after WWII, long- term exposure to radiation was not as well documented, nor were the effects known about intergenerational exposure or exposure to multiple environmental contaminants, such as pesticides, alongside radioactive substances (Brown 308, 310; Kenny 32-33). The 1983 documentary film, Windscale: The Nuclear Laundries, attests to heightened concerns about the risk of nuclear contamination on people and environments, and such concerns persist, which programs such as Frontier Film’s 2006 docudrama, Fallout, demonstrate (RTÉ Archives, Tapes 315047, 315182). Anglo-Irish debates about Sellafield culminated with Ireland bringing an unsuccessful international court case against Britain in 2002 through the OSPAR Commission and the UN Law of the Sea for the environmental damage caused by Sellafield (McDermott 258; Cullen).While the Republic of Ireland was unsuccessful in these legal challenges, Sellafield is set to close in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and outbreaks of COVID-19 among the facility employees (Ambrose). 152 elite pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal party governed Ireland in the first decade after independence, and in McDermott’s words, “directed [its relations with Britain] towards portraying Ireland as a responsible dominion within the imperial fold” (24). While a nuclear power plant was never built on the island of Ireland, Ní Dhuibhne’s representation of an ultimately disastrous nuclear project in Northern Ireland raises questions about whether economic integration with Britain and the USA would exacerbate existing social inequalities in Ireland that arise from its history as a British colony. The Bray House exposes ongoing colonial hierarchies that persist in 1980s Ireland despite the apparent advancements that economic modernization promised to bring. Notwithstanding the gravity of nuclear systems destroying all of Ireland, the media coverage of the Ballylumford “Incident,” as the media calls the nuclear explosion in the novel, tries to “scapegoat” the accident on the IRA, which Robin assesses “to be too obvious a choice” (37, 62). Although Robin’s narration is generally unreliable and biased, her critique of the media in this instance is ironically correct. Through this irony, Ní Dhuibhne critiques how euphemistic terminology conceals complex constellations of colonial power hidden beneath mainstream media representations of the Irish state’s relationships with Britain and the United States. The reference to the IRA indicates the Troubles, which itself is a euphemism for the armed conflict between Irish nationalist groups, including the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA, and Loyalist paramilitary organizations, such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, with which British state forces, like the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), are known to have regularly colluded, most 153 famously perhaps in the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane (Lentin et al. 156).47 While the IRA remained active in Ireland since partition and partial independence in 1922, their armed resistance intensified in the late 1960s in response to the police violence against Northern Irish civil rights activists. The civil rights movement called for an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, for example, in housing, education, healthcare, and employment, but peaceful demonstrations were brutally oppressed, notably on Bloody Sunday in 1972, when thirteen people were killed by British forces. Given the social and environmental discrimination against Catholic populations in Northern Ireland, distrust of BNFL data and British assurances of the safety of Sellafield and Calder Hall existed alongside the complex and violent contestations of power in the Troubles. Robin’s ironic correction of mainstream media for inaccurately blaming the IRA for the nuclear disaster obliquely points to how euphemisms, like “the Incident” and “the Troubles,” mask multiple layers of colonial and neocolonial power, social justice activism, and anti-colonial conflict that come into sharp relief through the nuclear explosion in the novel. Ní Dhuibhne’s novel obliquely draws out the complexity of colonial power relations persisting in both the Troubles and the neocolonial modernity of 1980s Ireland through the location of the nuclear explosion in the text. The disaster in the novel emanates from Northern Ireland, beginning at the fictional nuclear power plant at Ballylumford and spreading across the Irish Sea to the actual nuclear energy and processing plants of Calder Hall and Sellafield. The location of the fictional nuclear explosion in Ballylumford, Northern Ireland, demonstrates an implicit cultural 47 The IRA splintered into the Official and the Provisional IRA in late 1969 (Hanley et al. 145). The reference to “the IRA” in the novel is therefore necessarily ambiguous and reductive. 154 expectation of spectacular displays of violence emanating from the Troubles. By giving the reader an enormous nuclear explosion, Ní Dhuibhne, to use the words of Rob Nixon, “help[s] us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer” (15). Through the geography of the explosion, Ní Dhuibhne calls the reader’s attention to less visible forms of power implicit in a neocolonial modernity that builds on colonial power relations. The nuclear disaster in The Bray House occurred, like that of Three Mile Island (TMI), through a series of human errors in which “experts” were “unable to cope with a technology which was rapidly becoming almighty” (63). Like colonial hierarchies and their afterlife in Ireland’s neocolonial modernity, the seemingly invisible nuclear technologies attain an agency to act within systems that are out the control of even the supposed authorities. Ní Dhuibhne points to how such systems structurally marginalize Irish interests in late twentieth century Anglo-Irish-US relations. The Bray House reveals the interrelated and ongoing histories of colonial occupation and neocolonial modernization through the silent Irish Taoiseach after the nuclear disaster in the novel. Even after the entire island and its people, north and south, are destroyed, by the nuclear explosion, the nameless Irish premier remains silent. Rather, the Thatcher-like British Prime Minister, Ms. Elizabeth Bennett, fills this silence with her statement from California “where she was at a meeting with the President of the United States and the Irish premier, to discuss, ironically enough, the question of a new Anglo- Irish-American agreement” (64). The geopolitical marriage of Britain and the United 155 States echoes longer histories of the institution of marriage to control and reproduce the distribution of wealth and property. It also uncannily foreshadows the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the Troubles in 1998, and was facilitated by the US through the Clinton Administration. The silence of the Irish premier in the novel registers the infantilizing and subordinate role into which the young postcolonial nation is forced, marginalizing its interests even when diplomatic discussions are directly about Ireland. Unable to represent his people’s interests or even their memory after they have been killed in a coerced nuclear modernity, the Irish premier stands silently next to the paternalistic leaders of the United States and Britain. The fictional Irish premier’s silence in The Bray House reveals a crisis of national representation within shifting constructions of geopolitical and planetary-scale power in which ongoing forms of colonialism combine with emerging neocolonial modernities in the 1970s and 80s. This silent premier in the novel implicitly critiques Taoiseach FitzGerald’s own silence on the issue of Sellafield during the negotiations and signing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Treaty, even when the majority of Irish people historically opposed nuclear technology in the 1980s (McDermott 278; Ní Dhuibhne 64-65).48 Indeed, the premier’s silence indicates prevalent concerns that many activists in the 1980s had about the Republic’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) and the forms of modernization that would entail (Hanley et al. 207, 243, 277). Ní Dhuibhne’s novel exposes how forms of economic integration entailed selling off natural and cultural resources, including the physical and intellectual labor of Irish people, to Britain and the 48 During the coalition government of the mid-1980s, FitzGerald’s concerns about rising support for Sinn Féin led him to make concessions about the possibility of a united Ireland that aligned Fine Gael more with their coalition partner, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) (Sweeney 348). 156 United States, as well as accepting constraints on national autonomy within a subordinate position in geopolitical hierarchies that actively perpetuate colonial power relations in postcolonial Ireland. Drawing on flawed colonial representational tropes parading as authoritative forms of knowledge, like her made-up field of archaeo-anthropology, Robin asserts the right to write Ireland’s history in the Taoiseach’s silence. Despite the Taoiseach being an actual Irish person who could articulate what Robin feigns to research, Robin’s narration dominates the novel and openly ignores anything Irish people might have to say about Ireland before the nuclear disaster. Robin points out that the Irish premier was in California at the time of the “Incident,” indicating that there is at least one Irish person who could “tel[l] the story” of Ireland, but the Irish premier’s silence in the novel gives Robin the opportunity to tell whatever story of Ireland she wants: “It’s only when there’s nobody telling the story, nobody writing it, indeed, when nobody has ever written it, that archaeologists need to step in” (249). The material evidence Robin finds to support her narrative of Ireland sustains her authority and the power relations that put her in a position of authority in the first place, and the Taoiseach’s silence supports this narrative. The “Anglo-Irish-American agreement” and the silent Taoiseach after the destruction of the entire island of Ireland by nuclear disaster expose how international economic and security alliances privilege certain places and communities in geopolitical hierarchies while rendering others disposable, even within sovereign territorial boundaries. Traci Brynne Voyles describes this process as “wastelanding,” which “renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable” (9). The Bray House critiques how economic reforms in the Republic of Ireland since the 1960s establish 157 alliances between the postcolonial state and neocolonial power structures that guarantee the national security of those who control nuclear technologies. The Republic of Ireland’s subordinate position within Britain and US relations exposes how security alliances “wasteland” the entire island of Ireland. During the Cold War, nuclear technology in Anglo-US politics played a prominent role, and Ireland’s overwhelming opposition to nuclear power by the 1980s was largely ignored. The national boundaries that international alliances supposedly protect actually work to unevenly distribute the benefits and burdens of this post-nuclear neocolonial modernity across postcolonial nations, like the Republic of Ireland, and subordinated populations in settler colonies, including Northern Ireland. Although many former colonies obtained national independence or partial forms of territorial sovereignty in the latter decades of the twentieth century, Ní Dhuibhne’s novel reveals the ongoing subordination of Ireland’s intellectual, physical, and natural resources to benefit a globalizing economy dominated by colonial nations. By depicting the Taoiseach’s curtailed autonomy to even speak for the memory of Irish people after the fictional nuclear disaster, The Bray House points to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland’s marginalization in negotiations that directly impacted people and environments in Ireland. Ní Dhuibhne connects the dystopian future in the novel with the longer history of British colonialism in Ireland and neocolonial forms of occupation through FDI and environmental degradation in Lemassian modernization since the 1960s. The Bray House draws on the politics of nuclear energy in the 1980s to expose how such forms of modernization reinforce neocolonial hierarchies that perpetuate colonial-era social inequalities, both economically and in terms of environmental risk, 158 despite perceived or attempted gains by anti-colonial and civil rights movements. Through this connection between postcolonial independence, partition, and a neocolonial modernity, the text emphasizes persisting colonial power relations, including the anti- Catholic discrimination in the North, as well as the Republic’s economic relations with Britain, an integrating Europe, and the USA, that cumulatively exacerbate the disastrous environmental impacts of empire. The novel’s obliterated Ireland signifies how colonial hierarchies reach far deeper into neocolonial social and geopolitical relations than understandings of territorial sovereignty or state autonomy. Both within national boundaries dividing the island of Ireland and across geopolitical economic relations, The Bray House shows Ireland’s neocolonial modernity to be the toxic fallout of centuries of colonization. Managing Time and Space: The Personal and Professional Logics of Empire The neocolonial modernity and economic modernization that permit the destruction of the entire island of Ireland show how the history of colonialism is not over but rather perpetuates through material, discursive, and interpersonal relations into an apocalyptic future. By drawing broader connections among the history of colonialism, the Troubles, economic modernization, and a neocolonial modernity in Ireland in the late twentieth century, The Bray House critiques the systems of Western scientific knowledge and technological advancements that allow Robin to assert her megalomaniac authority over vast expanses of time and territory. After the nuclear explosion, Robin sails to Ireland on the ironically named Saint Patrick with her colleague, Karen, and two junior archaeologists, Karl and Jenny, to “discover what, if any, fragments had survived the 159 disaster” (109). Yet rather than a voyage of discovery, Robin only asks questions for which she already has answers, however flawed. Robin revises and reorders materials and information to assert scholarly advancements that privilege her individual success. Robin uses the prestige of archaeology and its studies of ancient civilizations to legitimate her own narrative of Ireland. The use of material evidence in archaeology helped construct a cultural identity in Ireland before and after independence, as Patrick Carroll explains: “The study of archaeological material culture played an important role in the development of colonial nationalism and patriotism and later also republican nationalism, and therefore the Irish state-idea” (151). The material and cultural elements that support state formation in an independent Ireland draw on the idea of an ancient civilization to value modern Irish culture. Robin strategically manipulates this valuation of the past by describing Ireland after the nuclear disaster as a place and time “more different […] from, say, the Middle Ages” (108). She goes on to assert that “what is archaic is entirely subjective,” thereby undermining the implied objectivity of her academic discipline to study an ancient past (108). Robin inserts a false temporal distance between an ancient past and the apocalyptic present in the novel to justify her work. Collapsing the Middle Ages with the post-nuclear disaster exposes how Robin’s archaeo-anthropology relies on imperial logics that impose understandings of time as linear and space as territory to promote development (Mohanty 121). Robin’s attempt to divide a very recent past from the apocalyptic present calls the reader’s attention to how imperial-era conceptions of time as linear and space as territory persist in the neocolonial modernity emerging through political contestations and economic development in 1980s Ireland. Robin strategically uses imperial logics of time and territory to retell Ireland’s 160 history. She fills the multivalent political silences of an apocalyptic future with outdated colonial, patriarchal, and eugenics tropes. Robin’s colonial discourse explicitly reduces to atavistic stereotypes the social inequities that gave rise to civil rights movements and the Troubles in the late twentieth century (54-55, 175, 200-203, 232-233).49 Robin falls back on stereotypes of Irishness to explain why the family of her late husband, Michael Madden, moved to Dunquin (Dún Chaoin), Co. Kerry, from Portadown, Northern Ireland. Robin says that Michael’s family moved “as far south” and “as far west” as they could to find an idea of authentic Ireland: “Catholic and of the strong old-fashioned nationalist streak endemic to the class in that place, at that time, they had never felt truly at home in Portadown, although their ancestors had lived in its vicinity for several hundred years. Not enough, it seemed, to get used to their Presbyterian neighbours” (55). Robin trivializes the social inequalities giving rise to the Troubles to chalk up the Maddens’ move to misplaced notions of Irishness. Her insistence on cardinal directions of “as far south” and “as far west” impose ahistorical understandings of authenticity and identity on southwestern regions of Ireland, particularly on the Dingle Peninsula and its historical relevance to preserving Irish culture, as I discuss in Chapter 4 in relation to Seán Ó Riada. Although Dunquin (Dún Chaoin) caters substantially to a tourist industry, it is officially a national park in the 49 Fishing and natural resources rights were areas of focus in the civil rights movements both Northern Ireland and the Republic in the 1960s and 70s. For example, many rights on fishing continued to rely on colonial-era allocations. Brian Hanley and Scott Miller explain, for instance, how in 1966, the National Waters Restoration League pushed back on what was known as the “king’s mile” at the mouth of the Corrib River: “The legal rights to fish this area owned by members of the British gentry, whose families had been granted them during the Cromwellian settlement, and similar situations existed on many of Ireland’s other rivers” (84-85). These colonial-era fishing allocations continued to restrict Irish people’s ability to retain connections to traditional stories and practices, such as the importance of the salmon in the Fionn Mac Cumhaill folk story, let alone in allocations of fish as potential natural resources for sustaining one’s family. 161 dystopian future of The Bray House. The Blasket Islands have historically connoted forms of authentic Irishness associated with the Irish language both before and after independence, as I show Flann O’Brien to satirize in revivalist uptakes of Blasket Island writings in Chapter 3.50 Through Robin’s obtuse narration, Ní Dhuibhne critiques how this commodification and reduction of Irish language and culture obscures the valuable forms of knowledge in the Gaeltacht to perpetuate a neocolonial modernity. The Bray House shows how persisting colonial logics permeate personal and political relationships to sustain social and geopolitical hierarchies in an integrating economic European block in the 1980s. Intellectual and natural resources of economically subordinate nations like Ireland support more affluent nations like Sweden, a power dynamic that is mirrored in Robin’s marriage to Michael. Indeed, the Swedish Robin exploits her Irish husband’s intellectual and physical labor.51 For example, Robin’s narration undermines her Irish husband Michael’s agency, making it ambiguous as to what Michael actually said or wanted. By subordinating Michael’s interests, Robin is able 50 Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s sequence of poems, entitled “Immram,” in The Astrakhan Cloak (1992, translated from Irish into English by Paul Muldoon) also draws attention to the commodification of Irish culture in western County Kerry, in particular the Dingle Peninsula and the Blasket Islands. The notion of commodifying conceptions of authentic Irishness resonates with Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s An Blascaod Mór National Historic Park Act of 1989, which attempted to turn the Great Blasket into a national park (“Court Rules”). Under the act, the state would “acquire land compulsorily” and preserve the Blasket Islands as a cultural resource for tourism, though this was later found unconstitutional in 1999 (Irish Statue Book; “Haughey Sees”). 51 As William Crotty points out, EEC subsidies imposed “a special emphasis on the skilled needed by multinationals in international trade and information services” (11). These subsidies supposedly benefited Ireland but, in Crotty’s quote of Richard Rapaport, “During one dismal year in the early ‘80s recruiters from Sweden poached an entire graduating IT [Information Technology] class from the University of Limerick for overseas jobs” (4, brackets in original). As Brigid Laffan points out, the willingness of Ireland to defer parts of its national sovereignty to emerging opportunities and restrictions in the European community contrasted with other member states, like Sweden and Denmark: “Size is not a good predictor of approaches to European integration. Some small states, notably the Benelux, have embraced a federalist view of the European project with zeal, whereas others, such as Denmark and Sweden, are among the most reticent about political integration” (90). These differences between European countries vying for and benefiting from economic integration in various ways illuminates uneven geopolitical hierarchies that demonstrate changes to conceptions of identity and sovereignty as attached to territorial boundaries. 162 to use Michael’s labor to support her own interests: “indeed, he became a housewife” (78). Although Robin can see that Michael is unhappy, she asserts that the situation “suited me admirably, although it was disconcerting to have a companion who was so clearly discontented with life. This, however, seemed a small price to pay for having a full-time unpaid servant, who took all domestic responsibility in return for some food and a roof over his head” (78). She blatantly ignores Michael’s interests to benefit her own personal wellbeing and professional advancements, justifying her actions by saying “that he always gave into me” (59, 74). Robin does not consider the “price” Michael pays to be in a union with her. Instead, she strategically draws on the gender roles implicit in heteronormative marriages and the ideology of separate spheres to normalize Michael’s role as “a housewife” and legitimate her ongoing exploitation of him, including plagiarizing his master’s thesis research, which becomes her best-known work. The use of gendered labor indicates, to quote Mohanty, “how capitalist production relations are built upon the backs of women workers defined as housewives” (149). Robin’s strategic use of gender hierarchies is all the more pronounced since she herself is a woman. Just as Robin’s career can “soar” because her “ordinary living” was done “for” her by Michael, the uneven relations emerging across an integrating Europe allow some countries to benefit from the subordination of others (79). In contrast to the communal way of life Michael and his parents had in Dunquin, Robin describes the “free[dom]” of independent living arrangements in Sweden: “He [Michael] could not get it into his head that in Sweden no one depended on another individual for basic needs. The state guaranteed all citizens, even foreign ones like Michael, a decent lifestyle. For an Irishman, this was incredible, and I don’t think he ever realised what it meant (that 163 Swedes were free, as most people of other nations were not, to choose their way of life)” (74). The Swedish “state guaranteed” that everyone within the boundaries of Sweden could “choose their own way of life,” thus emphasizing a neoliberal individualism rather than the collectivism Michael’s family embraced in Dunquin. Yet Michael is constrained by his relationship with Robin, a relationship which is reflected in the uneven relations between Ireland and more economically and geopolitically privileged nations in the novel, like the US, Britain, and Sweden. Michael and Robin’s marriage becomes analogous to Ireland’s constrained autonomy within integrating European nations, in which countries like Sweden could make decisions about territorial boundaries while still benefiting from technological advancements and economic integration. Indeed, Sweden passed a referendum in 1980 to eventually eradicate nuclear power from within its borders while Ireland made very little progress in its campaign against the Sellafield processing plant.52 The Bray House exposes how uneven power relations at local and global levels preclude the possibility of free choice for independent nations in a globalized economy or equal agency for the individuals within those nations. In showing that “[o]ther nations,” like Ireland, “were not [free] to choose their own way of life,” The Bray House emphasizes the irony of Sweden’s freedom being structurally dependent upon the exploitation of “foreign” people and places. Robin asserts “that in Sweden no one depended on another individual for basic needs,” but she fails to mention how the needs of the Swedish people were met by technological advancements for environmental and social sustainability, which, in turn, to 52 This referendum to phase out nuclear power was reversed in 2009. 164 use Voyles’s term, “wasteland[ed]” the entire island of Ireland and everyone who lived there (9). The Bray House thus challenges the artificial separations among individuals, nations, and environments in Ireland’s neocolonial modernity of the 1980s. The novel critiques how such separations unevenly distribute environmental benefits and burdens in the name of progress, which ultimately advances a neocolonial modernity. In doing so, Ní Dhuibhne’s text implicitly engages with what Kate Brown calls “plutopia” and “zones of immunity,” or “the segregation of territory into nuclear and non-nuclear zones” (6). Such zones benefit some while sacrificing others: Before Chernobyl and Fukushima came Hanford and Maiak, and with them the practices of plutopia: partitioning territory into ‘nuclear’ and ‘clean’ zones, skimping on safety and waste management to prioritize production, repressing information about accidents, forging safety records, deploying temporary ‘jumpers’ to do dirty work, and glossing over sick workers and radioactive territories, all while treating select citizens to generous government subsidies and soothing public relations programs (9). The Bray House implicitly extends this logic of “clean” and “nuclear” zones through a Manicheaistic moral value system in Ireland’s neocolonial modernity. The text parodies “the good” and “virtue” of technological progress by depicting Robin’s scientific objectivity to reflect a subjective, religious devotion to Per Bishop. The teachings of Per Bishop encourage Robin to situate Sweden’s “innocence” in the Swedish government’s decision to foster a “friendship with nature” (23). Although renewable sources of energy saved the Swedish people and nation from nuclear apocalypse in the novel, and their northern location allows them to exist sustainably despite the effects of climate change, they “harness nature” to technology in a subordinating hierarchy (22, 23). This nation- nature hierarchy reveals the underlying logic that also informs Ireland’s subordinate 165 relationship to other nations in economic globalization, including Sweden, the US, and Britain, as well as Robin’s marriage to Michael. These uneven personal and political relations are supposedly justified by how, as Robin asserts, the “virtue” of this “reasonably peaceful union” “was rewarded,” that is, those in Sweden survived (23). Yet the text exposes how this moral-value system comes at a cost, one that potentially destroys even those it ostensibly benefits. The superficial guilt Robin feels about stealing Michael’s research before sending him to Ireland right before the nuclear disaster is analogous in the text to how the Swedish “suffer” “the psychic pain” of being “ridden with guilt” (73, 23). The technological progress that implies Swedish “innocence” is only possible through resource extraction and risky technologies, like nuclear energy, being located outside the boundaries of their own “saved” nation (23). Robin describes Swedish people as unable to “face the fact of their innocence” in “the heaven we made for ourselves” while she frames the fate of the Irish people who were killed in the “Incident” in terms of “radioactive burns” and “hellfire” (23). The novel satirically situates technological and scientific advancement within moral value systems that require sacrifices of the many for the greater “good” of a few. While Swedish people may regret the loss of most of the world, they do nothing to alter the material impacts of empire. Rather, Robin and the Swedish people she represents subscribe to Manicheaistic value systems that depend on conceptions of redemption. Robin maps this value system onto Europe to position Sweden within a space of “the good” and the “saved” and Ireland as seemingly inevitably damned. While Robin considers Sweden as “free” and clean, she posits Ireland by contrast as heavily polluted even before the “Incident” in ways that justify the uneven 166 distributions of environmental benefits and burdens within intra- and international geopolitical hierarchies among nations and between nations and the natural world (90). The latent Manicheaistic moral-value systems implicit in Robin’s supposedly cutting- edge scientific knowledge reveal imperial logics of colonial institutional hierarchies. These hierarchies legitimate themselves in moral-value systems that perpetuate neocolonial power relations through modernization projects. Imperial logics attempt to justify neocolonial modernization projects as peoples and places are sacrificed in the name of progress. In this way, The Bray House exposes a continuity of the impacts of empire in neocolonial structures of power that permeate the past, present, and imagined (and disastrous) future modernities. Reinterpreting “the writing on the wall”: Sites of environmental and cultural resilience As dominant as Robin is in the novel, The Bray House consistently reveals cracks in her narration to indicate cultural resources upon which Irish people might draw to resist the imperial logics of economic modernization in the 1980s and honor Irish cultural relationships to the material environment in an anthropogenically altered era. Offering glimpses past Robin’s obtuse framing, the text reveals persisting forms of material and cultural meaning embedded in the material environment. Natural and cultural elements gesture toward dimensions of Irish culture and history developing alongside histories of colonialism and the economic and environmental modernization in a neocolonial modernity. Such dimensions recognize what Eve Tuck theorizes as “an assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant, [that] necessarily 167 complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance” (420). Such an assemblage disrupts, as Tuck puts it, “the binary of reproduction versus resistance” (419). Tuck’s theory uncovers multiple modernities in Ní Dhuibhne’s novel that imagine alternatives to extraction economies inherent in neocolonial constructions of the nation state and binary resistance to those extraction economies. Rather than a logic of colonial or precolonial, The Bray House shows ongoing relations between communities and material agencies in Irish landscapes, language, and cultural traditions. These relationships among people, place, and history establish alternative modernities that prove more respectful of a community’s place in ecological systems than the understandings of national territory, globalization, and technological advancements brought to Ireland under neocolonial understandings of economic modernization and natural resource extraction in the name of progress. The Maddens conceptualize their relationships with material environments and nonhuman agencies in different ways than Robin’s neocolonial worldview. Michael’s mother and father move to Dingle to live in mutually constitutive relationships with their surroundings (56, 57-58). They spend their time “growing vegetables organically, milking prize goats, freezing yoghurt” (56). On a fishing trip, John Madden accidentally catches a baby seal, which “were very rare at that point anywhere in Europe” (57). John describes the seal: “‘He’d nearly talk to you!’ Michael’s father said, gently removing his hook from the animal’s fin. […] ‘There!’ said he, throwing him back into the churning black water, none too gently. ‘He’ll recover before he’s twice married, and no harm done!’” (57). While John’s words are filtered through Robin’s sardonic narration, she quotes him as addressing the seal as an agent who acts with intention. Although John 168 might have inadvertently harmed the seal with his fishing hook, he addresses the seal as a fellow being, calling the seal “he” and considering the seal’s ability to thrive after John “gently remov[es] his hook” and determines that there’s “no harm done!” (57). While what happens to the seal ultimately remains a mystery, this interaction demonstrates what Amitav Ghosh theorizes as “recognition” or “a renewed reckoning” with “something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” (Ghosh 4, 30). John has retained a sense of community with “nonhuman interlocutors” and recognizes the agency of the seal. The awareness of interdependence with the material environment and nonhuman others that John exhibits contrasts sharply with Robin’s understandings of freedom and independence as moral virtues in Sweden. Rather, John’s ideas seem more informed by Irish folklore. Myths of selkies, or seals who can inhabit a human or seal form and who intermarry with humans, spending part of their time at sea and part on land, are implicitly invoked when John suggests the seal will “recover before he’s twice married” (Ní Dhuibhne 57; Monaghan 411-412). Environmental and cultural knowledge evolve in collaboration with specific places to establish interdependence with other creatures, such as seals. These interdependent relations within a region over time offer an alternative spatio-temporal logic to those implicit in the legacy of colonialism. Rather than the imperial logics of space as territory and time as linear, John’s interactions with the seal demonstrate ongoing communal relationships to place in the Maddens’ community in Dunquin that offer alternative ways of being and knowing. These alternative modernities destabilize colonial and neocolonial hierarchies persisting across the island of Ireland during economic and environmental developments since the 1960s. 169 The environmental and cultural knowledge inflected in the Maddens’ way of life in Dingle affects Michael’s marriage to Robin and his short career as an anthropologist in the Faroe Islands. Brought up with a sense of familial connections to other creatures, Michael’s inability to cultivate a detached view of the grindadrab whaling tradition as part of his research on the Faroe Islands highlights complex understandings of mutually constructed environmental and cultural relations and competing notions of sovereignty (76). In referring to Faroese whaling, The Bray House illuminates tensions between sovereignty as national territory and sovereignty as relationships among land, place, and people. Understandings of sovereignty as relationships with material environments rather than forms of territorial ownership are theorized in Indigenous feminist scholarship. As Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill explain, “[w]ithin Indigenous contexts land is not property, as in settler colonialism, but rather land is knowing and knowledge” (21). Arvin et al.’s definition of land in the context Indigenous understandings of sovereignty helpfully elucidates how Ní Dhuibhne critically positions Robin’s rigid views of modern authorities, the novel’s depiction of fixed traditions in the Faroe Islands, and Michael’s alternative forms of embodied knowledge. The Bray House shows Michael to embody relationships among the land, the Irish language, and cultural relations that continually adapt and work within the constraints of changing environments as Robin and the text’s representation of the Faroese grindadrab indicate staunch attachments to colonial- modern-authorities and precolonial-traditional-practices, respectively. The text juxtaposes possible postcolonial responses to multinational corporatism through the different relationships to cultural traditions and material environments that Michael and the Faroese grindadrab demonstrate. Since the 1880s, Faroese nationalists 170 have drawn on the grindadrab tradition as a way of asserting cultural difference from Denmark. Yet anti-whaling campaigns emerging in the 1970s and Denmark’s simultaneous entry into the EEC together with Ireland and UK led to strong critiques of Faroese pilot-whaling, particularly by activist groups in the 1980s (Alder-Nissen 56, 70; Oslund 163-167). The Faroese government has under a Home Rule Act of 1948 strategically asserted sovereignty both in relation to Denmark and the EU, as Rebecca Alder-Nissen explains, around issues of fishing rights generally and whaling traditions in particular (59, 66). Faroese nationalists have also asserted that “Denmark saved money by making the Faroe Islands a target for an atomic bomb” due to a discount the Danish government received from NATO for allowing NATO military bases to be placed in Greenland and on the Faroe Islands (Alder-Nissen 60). The Faroese critique of unequal nuclear threats placed on their sovereign territory occurred alongside their defense of the pilot-whaling tradition, even as evidence emerged that whale consumption was leading to significant health problems in Faroese people due to mercury and PCB contaminants in pilot whale meat (Alder-Nissen 71). The Bray House critically represents Faroese grindadrab to expose colonial binaries of modern and premodern practices. While Robin embraces the position of a modern researcher, the Faroese appear staunchly attached to a premodern tradition. This modern-premodern binary contrasts with the text’s representations of continually changing Irish cultural traditions that relationally adapt to shifting environmental conditions. By critically representing Robin and the grindadrab, Ní Dhuibhne shows binary logics to structurally impede the ability to recognize the alternative modernity Michael inhabits. 171 The Bray House reveals the colonial binaries of an authoritative subject and object of study, as well as modern and premodern cultural practices, in how Robin is “revolted” at Michael’s failure to view the pilot whaling. Robin asserts: “It struck me as perfectly natural, to enjoy a whale slaughter. It’s the sort of thing all peoples have always enjoyed doing” (77). By generalizing what constitutes “natural” human feeling, Robin universalizes a subjective sense of distance from the objectified whales. She has internalized a clear divide between an implied modern human subject and premodern nonhuman (or less human) object of study. This spatiotemporal divide legitimates her role as a detached voyeur of the whale killing as well as the dehumanization of her material and sentient surroundings. Robin’s attachment to understandings of fixed traditions and modern science sustains her neocolonial worldview because of, rather than despite, the Faroese assertion of sovereignty through a fixed tradition that represents a precolonial, premodern era. The novel’s depiction of the Faroese pilot whaling exposes colonial logics to dictate what is tradition or modern, for both the Faroese and for Robin. Robin’s conception of what is “natural” is the ability to dissect the material world into subject-authorities of modern science who view objectified-premodern practices without emotion or attachment. By positioning both Robin and the Faroese in the text to embrace modern-premodern colonial binaries, Ní Dhuibhne points to the alternative both-and logic in Michael’s ways of knowing. The Bray House shows Michael to recognize nonhumans as actors like himself, who have varying degrees of agency and intention. This worldview suggests a sense of shared responsibility that is in keeping with the myth of seal people, which exists in variations around the North Atlantic, including in the Faroe Islands, where the slaughter 172 of entire groups of seals will bring unexpected vengeance upon the killers (West 90-91). Unlike Robin’s attachment to subject-object relations and the novel’s representation of the Faroese seemingly unwavering attachment to precolonial practices, Michael engages in a non-binary modernity. He cohabits the world of nonhumans in which eating certain creatures, like seals, “was considered a form of cannibalism” (Monaghan 411). Robin disdains Michael’s sensitivity to environmental conditions and human and nonhuman communities as a failing, describing as negative the fact “that he was a chameleon, borrowing his colours from the surroundings, always ready to accommodate other points of view, to compromise, to back off, always ready to say ‘yes’, unless he suspected that the correct answer was ‘no’” (59). Rather than a lack of initiative, as Robin would deem it, the text shows how Michael continually learns from his surroundings and demonstrates a more relational way of being. This relational inhabiting of the land and Irish cultural relationships to the land contrasts with the understandings of individual autonomy and boundaries that led to the “wastelanding” of Ireland. Instead of imposing a hierarchical subject-object order on the material environment, Michael “borrow[s]” from it and adapts within the constraints that his surroundings assert, being “always ready to accommodate other points of view, to compromise.” In doing so, Michael demonstrates collaborations with material and multispecies agencies in his immediate surroundings that reveal, in the words of Arvin et al., “land is knowing and knowledge” (21). Michael heeds the knowledge embedded in his material environments and acts according to that knowledge. Despite Robin’s ridicule, her narration registers Michael’s embodied forms of knowing that allow him to emerge within and through practices of listening to and learning from the land itself. He can “accommodate” and “compromise” to ensure more 173 just relationships with those around him. Michael’s engagement with existing environmental relations among humans, nonhumans, and material agencies makes it impossible for him to watch the grindadrab as a detached subject-authority observing the slaughter of dehumanized objects. This failure to detach, to use Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s words, “produces knowledge because engagement in the process changes the actors embedded in process and aligns bodies with the implicate order. The only thing that doesn’t produce knowledge is thinking in and of itself, because it is data created in dislocation and isolation and without movement” (20). Michael’s ways of knowing and producing knowledge reveal him to be “embedded in process” even though he fails to finish his master’s project. Rather, Michael’s experiences and ways of knowing lead him to remove himself from higher educational institutions that would perpetuate the detached study of traditional practices, including his own Irish cultural knowledge as well as the grindadrab. As a result, Michael dedicates himself to his relationship with Robin, a situation she exploits. Robin uses Michael’s communal way of being in the world to further her own career, and she justifies her actions by pretending that her “thinking in and of itself” was for some greater good besides her own self interests. Yet Michael’s self-removal from the institutions that produce authorities like Robin demonstrates his refusal within limited agency to directly participate in the exploitative forms of knowledge that Robin values. While Robin is appalled by Michael’s failure to be an unemotional spectator of the whale slaughter, she conflates his expertise and success as an Irish folklore scholar with the commodification of culture for tourism. Her reduction of Michael’s knowledge to fetishizing stereotypes of Irish culture formally distracts from the more situated and 174 traditional systems of knowledge that Michael’s work and understanding of the Irish language indicate (56). Michael attended éigses, or an “assembly of learned men, sages, poets,” as a child and developed an understanding of the linguistic and cultural landscapes of his surroundings (Ní Dhuibhne 56; “éigse” Teanglann). Michael’s embrace of the Irish language resists the erasure of the worldview that the Irish language implicitly brings to material environments. The culturally specific understanding of place that the Irish language enabled for Michael had been steadily eroded away since the early modern period by the advent of the printing press and colonial occupation, both of which fostered specifically Anglo-Saxon ways of knowing through the English language (Morash 6, 14, 15, 22; Mac Giolla Chríost 4, 96). These textual projects of modernization become a point of satiric speculation in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which I examine in Chapter 3, and establish an early precursor to the broadcast media modernization I discuss in Chapter 4. Through representing Robin’s inability to apprehend, let alone learn from, Michael’s embodied forms of knowledge, The Bray House critiques how colonial ways of knowing and neocolonial modernization projects obscure alternative possibilities for modernity. The oppression of the Irish language through the colonial histories in which the printing press privileged English-language texts reveals Michael’s knowledge of the Irish language and ways of knowing to be unique in their scarcity. Such forms of knowledge indicate alternative modernities that offer more mutually constructive ways of dwelling in the world. While Robin cannot recognize the value in such ways of knowing (or she deliberately ignores them), Michael and his family inhabit relationships among cultural practices, material surroundings, and nonhuman agencies built over longer periods of 175 time and through an ongoing engagement with a particular region. These relational and regional forms of knowledge challenge the colonial and neocolonial worldview of time as developmental and space as territorial. Such ways of knowing continually emerge in ongoing interaction with changing environments. Consequently, these Irish traditional ways of knowing exceed Robin’s ability to master the expertise Michael embodied. Although Robin tried to obtain authority over Michael’s knowledge through stealing his research, she fails to see how Michael participated in relational ways of knowing that made him better able to adapt to shifting material and cultural conditions, something Robin sees as a flaw. Robin’s theft of Michael’s research and his subsequent death in the nuclear explosion expose how neocolonial logics foster an inability to observe, understand, or articulate situated relationships with the material environment that Michael embodies through traditional forms of knowledge. The neocolonial worldview Robin represents in the text reveals the hegemonic discourse the novel invites readers to look past. Despite Michael’s death, his embodied and situated forms of knowledge persist in Ní Dhuibhne’s text and the material environments to which the story points. After Robin excludes Karl and Jenny from participating in the excavation once they have finished removing the fallout dust covering of the excavation site, they walk off into the Wicklow Mountains and meet the only known survivor of the nuclear disaster, Maggie Byrne, who they bring back to the ship (175, 200-201). The text makes Irish cultural relationships to the environment explicit in descriptions of the tumulus that protected Maggie through the obliteration of Ireland. Maggie’s husband, Eddie, made the shelter following “the old Civil Defence booklet,” which suggests the collaborative effort between Northern Ireland 176 and the Republic in the 1960s to integrate safety measures across the entire island (Ní Dhuibhne 245; Kennedy 119). By invoking a shared environmental risk across the island of Ireland, The Bray House, to quote Jennifer Wenzel, offers ways of “reading across those geographic and experiential divides, working against foreclosures of unimagining” (134). Ní Dhuibhne’s novel “read[s] across those geographic and experiential divides” to “unimagin[e]” the ways in which postcolonial national independence assert forms of territorial sovereignty and fixed traditional practices are ensnared in imperial logics. Rather, Ní Dhuibhne points the reader to how Irish cultural and natural environments reimagine relations to place through a cultural consciousness embedded in the land itself, even in the rubble of nuclear disaster and longer material histories of cultural oppression. One way the text points to this underlying cultural consciousness is by showing natural and cultural elements to sustain Maggie in a fallout shelter that bears striking resemblance to Newgrange. In its similarities to Newgrange, the Ogham-inscribed walls in Maggie and Eddie’s fallout shelter also indicate an ancient civilization that remains embedded in the material landscape. Where established authorities failed to save Eddie, the ongoing relationships between cultural and natural elements ensured Maggie’s survival even in nuclear disaster. As Robin’s junior colleagues Jenny and Karl explain, Maggie survived the nuclear disaster because the tumulus that sheltered her had “its own spring, deep in a rock, and obviously that water never got contaminated” (224-225). Despite the nuclear explosion destroying all lifeforms on the island of Ireland, it failed to “contaminat[e]” the “spring, deep in a rock.” The idea that geologic formations and water systems persist untouched by the nuclear disaster indicates planetary forces that exceed 177 the technologies Robin deemed were “rapidly becoming almighty” (63). These planetary forces and systems constrain the devastation of even an apocalyptic nuclear explosion. Like the spring “deep in the rock” in Maggie’s tumulus, a spring “deep in a rock” was also found at Newgrange during the excavations between 1962 and 1975 (Ní Dhuibhne 224; O’Kelly 112-113).53 Originally thought to be a winter stream, excavators and conservationists realized it was “a spring which welled up from the socket of R8” (O’Kelly 113). The taxonomized location of the stream in the Newgrange excavation was subsequently outfitted with a pipe to drain off the water as the tumulus was prepared for visitors (113). While this pipe and the excavation at Newgrange tie into Irish natural and cultural resources being reworked for industry and tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, it also attests to natural and cultural elements that persist outside national and geopolitical boundaries and relationships. These elements interrupt and slow down modernization efforts as they indicate alternative modernities persisting alongside Ireland’s headlong rush into modernization in the late twentieth century and the neocolonial modernity to which Irish modernization projects capitulate. These material and cultural artifacts imagine alternative possibilities for development and relations to the environment that exceed Robin’s authority and neocolonial worldview and consequently also possibilities of narration in the novel and of 1980s Ireland. Through the interwoven material and cultural histories of land and environment, Ní Dhuibhne presents an Irish cultural consciousness that relationally dwells in and with the material environments across the island of Ireland, both before, during, and after the 53 The tumulus at Newgrange was ‘rediscovered’ by a Williamite settler, Charles Campbell, in 1699 and preserved under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, but the extensive archaeological excavations make Newgrange accessible to visitors today were carried out between 1962-1975 (O’Kelly 24, 38, 9) 178 nuclear disaster. Jenny and Karl describe how they “emerged from the passage into the chamber. Don’t ask me why, but it was eerie enough, between the skeleton and the rubbish and the stones carved with old runes” (224). Although “the skeleton” in the tumulus likely belongs to Eddie, it also signifies the persistence of the embodied forms of knowledge that comprise longer, material histories buried in the material environment. When read as Eddie’s remains, the skeleton indicates the failure of the authorities in which he put his faith. Maggie explains that “Eddie, however, was a believer in the cause. He maintained that they would be saved […] after a reasonable period, which he assessed as a month, things would be getting back to some sort of normality, and ‘help’ would be available” (246-247). Eddie’s work on the shelter attests to his confidence in the authorities he anticipated would eventually rescue them. Yet these authorities are experts like Robin who inhabit a modern colonial, authoritative position that produces and reproduces the systems of knowledge and neocolonial hierarchies in which Eddie was always already positioned in a sacrificial role for the greater good in Robin’s moral value judgements of Sweden and Ireland. Indeed, such systems are structurally built to fail the “wastelanded” peoples and places upon which they rely, to use Voyles’s term. Additionally, these uneven systems obscure vital relationships among people, history, and material environment in the alternative modernity in which Maggie lives. Within this alternative modernity, the skeleton and runes also register what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls the “temporality of struggle,” which “suggests an insistent, simultaneous, nonsynchronous process characterized by multiple locations, rather than a search for origins or endings” (120). Elements in an underlying and ongoing cultural 179 consciousness emerge in the text through “insistent, simultaneous, nonsynchronous process[es]” among Irish cultural and material relationships with the land. “Temporalit[ies] of struggle” across “multiple locations” emerge in Maggie Byrne’s story, name, and survival, as well as in the McHugh family name and the material artifacts of the Bray house that Robin and the other Swedish archaeologists unearth in their excavation. These names intertextually invoke Feagh Mac Hugh O’Byrne, who is a symbol of resistance in his alliance with Hugh O’Neill during the final years of the Irish Chiefs’ attempts to maintain autonomy and power in the midst of material and cultural colonialization under Elizabeth I (Lawlor 22-23; Maginn 2). Like Maggie, Feagh was also found hiding in a cave in the Wicklow Mountains, at Glenmalure, from which he was taken and executed on May 7, 1597. The skeleton in the tumulus thus refers to longer histories of colonialism which indigenous Irish civilizations resisted for generations, including through O’Neill’s strategic diplomacy, military force, and use of indigenous Irish culture to oppose colonial occupation. Maggie’s name also resembles that of Feagh’s sister, Margaret Maol O’Byrne, who was murdered by colonial forces in August of 1580 after the Battle of Glenmalure. These intertextual references connect the history of the Irish Chiefdoms before the Flight of the Earls in 1607 to the Newgrange-like tumulus in a post-apocalyptic neocolonial modernity. Through these references, the novel exposes multiple temporalities emerging alongside and in ongoing interaction with histories of colonialism in Ireland. The text situates Maggie’s experiences with nuclear disaster alongside imperial wars against indigenous Gaelic populations. During these wars, O’Neill adapted the chieftain system to protect the survival of his people and culture amid an encroaching 180 imperial order, thus constructing an alternative modernity of which the text shows Maggie to also be a part. Ní Dhuibhne’s text reveals interconnections among people, place, and history that ultimately demonstrate a “temporality of struggle” in which competing relationships to time, space, and environmental emerge in parallel. The multiple temporalities of Maggie, the McHughs, and Ireland’s material landscape demonstrate memories that endure literally and figuratively in the land. The land’s memory challenges the exploitation and extraction of material environments and bodies in the neoliberal economic modernization of 1980s Ireland. The multiple temporalities of an alternative modernity of which O’Neill, Feagh, Margaret, and Maggie are all part resist Robin’s imperial understandings of linear time. Robin tries to position Maggie in an ancient past by obtusely overwriting Maggie’s own account of her husband’s death as part of a “saga” through which Robin can conclude that “obviously what happened was that his spirit and health had broken” (217). By situating Maggie’s experience in a “saga,” Robin attempts to relegate Maggie’s story into a past over which she can assert authority. Yet the text shows Maggie’s experiences to exceed an imagined triangulation of past, present, and future through the persistence of the past through the skeleton, Ogham, and tumulus-like fallout shelter. Rather, a multiple and relational present emerges diachronically through an ongoing “temporality of struggle.” This “temporality of struggle” in Ní Dhuibhne’s novel situates the Troubles and the fictional nuclear disaster within longer and larger cultural and environmental histories in which an underlying cultural consciousness offers alternatives to persisting colonial and neocolonial power relations. The implicit shared cultural consciousness that The Bray House evokes challenges fixed understandings of 181 sovereignty as national territory and indicates more relational understandings of people, material environments, and cultural histories that are more in keeping with definitions of sovereignty theorized by Indigenous scholars. The text registers the legacy of empire in geopolitical hierarchies and their material implications being written into geologic histories through nuclear technology and climate change. Yet it also reveals multiple modernities that persist in the land as knowledge. The Bray House shows even the obtuse Robin to sense something in the land and her surroundings that her neocolonial lenses for producing knowledge cannot situate or explain. During the few days Jenny and Karl appear to be lost, Robin waits while contemplating the devastated landscape: “Home. Home, which I have never had. Mother, mother! I cried, as I watched the specks. Mother, take me home! Mother, say it, Mother, just once. Say, say you love me!” (216). This distinctly out-of-character exclamation suggests elements of relational affect embedded in the land that Robin perceives, revealing alternative relations to material environments and cultural histories in which, to quote Arvin et al. “land is knowing and knowledge” (21). Although Robin falls back on entrenched gendered frameworks of Mother Ireland for articulating the feelings she fails to understand, this outburst registers forms of knowledge persisting even in the utterly devastated environment around her. Yet the text shows Robin to quickly dismiss her feelings and looks for ways of bending her affective senses into neocolonial structural relations she knows. She manipulates her perceptions into histories that develop linearly, from understandings of the past to imagined modern futures. Rather than apprehend the relational forms of knowledge both Michael and the island of Ireland embody, Robin views the empty 182 landscape as the climax of a progress narrative toward an ultimate efficiency: “The shape of the earth, plain at last. Uncluttered by the frippery of flora and fauna which masquerades under the name of nature. […] The pure and simple perfection of form and light. There was nothing else. Nothing else that I want” (Ní Dhuibhne 215). The empty “form[s]” and the repetition of “nothing else. Nothing else” emphasizes Robin’s overt reliance on and desire for forms of knowledge that seek, in Mohanty’s words, “origins and endings” (Ní Dhuibhne 215; Mohanty 120). The clarity of “origins and endings” in linear progress narratives must climax in the erasure of life itself. The ultimate endings Robin desires lead her narration to result in multiple deaths. Robin murders Karl when she suspects his transcription of the Ogham in Maggie’s tumulus might undermine her research report (239). Then she asserts that Maggie, who is brought from the tumulus to Sweden is nearly “killed […] by systematic institutional care at its most perfect” (252). Cut off from the natural and cultural elements that ensured her survival, Maggie suffers an institutional death. While this institutional death critiques how the Free State and later the Republic embraced colonial-era institutions after independence, it also shows such forms of incarceration to rely on neocolonial notions of individualism that Robin lauds as good and morally better than the more communal ways of living Michael and his family embodied. Indeed, Robin also falls victim to the systems she promotes. Robin’s logics of “origins and endings” lead her to ultimately commit suicide at the end of the novel. The endings of Ireland, Karl, Maggie, Michael, and Robin in The Bray House expose how institutions of knowledge, nation, and autonomy tyrannically master and control even those who appear to benefit from them. The text thus critiques ongoing 183 histories of systemic colonialism and neocolonialism that violently erase alternative ways of knowing, thereby foreclosing the possibility for more just futures. Despite these seemingly complete conclusions in the story, the text evinces through the narrative of Maggie and Michael, as well as Michael’s family, the persistence of existent but alternative forms of knowledge and environmental relationships embedded in the land and an Irish cultural consciousness amid even the most apocalyptic moments of erasure imaginable. After History: Narrating more just futures in the inevitable collapse of neocolonial modernity Through exposing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic frameworks, The Bray House demonstrates how the modernization of the economy and natural resources in the late twentieth century reframed social and political relations in Ireland, drawing on the legacy of colonialism to revise colonial hierarchies into questions of individual or national success in a neocolonial modernity. The text registers a neocolonial modernity perpetuated by Anglo-Irish politics amid the Troubles in the 1970s and 80s. Economic globalization, technologies like atomic energy, and the effects of climate change reinforce social and geopolitical hierarchies even as modernization projects promise national and postcolonial territorial sovereignty and independence. The Bray House uses representations of nuclear power and the effects of greenhouse gases from Ireland’s intense dependence upon fossil fuels by the 1970s to expose shifting conceptions of land, identity, and sovereignty. Ní Dhuibhne critiques how territorial boundaries in a neocolonial modernity ultimately work to unevenly distribute forms of economic and 184 natural resource development across populations within Ireland as well as geopolitical hierarchies of an economically integrating Europe in ongoing colonial relations. Although The Bray House reveals complex continuities between colonial histories and neocolonial economies, it also demonstrates an underlying cultural consciousness that persists despite the seemingly utter destruction caused by the nuclear disaster and the neocolonial power relations that facilitated the disaster’s impact on Ireland. Both Maggie and Michael’s understandings of their environments emerge from within situations rather than being studied from without, and they remain embodied in the land itself, even if under a layer of toxic nuclear fallout. Michael and his family’s interactions with nonhuman actors, such as the goats, seal, or whales, and Maggie’s subsistence on “uncontaminated water” springing up from the Irish ground and cohabitation with the material and discursive knowledge systems and multiple temporalities of the skeleton and Ogham-inscribed walls demonstrate an enduring cultural consciousness. This way of knowing persists in the materiality of the ground itself after everything seems to be destroyed. The communal forms of knowledge and lived experience that Michael and Maggie embody in Irish environments contrast with the artificially separated individual freedoms in Sweden or the “zones of immunity” and “plutopia,” to use Brown’s terms, that rationalize geopolitical regions of Europe and the distribution of risk and degradation in processes Voyles calls “wastelanding” (Brown 6; Voyles 9). The text foregrounds the multiple and alternative modernities in Michael and Maggie’s ways of knowing to reveal alternative environmental relations in an Irish cultural consciousness that contrasts with the social and geopolitical hierarchies emerging out of colonialism in a hegemonic neocolonial modernity. 185 Ní Dhuibhne’s novel thus shows readers how to look through the cracks of hegemonic colonial binaries and their oppositions in counter-hegemonic frameworks, like Robin’s narration or assertions of territorial sovereignty and fixed precolonial traditions. Such colonial logics expose how, in Tuck’s words, “the binary of reproduction versus resistance” obscures how to think or engage otherwise with material pasts, presents, and futures (419). Ní Dhuibhne’s text offers ways to reimagine and revitalize relationships to seemingly dead material and cultural environmental relationships for modern Ireland. The Irish cultural consciousness The Bray House depicts offers alternative relationships with the material environment in which peoples and places co-constitute each other in ongoing relations. Like Mohanty’s concept of the “temporality of struggle,” the multiple modernities that arise through alternative and culturally informed relationships to the environment emerge across multiple locations and through diachronic interactions between pasts and presents. By exposing the cracks in Robin’s narration and the neocolonial worldview her narration reveals, The Bray House presents multiple modernities emerging in and through the material agencies and environmental relations of embodied forms of knowledge and experience that the characters of Michael and Maggie demonstrate. Ultimately, The Bray House reveals an environmental and cultural consciousness embedded in the devastated Irish landscape that points to more just futures for a changing world. 186 Chapter 6: Multispecies Modernities: Reworking Environmental Film for Postcolonial Cinema in Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s The Pipe In 1996, Enterprise Energy Ireland (EEI) found a natural gas field seventy kilometers off the West coast of County Mayo, Ireland (Garavan 134). Despite concerns about safety, EEI got permission to build a liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline and refinery at Ballinaboy, in what became known as the Corrib Pipeline Project (142-146). Nine kilometers of the pipe would run through the local community in Rossport, in some cases less than a hundred meters from family homes and farms (136, 101). Local opposition to the project began in the early 2000s, as the Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Frank Fahey, created Compulsory Acquisition Orders (CAOs), requiring local property owners to cede land to Shell E&P Ireland (Royal Dutch Shell acquired EEI in 2002) (149). The resistance movement grew in 2003 as “twenty serious bogslides” around the area of the proposed pipeline made residents concerned about their safety (8). Additionally, the pipe was to transport raw natural gas at unprecedented pressures of 345 bars, though recommended pressures were at just 144 bars (9, 135). By 2005, the local community had formed the Shell-to-Sea environmental justice group to protest the Corrib Pipeline Project. In February 2005, a group of local landowners refused to comply with the CAOs and blocked the road Shell workers used. Shell took legal action, and on June 29, 2005, Willie Corduff, Micheál Ó Seighin, Philip McGrath, Brendan Philbin, and Vincent McGrath were imprisoned in the Cloverhill Prison for ninety-four days (9). The arrest and incarceration of these five men, who became known as the Rossport Five, drew national and international attention. Resistance to the pipeline escalated while the Rossport Five were in jail. Despite slowing down construction, Shell started work again 187 in 2006 and eventually completed the project amid ongoing protests. Although Shell-to- Sea did not stop the pipeline, it continues to support movements to resist pipelines in Ireland and abroad.54 Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s 2010 documentary film, The Pipe, follows the struggles of the Shell-to-Sea campaign, from the time the five protesters were jailed in 2005 until Shell got the planning permission to complete the Corrib gas pipeline in 2011. In tracing this environmental justice movement, The Pipe documents ongoing connections between the environmental impacts of empire and the integration of national resources into a globalizing economy. Despite the complex systems of power with which the film deals, scholars have largely critiqued The Pipe for reproducing colonial visual tropes of a romanticized, primitive, and feminized rural Ireland. Scholars thus recognize the important role visual conventions play in The Pipe, but they have yet to engage with the film’s strategic disruption of colonial-indebted imagery. By reevaluating how Ó Domhnaill employs filmic and photographic conventions, my analysis shows The Pipe’s cinematography, soundscape, and montage to challenge the very tropes the film is deemed to perpetuate. Analyzing The Pipe within longer histories of Irish environmental film reveals how Ó Domhnaill subversively invokes and revises colonial-inflected romanticizations of Ireland’s underdevelopment and gendered petro-modernities. The handheld shots that Ó Domhnaill took over the course of four years in his own community implicitly reflect on the role cameras have played in shaping material environments and fossil-fuel 54 See www.shelltosea.com. 188 consumption in colonial and postcolonial Ireland.55 Putting these handheld shots in conversation with longer cinematic histories of Irish rural landscapes highlights underacknowledged histories of gender in visual representations of colonial and neocolonial development projects. Instances of women’s agency in the film offer insight into the gendered politics of immigration, nation, and modernity as Ireland experienced unprecedented economic growth during the so-called Celtic Tiger, between 1995 and 2008. The Pipe’s depiction of women’s relationships to environmental justice elucidates human and nonhuman agencies among people, bog, and coastal waters around Rossport that reveal multispecies modernities outside sanctioned views of modernization. These multispecies modernities permeate filmic histories, global economic integration, and environmental justice struggles connected with ongoing colonial and neocolonial histories of international economic integration. Heeding the nuanced critiques of colonial-inflected cinema histories in The Pipe exposes how Ó Domhnaill reworks filmic conventions that produce flattened visions of modernity. Through such a reading, The Pipe’s representational techniques reveal postcolonial multispecies modernities that revise and expand how we analyze postcolonial films in ecocinema studies and postcolonial ecocriticism. 55 In a live Q&A session with my Spring 2020 Introduction to Environmental Literature course, Ó Domhnaill explained that he was teaching physics at a local school and living with his uncle, Pat O’Donnell, as the Shell-to-Sea movement intensified. Having recently taken an evening course on filming, Ó Domhnaill began to film the protests and sell his footage to the national media. Upon seeing his footage used to tell a story he did not witness in his community, Ó Domhnaill began to think about making The Pipe (Live Q&A 0:00-10:00). 189 Modernity Montage: The National Rights of Modernizing Industries In its opening sequence, The Pipe destabilizes longer representational histories of rural Irish regions used to promote development in supposedly empty spaces. Panning aerial long-shots of vast and sparsely populated landscapes switch back and forth three times with jarring handheld shots of the local Gardaí, or police officers, violently pushing protesters off the road (Ó Domhnaill 1:00-2:30). Harvey O’Brien reads these aerial shots as setting up a “romantic story space” that fails to inspire action from the audience about the urgent issues it conveys (“Advocating” 223).56 Yet the montage and passage of time in these abrasively different morning, daylight, and evening shots implicitly critique the recalcitrant aesthetic conventions that historically sought to naturalize certain forms of development as inevitable. Colonial-era modernization projects include the seventeenth-century implementation of settler-colonial plantation systems in Ulster, which forced many Irish- speaking people to migrate west to places like Rossport, as well as Victorian-era agricultural and fisheries reforms that encouraged emigration out of Ireland. The Pipe challenges visual representations of modern and premodern landscapes that extend back, as Luke Gibbons shows, to the era of romanticism, in which the Irish landscape “came to embody, along with other similar regions on the European periphery, all the attributes of a vanished pre-industrial era—if not a society entirely beyond the pale of civilisation” (Rockett et al. 203-204). To be “beyond the pale of civilisation” was to be developmentally behind other nations. 56 Ó Domhnaill explained that he took these aerial shots on his friend’s camera, which they strapped to the side of a helicopter that they rented for a couple of hours at Knock Airport in 2009 after receiving funding from the Irish Film Board at the editing stage of making The Pipe in 2009 (Live Q&A 12:58-13:48). 190 This idea that Ireland is developmentally behind emerges in documentary films that historically engaged primitivist images of supposedly precolonial Irish rural communities or picturesque landscapes with the potential for development. Like Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flaherty’s 1934 Man of Aran, as Pat Brereton puts it, “remained preoccupied with showing primitive societies embodying a universal human trait of endurance and survival against the odds” (119). Primitivist depictions entrench divisions in postcolonial Ireland between supposedly premodern traditional ways of life and the modernity of Britain and the USA. While Britain industrialized through extracting resources from its colonies, including Ireland, modernity after the Second World War was increasingly associated with a US-led fossil-fuel economy. The idea that Ireland should transition from premodern cultural relations into a modern nation after independence indicates how, as Priya Satia explains, “the development goal is a legacy of liberal empire so deeply embedded in political and institutional structures and practices that it is difficult for postcolonial societies to shake off; indeed, it is what makes postcolonial societies postcolonial” (264). Ireland’s “development goal” arises in mid-century promotional films to justify implementing new science and technologies for efficient resource extraction. Films such as Gold in the Grass (1964), as O’Brien puts it, “was an unusually scientific argument in favour of the modernisation of Irish agriculture” (The Real Ireland 151). Other films, like Life for the Soil (1966) and The Harvest of the Rich (1966) were about peat and fisheries extraction, respectively (151). Promotional films drew on ideas of past traditions and a future modernity in ways that, “encapsulat[e] the paradoxes of [Seán] Lemass’s [post 1958] Ireland, where modernisation remained subject to a lingering traditionalism 191 modified to meet the demands of the expanding economy” (150). Such understandings of progress and modernity build on imperial-era representational conventions of development, even as they purport to preserve ostensibly authentic, precolonial, and vanishing ways of life. Analyzing the handheld shots in the opening montage of The Pipe shows how Ó Domhnaill subversively invokes romanticized images of Irish rural regions to interrupt divisive narratives of development. Instead of underwriting development projects, The Pipe’s opening scenes expose picturesque images to construct binaries of developed modernity or preserved traditional lifestyles. These binaries, in turn, obscure and disrupt existent postcolonial rural modernities. By turning the camera on the authorities who protect and promote development, the protesters become the viewers of the Gardaí, who use their batons and physical force to suppress resistance against the pipeline and refinery. These handheld shots indicate the camera’s implicitly disciplinary purpose to conceal struggle and position the entire community in ongoing processes of modernization, thus reflecting how, in the words of Helen Hughes, “[f]ilm is a medium that is imbricated in the modernity that it critiques” (5). At times, the Gardaí wield a camera, and Shell’s private security forces use cameras to surveil the protestors’ homes and interactions (Ó Domhnaill 28:29; 41:15). Positioning the protesters behind the camera in these opening scenes registers spatial and temporal ruptures in the community upon which modernization projects strategically rely. The montage of aerial coastal shots with handheld close-ups of social conflict critically depicts the imposed divisions between tradition and modernity, underdeveloped and developed, as well as the viewer and viewed. The handheld shots show the viewer and viewed to oscillate ambiguously 192 across multiple rural modernities that the Gardaí and protesters in the community collectively inhabit. By foregrounding the role of the Gardaí as both community members undergoing modernization processes and agents of modernization, The Pipe refuses binary oppositions that would divide people and places into tidy understandings of before and after, traditional or modern, undeveloped or developed. The Pipe’s representation of the Gardaí exposes the region to already inhabit an unexpected modernity outside the sanctioned view of development. The Gardaí demonstrate the fractured social and environmental relations to region, nation, and globalized extraction economies in rural communities in the Republic of Ireland in the early twenty-first century. While the Gardaí represent the state and Shell’s interests in developing fossil-fuel economies, they are also locals in Rossport who, like the protesters, seek to carry out their livelihoods in the community. The scenes of the Gardaí indicate the overlapping interests across local, national, and multinational contestations of, in Jennifer Wenzel’s words, “[t]o whom do natural resources belong?” (102). The Gardaí ostensibly protect the resources that national sovereignty in postcolonial Ireland would grant to the local community. Yet the film shows the Gardaí to protect the state’s interests in developing natural resources for a globalizing economy rooted in extraction and consumption. The Gardaí continue their work even at the expense of severing friendships they previously held with local community members who participate in the protest. These competing interests reveal conflicts caused by modernization projects historically in the region and elsewhere in Ireland. These conflicts splinter progress into multiple modernities in which ongoing social and environmental relations interact with the unexpected effects of power. 193 Through the representation of the Gardaí in these persisting and multiplying ruptures in the community, The Pipe critiques the postcolonial Irish state’s embrace of multinational interests in fossil fuel extraction that presumably would bring progress to the region. The film shows this embrace to challenge anew the multi-generational farming and fishing in rural Ireland that helped define Irish identity and territorial and natural resource sovereignty since imperial-era land and fisheries reform projects in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pipe’s critique emerges in depictions of how the Gardaí use the road to protect ongoing forms of modernization that actively erase alternative modernities. Roads are an indicator of modernization in imperial-era land reform photographs in Ireland, as I argue in Chapter 2. To quote Nadia Bozak on railroads, “nineteenth-century photographers tended to focus the camera’s point of view into the direction the iron tracks were heading—that is, into an implied course of progress” (91). Contrastingly, Ó Domhnaill’s handheld shots show what is on and surrounding the road. The Gardaí throw protesters from the road in a violent imposition of order that puts the rural community back into the landscape and frees the road to facilitate further forms of development, of which the Gardaí and the road are both part. The Pipe’s opening sequence exposes how colonial, national, and multinational interests rely on divisions between premodern and modern and underdeveloped and developed to justify the changes they enact in the communities they alter. By critically drawing on visual representational conventions, The Pipe demonstrates how progress narratives obscure and erase existent alternative modernities that have emerged through ongoing interactions between traditional relations to the land and multiple modernization projects. 194 Representations of alternative modernities arise as The Pipe registers the community’s inextricable reliance on the multinational forms of extraction they simultaneously resist and embrace. These contradictory relations produce postcolonial rural modernities through which histories of imperial-era land reform and the extraction of national resources come into sharp relief. To demonstrate the multiple modernities in which the community members already live and work, The Pipe narrates the struggles of individual protesters, their collective action, and their relationships to the region as entangled with the industries they oppose. The Pipe introduces local farmers and fishermen in Shell-to-Sea, who become the main voices in the documentary’s narrative. Pat O’Donnell, who has been a fisherman in and around Broadhaven Bay since he was fourteen, states that he had two choices in life, either to fish the waters around the place where he was born or to emigrate. Two farmers then describe their relationship to the land. Monica Müller explains her dependence, both personal and professional, on the commonage of the region, which is shared “undivided” by sixty-two people (Ó Domhnaill 31:50-32:00). Willie Corduff demonstrates how to dig for clams on the local beach, a practice that has been passed down in his family for generations, saying these shellfish “were a great source of food in the old days” (6:10-6:12). These cameos highlight the individuals of Rossport who depend upon the surrounding lands and waters in their region to live, work, and allow their ways of life to thrive. The film’s depiction of these individuals leads Brereton to call The Pipe a “universal econarrative” in which “the documentary-story paints a picture that embraces core aspects of a de facto frugal existence […] as being more environmentally and ethically acceptable than simply accepting the inevitable march of progress” (125). 195 Throughout the film, however, The Pipe foregrounds these individuals’ dependence upon the fossil-fuel economies and forms of modernization their struggle seeks to resist. As the conflict escalates, the film shows local fishermen protesting on their diesel-powered fishing boats as Maura Harrington, a local schoolteacher and one of the most vocal protesters in the Shell-to-Sea campaign, blocks the road to the development site with her car (Ó Domhnaill 16:30, 1:07:14). The car on the road and motorized fishing vessels both demonstrate the many forms of modernization that are already part of the everyday lives of the community. Indeed, the Gardaí impound O’Donnell’s boat during a protest, and the camera shows O’Donnell to be drinking Coca-Cola out of a plastic bottle as he walks to the police van, thus revealing multinational forms of fossil fuel extraction and consumption to permeate the bodies of people in the community (1:05:24). The following day, O’Donnell goes “out to check [his] property” in Broadhaven Bay, which indicates forms of natural resource and property ownership that implicate the community in the neocolonial and multinational systems they also oppose in their region (1:06:42, 1:07:28). These scenes show that O’Donnell is aware of how the pipeline and refinery “destroy one industry to set up another,” an observation he makes over the film’s whirring soundscape of his boat’s diesel engine (14:00-14:20). O’Donnell recognizes that the extraction of fish is as much an “industry” as natural gas extraction by Shell, even as he frames his livelihood as a family tradition he has maintained through multiple forms of fisheries modernization for generations. By showing the ongoing dependence in the community upon forms of development and fossil fuel economies, The Pipe rejects false dichotomies between preserving local traditions and environments or embracing globalized economies in 196 postcolonial rural modernities. One way in which The Pipe challenges dichotomous constructions of modernization is in its depiction of Shell as a specter of a neocolonial, multinational modernity. The agents and infrastructure of Shell emerge out of nowhere to privatize the public commons for its own profits. This detached representation is, in part, because Shell refused to participate in the film. Yet formal aspects of the cinematography enhance this spectral depiction, thereby indicating a decentralized form of power that occupies the territorial space of the independent postcolonial nation under the aegis of development. The low-angle shots of the ship Solitaire, which sails into Broadhaven Bay to lay the undersea section of the pipeline, make the ship appear larger than life, as well as larger than the law. This framing of Shell offers a haunting specter of the colonial forms of development and forced land acquisitions during multiple imperial land reforms that intensified during and after the Tudor conquests of the sixteenth century. This implicit centuries-old narrative of modernization implicitly legitimates the contemporary cooptation of national resources with the postcolonial state’s protection. The film’s representation of Shell exposes a coerced complicity into the neocolonial flows of capital that the protesters are unable to materially resist. The film foregrounds this specter of colonialism through visual representations in which the Solitaire, security fencing, private security forces, and construction equipment are increasingly everywhere in the cinematography but have no identifiable point of origin or center. Fences around construction sites or the arm of an excavator emerge out of nowhere to take over and crowd the frame; handheld shots capture individual security workers through the bars of a fence (e.g., 48:26, 56:15-56:45, 1:00:35-1:01:04). The numerous scenes of fences, security cameras, construction equipment, private security 197 officers, and the Solitaire serve as indexes for the corporation. Shell’s spectral presence haunts the community with its colonized past, which shaped both the land in Rossport as well as the community’s identity. The film emphasizes the expansiveness of this specter of neocolonial power as Shell is excused by the High Court in 2010 for the same conviction of contempt of court that put the Rossport Five in jail for ninety-four days (1:18:30, 9:00). As Shell-to-Sea activist John Monaghan puts it, it is now “Shell’s law” (44:25). The Pipe exposes how “Shell’s law” is part of a longer history of colonial and neocolonial modernization projects in Ireland that continue to dominate the community’s relationships with its surroundings, ideas of nation and identity, and the legal and political institutions and histories through which rights are framed. In contrast to anti-colonial forms of nationalism in Ireland, The Pipe emphasizes the postcolonial state’s role in neocolonial projects through its soundscape and depictions of the Gardaí, roads, and several scenes of faded or frayed Irish flags flapping in the wind (e.g., 56:57, 58:56, 59:58, 1:04:40-50). O’Donnell receives sterile responses from the Solitaire over the VHF radio as the crew of Solitaire ignore O’Donnell’s inquiries about his crab pots: “Please immediately take action to stay well clear of Solitaire” (1:00:40- 1:01:35). The canned answer of the voice over the radio emphasizes how detached Shell and its outsourcing are from the community. Yet the anonymous voice also comes to occupy O’Donnell’s boat, asserting a command over the radio to which O’Donnell and viewers of The Pipe must listen. The voice enters and dominates the frames and soundscapes of the film, as well as the lives, legal rights, and fishing and farming commons of the people of Rossport. This aural occupation of O’Donnell’s boat occurs under the protection of the Irish state. 198 When the Gardaí and Navy protect the interests of Shell and impound O’Donnell’s fishing boat during a protest, the camera shows the Solitaire off the stern of O’Donnell’s boat. The pitching of the waves and the distance between the boats position the Irish flag under the Solitaire in the two-dimensional screen (1:04:40). This frame indicates that the Irish nation is subordinate to the multinational interests it promotes during the period of unparalleled economic growth from the mid-1990s to 2008. The subsequent scene shows O’Donnell rolling up the Irish flag he once flew off the stern of his boat. This action registers O’Donnell’s allegiance to a conception of the Irish nation that would protect his interests over those of Shell (1:04:48). In rolling up the flag, O’Donnell shows how the national institutions from which he seeks protection have become part of a larger neocolonial and multinational system. O’Donnell is coerced into a subordinate role with limited agency in which he can protest through his refusal to fly the Irish flag but is unable to protect the fishing waters upon which he relies for his livelihood. Through the montage and framing of the Irish rural landscape, protesters, the Gardaí, and specters of neocolonial capital haunting rural Ireland, The Pipe reveals the imperial logics of territory and development to persist in the Republic of Ireland. These imperial logics of territory and development facilitate the privatization of national resources at the expense of the rights of Irish citizens that national institutions ostensibly protect. Such imperial logics established forms of extraction, including fisheries and farming, that are subsequently rendered anachronistic traditions even though many had been developed during imperial-era modernization projects a century before. Positioning local fisheries and agriculture as part of a traditional way of life in a supposedly 199 undeveloped region makes way for the LNG industry to develop the region in the early twenty-first century. By reworking progress narratives and the binaries upon which they rely, Ó Domhnaill’s film challenges established visual representations of rural Ireland and reveals multiple modernities embedded in the community’s ongoing struggle against coerced forms of modernization. Splintered Communities: Gendered Conflicts and Ruptures in a Modern Society Modernization narratives of territory and development rely on gendered understandings of progress and rationalized material environments. Sandra Harding asserts that “modernity defines itself against whatever it defines as past. Consequently, modernity narratives obsessively recuperate feminized tradition in order to define their own different, manly, and Western progressive features. In this way, tradition, exemplified within modern societies by women and women’s worlds, becomes conceptually internal to modernity” (206). Gendered modernity narratives in which a feminized traditional past in the private, domestic sphere supposedly progresses into a masculine-inflected public ‘good’ in a modernized future are evident in the history of Irish documentary films about modernization. Notably, the docudrama The Promise of Barty O’ Brien (1951), a film written by Seán Ó Faoláin but partially funded by the Marshall Aid Program’s Economic Co-Operation Administration (ECA), presents a feminized past tradition hindering the masculine modernity of technological advancements for extracting the bog for industrial energy production. The traditional farmer’s son, Barty, goes to the United States to become an electrician and returns to Ireland to work on the Rural Electrification Project. In the meantime, Barty’s sister 200 marries a local farmer who will maintain the family farm. Barty’s sister carries on the traditions attached to the land, even as her husband brings new technologies, like a tractor, to the farm. This film positions tradition as a feminized hindrance to rendering the seemingly useless bog into a more efficient fossil fuel in a masculine-inflected modernity. Heeding the specific roles that women play in The Pipe and the diverse forms of agency they assert shows how Ó Domhnaill’s cinematographic choices resist gendered “modernity narratives.” Depictions of women in the film rework gendered understandings of public and private spaces implicit in modernization projects to foreground fluid and continually unfolding networks of environmental relations existent in Rossport. The Pipe’s representations of community members and activists Maura Harrington, Mary Corduff, and Monica Müller, as well as Member of European Parliament (MEP) Kathy Sinnott, chart diverse and sometimes conflicting spatial and temporal relationships across seemingly divided public and private spaces. Through depictions of women’s relationships to land, law, and activism in the film, gendered relationships to modernity and fossil fuels in The Pipe expose how, as Sheena Wilson puts it, “empowered feminist identities outside those sanctioned by the mainstream neoliberal petro-discourses are depoliticized and renegotiated in the public sphere” (280). The Pipe reworks gendered “petro-discourses” in public and private spheres to carve out space through which ongoing relationships among human and nonhuman agencies emerge within the camera’s frame. The film traces what is considered reasonable in typically masculine-inflected public spaces like community meetings. The Pipe shows Father Michael Nallen reading a 201 letter the parish priests wrote to the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan asking that Shell reroute the pipeline through the “uninhabited area” of Glinsk (Ó Domhnaill 19:35). Community members convene at two separate Shell-to-Sea meetings to discuss the priests’ plan. The Pipe juxtaposes the seemingly unreasonable but impassioned protester Harrington with the apparently more reasonable men in the community. Harrington’s outspoken opposition to the priests’ solution recognizes the futility of an alternative route. The pollution of the land and sea would just occur further down the coast. Yet others in the community, like Monaghan, contend that they should accept it to “show that we are reasonable people” (22:20, 26:20). These scenes show the men as rational and seeking a solution for Shell that would also work for the community while Harrington’s approach staunchly refuses to work within the implicitly gendered frameworks that render local socio-relational environments into empty spaces ripe for privatized development (23:00). Indeed, Shell and the national media relied on these gendered spatio-temporal frameworks of modernization narratives to divide the community along binaries of tradition and modernity. For example, Shell primarily targeted men with the injunctions, thereby recognizing them as the property owners in the community even though women in Rossport continued to protest the pipeline and refinery (Our Story 87, 201, 205, 207). While their husbands and fathers were in jail, the media extensively covered the women in Rossport. For example, the five women whose husbands comprise the Rossport Five appeared on the popular national television program, The Late Late Show. The host, Pat Kenny, introduced the controversy that led to their husbands being held in contempt of court for over two months at the time of the broadcast on September 2, 2005, noting that 202 “meanwhile, their families survive in Mayo without the man of the house doing what needs to be done” (RTÉ Archives 0:37). Kenny’s ensuing interview with Mary Corduff avoids the reasons why the families in Rossport are protesting the pipeline, focusing instead on family affairs, such as what birthdays the husbands have missed and how the women are coping “without the man of the house.” The final question Kenny asks is “What would it take for the men to purge their contempt?” While Kenny’s question encourages Mary to offer some domestic reason why the men should give up their cause, Mary answers by bringing the conversation back to the protest: “It would be Shell that would have to take that step, to lift the injunction. Then they [the men] would purge their contempt” (3:26). Mary’s responses show that the women are as much a part of the protest as their husbands. Both the men and the women are committed to resisting the larger threat Shell’s development poses to their homes, families, and ways of life. Yet the appearance of the women on The Late Late Show and the topics about which Mary is interviewed demonstrate how the media perpetuated representational conventions in which, in Harding’s words, “[a] functional separation of public and private spheres is one of the significant marks of modernity’s social progress ‘for humanity’” (198). The Late Late Show segment sustains the “functional separation” between the feminized, private domestic spaces that the women supposedly represent and the public stance against development that their husbands ostensibly willfully maintain. Yet as Ó Domhnaill points out, “When the men were jailed, there was a large blockade of the refinery and work was stopped. And every morning hundreds of people would gather outside the refinery” (Live Q&A 4:15-4:35). 203 Rather than focus on their ongoing protest during their husbands’ time in jail, the media maintained gendered divisions between public-modern-masculine and private- traditional-feminine spaces. Maureen McGrath, who did not appear in The Pipe, explains in Our Story how this increasing media attention affected her: “The wives had to get on with it and deal with the media. […] They might come taking photographs or filming and it could take an hour with you walking […] the road until they got the shots right, walking the way they want you t[o]. You just did what you had to do” (Garavan 201). McGrath’s statement attests to the way visual representations craft the object of their gaze to meet viewer expectations and uphold dominant narratives. While the imprisonment of the Rossport Five was undoubtedly very difficult for the families, representations of the women as somehow outside the conflict preserves the image of a community of wives supposedly adrift without their husbands. The husbands are then rendered as recklessly risking their families to protest development. To establish Rossport as a region advancing in natural gas extraction and production, the national media shows the protest to interrupt feminized traditions in private spaces by the stubborn refusal of the five men to promote masculinized modernization projects of public spaces. The Pipe disrupts these gendered divisions of public-private spaces and traditional and modern temporalities in modernization narratives by showing how Harrington, MEP Sinnott, and Mary Corduff assert forms of agency that cumulatively refuse, in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s words, “the normative referent in such a binary analytic” (22). While Harrington loudly demonstrates in public spaces, the film depicts the relatively private gaze of a public figure. MEP Sinnott represented Ireland in Brussels, where the Rossport group stated their case to the petitions committee on a visit she sponsored. In its depiction 204 of this visit to the European Parliament, The Pipe only shows MEP Sinnott waving the community members off after their testimony (Ó Domhnaill 40:00-40:11). MEP Sinnott’s silence in the story is notable, as she had the authority to give the community members a platform to voice their concerns at the level of the European Union. Michael Paye interprets such silences in Ó Domhnaill’s films to perpetuate gender hierarchies that “uncomfortably mirror” longer histories of “capitalism, abstraction, extraction, and violence against nature/women” (124). Yet a closer examination of visual elements in the representation of MEP Sinnott reveals the film’s refusal of binary divisions, which, in turn, structurally challenges gender hierarchies. Although MEP Sinnott is not named or interviewed in the film, the camera foregrounds her perspective during her emphatic farewells to the group (Ó Domhnaill 39:49-40:07). MEP Sinnott briefly glances at the camera, thus acknowledging its focus upon her and asserting her agency to look away even as she stands in the center of the frame. The camera then follows MEP Sinnott’s gaze as the group leaves the European Parliament to return to Rossport (40:07-40:12). The camera’s gaze in this farewell scene briefly presents the community members as objects of MEP Sinnott’s view rather than as the subjects of the story. This implicit and momentary inversion of subject and object emphasizes the public authority MEP Sinnott holds and through which she oversees the effects of modernization processes on her constituents. Rather than offering a masculine- inflected depiction of MEP Sinnott’s authority over public space, The Pipe conflates public and private by preventing the viewer access to a clear articulation of her perspective. MEP Sinnott’s public service gives the protesters a voice while her own voice is present only through the camera’s view. By putting the Rossport delegates under 205 the purview of MEP Sinnott’s public-private gaze, the film refuses to work within “the mainstream neoliberal petro-discourses” it subtly disrupts (Wilson 280). Ó Domhnaill’s film also acknowledges and complicates public-private divisions that devalue feminine-gendered household work in its representations of Mary Corduff. The Pipe shows Mary quietly but diligently attending meetings and protests, and it interviews her in private, domestic spaces. She accompanies community members to Brussels, but she appears as silently observing the protest actions she supports. In interviews, Mary is in her kitchen cooking or minding a baby, and she provides her approval when the community calls off protests as violence escalates, an act Harrington sums up as a “dreadful mistake” and “a failure of courage” (Ó Domhnaill The Pipe 18:45, 9:00, 27:15, 41:15). These scenes of private domestic space frame Mary’s more moderate approach to the struggle within traditionally feminine-expressing labor roles. Yet The Pipe positions Mary in a prominent role in the film, thus refusing to erase or conceal the household labor she does or the forms of agency she asserts as an environmental justice protester. Mary’s activism shows how, as Mohanty put it, “[s]uperficially similar situations may have radically different, historically specific explanations and cannot be treated as identical” (35). Through regularly inserting Mary’s perspective as she carries out her work in the home, The Pipe does not metaphorize women as houses, which visual representations of modernization projects before and after independence have done, as I show in Chapters 1 and 2. Rather, it shows how Mary’s household work, perspectives, and agency are an integral part of modernization projects and the community’s public resistance to them. 206 The specificity of women’s diverse experiences in the film destabilizes normative referents and understandings of development implicit in gendered binaries dividing a masculine, public modernity from feminine, private traditional spaces. Through disrupting visual signifiers of gendered modernization narratives, The Pipe visually carves out a narrative space through which the region’s multiple postcolonial modernities come into sharper relief in representations of farmer and activist Monica Müller. The Pipe introduces shifting relationships to place in early twenty-first century Ireland by following Müller as she uses legal action to delay Shell from completing its LNG projects in Broadhaven Bay and Rossport. Like the scenes of Harrington as a rogue Shell-to-Sea activist, the film also shows Müller to act alone in her efforts to thwart Shell’s developments (Ó Domhnaill 31:45-35:00; 56:30). This representation of Müller acting alone but rationally within existing legal systems formally isolates her from the community even as it indicates her commitment to protect the lands upon which she too relies. The film’s representation of Müller’s isolation tangentially refers to xenophobic notions of who belonged in the community that arose during the protests. Micheál Ó Seighin explains that he and Müller were accused of being “outsiders,” because Ó Seighin moved from Galway to be a schoolteacher and Müller had immigrated to the region from Germany (Garavan 75). While the xenophobia Müller experienced recalls fears after the Second World War through the 1980s of Germans acquiring land that Irish people could not afford to buy, it also articulates tensions between immigration during the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s long history of coerced emigration resulting from colonialism and neocolonial economic subordination. Indeed, O’Donnell asserts at the 207 start of the film that he would be forced to emigrate if he could not fish the coastal waters around Broadhaven Bay. O’Donnell’s experience of the threat of emigration contrasts with Müller’s decision to immigrate from a modernized Germany to rural Ireland, which suggests geopolitical privileges of mobility. Pressures of emigration and opportunities of immigration indicate gendered geopolitical hierarchies in modernizing European countries in which Ireland has historically been feminized and economically subordinate. Tropes of the masculine British John Bull patronizing a feminized Mother Ireland implicitly persist in the uneven development across European countries. Eóin Flannery explains that “[w]hile nations such as Britain, France and Germany […] were engines of European modernisation, […] the Irish experience of modernity was enforced and traumatic, and in these ways had much in common with the experiences of other colonised, and often non-European, societies” (226). The uneven development and experience of modernization in Ireland contrasts with those in Germany that would have fostered geopolitical privileges, such as international mobility and the capacity for property ownership. In settling as a landowner and farmer in Rossport, Müller demonstrates intersections of masculine-inflected modernities and feminine-inflected traditions across twenty-first century geopolitical hierarchies emerging through European integration and ongoing colonial histories. While Müller was not targeted by Shell in legal proceedings over property ownership as the men comprising the Rossport Five were, the film implicitly associates her more with a masculinized German modernization rather than with rural Ireland’s historically feminized experience of modernity. Panning and uncut shots of the bog frame Müller’s descriptions of the legal action she is taking against Shell (Ó Domhnaill 31:45- 208 33:55). From inside her home, Müller describes how she strategically draws on legal frameworks to protect the land. These moments in the film demonstrate Müller’s settlement in Rossport and embrace of a traditional rural farm lifestyle and modern property ownership. Müller explains her analytical approach to the law and definition of the commonage that materially and legally substantiates her attachment to and belonging in Rossport, as well as her claims in the district court. Müller explains that “Shell thinks buying a share in the commonage means they can enter the commonage as they like. I disagree with that” (34:40-35:00). Müller’s insight into both the national legal system and local land relations disrupts gendered divisions between a masculine modern progress and feminized premodern traditions. By filming Müller’s masculine-inflected analytical approach to public lands from within the domestic space she owns, The Pipe shows Müller to inhabit multiple gendered spaces at once, thereby disrupting implied temporalities of progress to divide private and public, tradition and modernity, and undeveloped and developed. Analyzing the cinematography and montage around Müller’s movements across the commons maps out postcolonial modernities in which the people of Rossport implicitly already live and work in ongoing relationships with nonhuman communities and material agencies. The film shows Müller walking along a road lined with turf at the start of the film. These scenes remind the viewer of how cutting turf has a long cultural history in subsistence farming in rural Ireland. Yet they also indicate how the industrial energy extraction of turf and the building of roads have been iconic forms of modernization since imperial-era land and fisheries reform projects in the late-nineteenth century. Films like The Promise of Barty O’Brien represent land reforms that continue to 209 shape Irish rural landscapes after independence. Policies protecting state-sanctioned understandings of economic and social progress are literally pounded into the bog when Willie Corduff posts signs announcing Müller’s claim in the district court that delayed Shell’s project (1:15:30-1:16:52, 1:18:40). Müller’s actions demonstrate her ability to navigate traditional local knowledge amid multinational extractive economies as she confronts Shell in the courts and on the bog with their misunderstanding of how the commonage works. Müller’s actions in the film foreground how the landscape embeds understandings of tradition, modernity, identity, agency, and belonging in postcolonial rural Ireland, even as such understandings shift from those of territorial sovereignty to ephemeral flows of multinational capital associated with fossil-fuel extraction. By subverting gendered divisions between public and private spaces upon which modernization narratives rely, Ó Domhnaill’s film traces trajectories through which alternative modernities emerge in postcolonial rural Ireland. The breadth of women’s experiences and the forms of agency they assert challenge tensions between feminized private spaces in supposedly premodern traditions and masculine-inflected modern public forums, where an implied rational petro-discourse promises a supposedly better future for human communities. Harrington’s loud demonstrations against the pipeline in public spaces refuse the terms of reasonability dictated by Shell’s masculine-inflected neocolonial modernity. The film reworks expectations of gendered public and private spaces by making the domestic labor happening in Mary Corduff’s kitchen more public than the European Parliament. The film thus critically reframes gendered spaces in progress narratives across a spectrum of competing modern experiences that come into sharp relief in representations of Müller. Müller’s trajectories over the bog reveal 210 narrative spaces for visualizing the complex constellations of social systems materially sculpting rural landscapes. The scenes of Müller and the bog trace, conflate, and complicate the gendered territories and histories of modernization through which postcolonial multispecies modernities emerge in ongoing interactions among human and nonhuman communities and material agencies. “The bog is a technology of its own”: Multispecies Interactions in Postcolonial Modernities By expanding narrative spaces for postcolonial modernities to multispecies interactions, The Pipe shows the region’s collaborative relationships between natural and cultural systems. Such relationships refuse a bifurcation between nature and culture, either in the exploitation of nature by culture or the submergence of culture into nature. Land and landscapes are cultural actors in many Irish films, as Gibbons asserts: “Landscape has tended to play a leading role in Irish cinema, often upstaging both the main characters and narrative theme in the construction of Ireland on the screen” (Rockett et al. 198, 200, 203). Like Gibbons, O’Brien recognizes how documentary films present landscapes through the role they have played in social histories: “Less often observed is that the landscape itself is also constructed, a signifier of habitation replete with meanings of its own” (The Real Ireland 17). The construction of landscapes takes opposing forms in the history of Irish documentary film. The Promise of Barty O’Brien shows the bog as a vast, empty space that could be used to create electricity if people would just let go of their traditional subsistence turf-cutting and enter the modern world of industrial extraction economies. In contrast, Peter Carey’s documentary film Oisín 211 (1970), made for the European Conservation Year, draws on the mythical Irish past of Fionn Mac Cumhaill to indicate interdependent relationships between human societies and their material surroundings. After describing the story of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Oisín offers a montage of close-ups and long-shots from various angles that demonstrate ongoing and vibrant interactions among birds, insects, and plants in Irish ecosystems. By beginning with a traditional Irish story and then showing only ecological relationships among nonhumans, Oisín contrasts an indigenous Irish culture with the Republic of Ireland as the state shifted toward foreign direct investments throughout the 1960s up until Oisín was produced in 1970. The Pipe implicitly builds on the opposing environmental perspectives evinced in these two historical films to refuse divisions of premodern or modern ways of life. In doing so, Ó Domhnaill’s film reveals postcolonial multispecies modernities to exist in and through ongoing interactions among human and nonhuman communities and their environments. Examining depictions of human and nonhuman relationships in The Pipe demonstrates what Isabel Carbonell calls multispecies cinema, which “opens the imagination to relearn different ways to see, to hear, to know, to feel and to understand the long-now of our ecological crises” (139). By critically drawing on what O’Brien describes as “a familiar Irish cinematic past,” The Pipe calls attention to material and nonhuman agencies that revise what the viewer observes upon encountering “extraordinarily beautiful sweeping image[s] of the West Coast of Ireland” (“Advocating” 222-223). Through changing what images of rural Irish landscapes signify in film, The Pipe “opens the imagination to relearn different ways to” perceive and 212 interpret the multispecies moments in cinematic representations of postcolonial modernities. Postcolonial multispecies modernities emerge in how The Pipe demonstrates material agencies to transgress the aims of both Shell and the Shell-to-Sea protesters. One such moment occurs after private security forces replace the local Gardaí, demonstrating how, as Wenzel puts it, “[i]n the oil complex, companies rival the state in a formal sense because they assume some of its functions” (108). The anonymity of the security forces allows Shell to continue its work without causing further rifts between local police and protesters. These rifts have, as Willie Corduff articulates, “a mark left in the community that’ll never be healed” (Ó Domhnaill 49:38). The private security officers form a line across the beach to protect the building site as the tide comes in, and many of the security officers laugh as they jump to avoid inevitably wet feet. Their laughter is the only time the officers reveal any emotion. Other scenes depict the robotic performance of their duty. Rather than subordinate the officers in hierarchies of humans over nonhumans, these mechanisms of dehumanization reveal stoic bodies enforcing hierarchies through sterile and unfeeling surveillance programs on and around Shell’s building site. The momentary interaction the security forces have with the tide destabilizes Shell’s spectral and seemingly inhuman incursion into the community to expose material agencies making themselves affectively and viscerally known, if only for a moment. This affective moment in which the tidal waters permeate the line and countenances of security officers indicates how ongoing planetary processes, like tides, exceed the legal, social, and economic systems through which the activists protest and Shell carries out its development projects. Indeed, these planetary processes transcend the 213 seemingly inhuman labor that the security officers do by making them laugh. Although the incoming tide shows that Shell workers are building below the high-water mark, which, as Monaghan explains, is the limit of Shell’s legal jurisdiction, the flow of the tide also reveals a physical force that exposes porous boundaries (44:25-45:30). Shell may appear to be an impenetrable force imposing itself on the community and formally taking over the documentary’s cinematic frames, but the film shows the material environment to transgress Shell’s apparently impenetrable boundaries with ease, undermining even the severest expressions of Shell’s hired security forces. By revealing environmental systems to transcend social barriers, The Pipe indicates material agencies that subtend and constrain local and global relations within the physical limits of earth systems. The Pipe also shows certain community members to recognize the agencies of material environments. When Shell responds to the protests and letter from the parish priests by rerouting the pipe through the bog, Willie Corduff asserts that “the bog is a technology of its own. […] If there’s one thing about the bog, you can’t trust the bog” (31:30). The idea that the bog is a “technology” indicates rival modernities embedded in the material environment. The “technology” of the bog has the agency to resist modernization projects by refusing to provide Shell’s pipe with stable ground. Willie’s statements about the bog are followed by panning aerial long-shots of a vast bog landscape in which areas of turf have been cut out (31:45). The ecological and cultural significance of the bog in Ireland reveals an ongoing history in which, as Derek Gladwin explains, “[t]he micro-geography of bogs is constantly in flux, but the change is too slow for the human eye to observe the constant and intricate rearrangement of textures and colours over time and space” (29). This deep geologic time of the bog indicates spatio- 214 temporalities that exceed visual representation and human historical social systems, even in the significant cultural value of cutting turf in rural Irish subsistence economies. The bog inserts an amorphous environmental agency into The Pipe that is both ecological and cultural. The viewer sees the bog while listening to Willie’s description of it. This montage emphasizes complex interdependencies between bog ecosystems and human relations, both in the film and in Rossport. The cinematic emphasis in The Pipe on the bog, sea, estuary, and coastline reveals the liminal connections between human and nonhuman relationships. An establishing shot of the estuary through which salmon travel to the Glenamoy River each year registers complex environmental systems in which many creatures, including the humans, live and work (36:32). The Pipe presents long-shots of green hills and blue water coming in from the sea as Willie notes “a different type of shellfish” (Ó Domhnaill 36:34). A close-up of the shellfish appears before the film shows Willie digging through seaweed on the beach as he describes the movements of a crab: “trying to get away there, see him? He’s fast on the move. He knows the direction to go, out into the water, so he does” (36:43-36:53). Although the viewer cannot see where the crab is going during subsequent close-ups, they know from Willie’s description that the crab scurrying between rocks and seaweed is moving toward the sea. These scenes of multispecies environments represent the crab as an agent with intention who “knows” to go out to sea or to grab Willie’s finger “if he gets the chance” (36:57). The montage of establishing shots, aerial shots, long-shots, cameos, and close- ups foregrounds liminal spaces in which human and nonhuman communities interact, sometimes unknowingly. Willie’s recognition of the agency of the crab registers myriad 215 communities and individual actors, human and nonhuman, that go unseen in visual representations. Through The Pipe’s montage, the establishing and aerial shots come to demonstrate interrelated human and nonhuman communities across physical spaces of land, coast, and ocean. The close-ups of the shellfish and crab become indexes for all the living beings and the relationships between them in Rossport. The Pipe thus revises the viewer’s perception and interpretation of picturesque images of Irish landscapes by showing such scenes to comprise infinite unrepresentable nonhuman and human relationships embedded in interconnected ecosystems. These multispecies moments in the film expose how picturesque representations of premodern or modernized landscapes elide complex interdependencies between humans and their material environments. Whether the security guards inadvertently interact with tides or the bog asserts “a technology of its own,” The Pipe refuses to separate humans and nonhumans from the continuous interactions and geologic histories in which they dwell. Like Oisín, Ó Domhnaill’s film seeks to capture nonhuman agencies and multispecies encounters, but it does so by gesturing toward these interactions in everyday human activities. Through the montage of material agencies and planetary forces, The Pipe reveals ongoing and inextricable relationships between human and nonhuman communities in material environments that cannot always be visually represented for an implied, external viewer. While visual representations of modernization projects may attempt to contain and control material agencies through aesthetic markers of progress, The Pipe demonstrates the existence of material agencies and environments that escape representation in visual depictions of modernization. 216 By destabilizing the representational strategies for modernization in the film’s initial juxtapositions and then disrupting gendered petro-discourses of space and time, The Pipe points to multispecies and agential material relations of which the human community is part. The film immerses the viewer in these multispecies modernities through scenes on O’Donnell’s fishing boat. The sound of the engine combines with the constant movement of the boat on the ocean’s swell. Footage of fishing gear pulling crabs and lobsters up from a tumultuous sea indicates the ecosystems beneath O’Donnell’s boat. O’Donnell asserts that fishing is a relationship he and the men in his family have carried out for generations: “I have a right to be here. This is where I’ve been all my life” (59:30). Indeed, the film regularly shows O’Donnell’s son working in the fisheries (e.g., 15:15; 1:17:50). The Pipe reframes this relationship between fathers and sons to the sea by subordinating the masculine-inflected fishing industry to the interwoven fates of the human and nonhuman communities. The history of modernization in Ireland has strategically relied on the idea of relinquishing past traditional industries in favor of modern technologies that supposedly ensure more prosperous economic futures. Through refusing bifurcations of tradition and modernity in the numerous scenes on O’Donnell’s boat, Ó Domhnaill, in Erika Balsom’s words on John Grierson’s 1929 Drifters, “advances a structural understanding of fishing as a network of human and nonhuman agents within which any individual worker is just one small part” (41). The scenes on O’Donnell’s boat reveal the human community’s complex position within obscured ecosystems and extraction economies. 217 The Pipe foregrounds the interwoven fates of human and nonhuman agencies through the movement of the boat. The ocean swell constantly rolls the camera’s gaze, thereby confronting the viewer with the physical forces of the ocean that refuse a stable position or complete view. Although such partial views are perhaps inevitable when the camera is situated on O’Donnell’s boat, their prominence in the film demonstrates, to use Stacy Alaimo’s words, how “oceanic depths […] resist the sort of flat mapping of the globe that assumes a ‘God’s-eye view’” (161). The rolling scenes and ongoing sounds of the diesel engine destabilize understandings of a fixed place or time. The soundscape of the motor and camera’s movement upon the waves reveal fluid and shifting waters that are metaphorically and literally, to quote Alaimo, “immersed in highly mediated environments that suggest the entanglements of knowledge, science, economics, and power” (161). By tracing the boat’s motions and sounds, the film shows the human community’s dependence upon the fossil fuel economies they protest and the material agencies and nonhuman interlocutors with which they interact every day. The Pipe thus refuses clear categories of complicity, culpability, and resistance in formations of citizens, consumers, and material and social surroundings that, as Wenzel puts it, “create the conditions for meaningful choice” in a “hydrocarbon modernity” (137). Like the bog, the scenes from O’Donnell’s boat show material agencies and nonhuman communities to surround and at times overwhelm the human community in Rossport and Shell’s modernization projects. Nonhuman actors in the film resist both erasure and filmic representation to demonstrate the existence of dynamic multispecies and agential material relationships comprising postcolonial rural modernities. 218 Conclusion: Depicting Postcolonial Multispecies Modernities in Documentary Film The Pipe concludes with another panning aerial shot of the bog, a space often invoked in Irish cultural and economic production and that plays an important role in Ireland’s ecology. By the end of the film, the bog indicates rival narratives of modernity as they unfold across human and nonhuman relationships with material environments, ecosystems, and the ongoing impacts of empire. Through invoking and destabilizing visual representations of imperial-era development projects and romanticized Irish landscapes, The Pipe refuses binaries in depictions of supposedly modernized regions or premodern empty spaces. Such binaries facilitated British colonial expansion into Ireland and continue to facilitate multinational neocolonial LNG development projects in the postcolonial nation. Forms of environmental modernization threaten to repeat and more deeply engrain colonial narratives of development through neocolonial economic regimes. Countering the cinematic visual tropes that support these forms of development, The Pipe revises understandings of progress in, to use Bozak’s words, “video harnessed as a political, social, and environmental practice” (193). The Pipe’s cinematography, soundscape, and montage critically rework longer imperial cinematic histories to resist a neocolonial petro-modernity actively overwriting existing and entangled postcolonial multispecies modernities. Heeding the postcolonial multispecies modernities in The Pipe reveals continuously unfolding relationships through which humans and nonhumans fluidly, collaboratively, and sometimes unknowingly interact to constitute our interwoven fates. 219 Conclusion: The Multiple Presents of Multiple Modernities Ireland’s uneven forms of development across the twentieth century raise important questions about how postcolonial nations internalize the logics of empire. Can postcolonial nations decolonize the environmental impacts of empire within our current neocolonial modernity? What modes of resistance arise to counter uneven divisions of material wealth established during the era of colonialism? How do these uneven divisions perpetuate social and gender hierarchies within and across national borders as immigration reforms protect colonial and neocolonial forms of wealth accumulation? Colonial and neocolonial logics persist in how progress is construed in the implied transformation of supposedly premodern traditions into a rationalized future modernity. What looked decidedly modern in the CDB photographic archive was subsequently framed as traditional by the national media during the Shell-to-Sea environmental justice struggle. Contradictions like this emerge in the mid-twentieth century as Seán Ó Riada describes innovative traditions and traditional narrative forms on national radio that offer alternative structures of development to those rapidly expanding across Ireland in the 1960s. Free-State land reforms during the economic wars of the 1930s continue imperial- era understandings of an extractive modernity in independent Ireland, memorializing what extraction economies destroy and imposing an idealized poverty on Irish-speaking communities that encourage emigration. The economic policies before and after Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage create social and cultural conditions to which Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House each respond. O’Brien’s text points to the alternative modernities embedded in more relational 220 productions of meaning through ongoing interactions among the writer, reader, text, and material and cultural context. Relational interactions reveal an ongoing unfolding of alternative modernities embedded in dynamic Irish traditions, an idea that persists in Ó Riada’s radio programs and becomes a focal theme of The Bray House. In Ní Dhuibhne’s dystopian future, late twentieth-century economic policies establish neocolonial regimes that perpetuate ideas of development that sacrifice particular peoples and places in the name of progress, in this case the island of Ireland and Irish people. The novel parodically critiques the reduction of the Troubles to atavistic colonial stereotypes as it demonstrates persisting cultural and material resources embedded in Irish folk traditions and the Irish landscape. By reworking and refusing the gendered tradition-modern binary at distinct moments of modernization across the twentieth century, each of these texts demonstrates multiple modernities emerging in parallel with imperial logics. These multiple modernities emerge in and through old and new media and narrative forms across the twentieth century. The documentary photography that was relatively new to rural Ireland in the early twentieth century is echoed by Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s en media res grassroots documentary. While documentary film was not new to rural Ireland, the Irish film industry generally only expanded in the 1980s after the establishment of the Irish Film Board in 1981. Ó Domhnaill draws on this relatively new medium for self-representation in rural Ireland to demonstrate the limitations historically of gendered visual representations of modernization. This depiction contrasts with the portrayal by the national media and Shell PR crews of the struggle within the imperial logics of a seemingly traditional people not wanting to modernize. Instead, The Pipe 221 offers montages representing community struggle as well as the community’s relationship to material agencies and nonhuman communities. This use of a relatively new media to rework logics of premodern and modern ways of life challenges imposed narrative forms already established in other regions of Ireland, as well as in the imperial centers of Britain and the Unites States. Ó Riada’s description of oral traditions in Irish-speaking communities on national radio modernizes them, reminding the listener explicitly of the innovative potential of traditional forms of knowledge. Formal elements in traditional music and song contrast with more linear forms of development elsewhere in Europe. The publication of The Bray House by the feminist Attic Press indicates how marginalized groups, such as Irish women, were organizing to rework understandings of Irish writing around the same time Dolmen Press published a revised version of Our Musical Heritage, which drew more on the fixed understandings of tradition that Ó Riada’s original program implicitly resisted. Although the Dolmen Press historically sought to create a platform for Irish writers in an anglophone publishing world dominated by presses in the United States and Britain, the emergence of Attic Press in 1978 demonstrates the need for a broader conception of good writing in Ireland, namely, more women writers. Such shifting understandings of Irish writing continue today with the establishment of Skein Press in 2017, which seeks to promote the writing of marginalized groups, including migrant writers and indigenous ethnic minorities, such as Irish Travellers (Mincéirí). By tracing aesthetic trends across different media in different moments of modernization in Ireland, “Re-mediating Ireland” reveals competing understandings of modernity and modernizing traditions. The multiple modernities represented in 222 documentary photography and film, as well as the shifting role of print in Irish presses and orality on radio, demonstrate alternative forms of development that indicate more socially just futures through reworking older forms in newer media. The ongoing interplay between form, content, and medium that my analyses elucidate reflects social relations with material environments embedded in the multiple modernities shown in each text. These multiple modernities and processes through which they engage dynamic cultural and material environments of Ireland offer new ways of thinking about environmental justice in postcolonial ecocriticism. It disrupts logics of development that persist in both the Irish context and those communities that emulate Ireland’s forms of environmental and economic development. This project consequently highlights the mechanisms that give rise to the uneven distribution of rights and resources across geopolitical hierarchies between and within nation states as a result of the environmental impacts of empire. In doing so, it foregrounds agencies and modes of resistance that imagine alternative and more enduring and socially just relationships among people and their material and nonhuman environments. This work lays the foundation for further inquiry into how multiple modernities in Ireland continue to develop amid racial formations after the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. The uneven forms of colonial development that persist in a neocolonial economic modernity continue to encourage emigration out of Ireland as racially diverse populations rework conceptions of Irishness. Tensions between immigration and emigration arise to establish what Ronit Lentin has theorized as “the return of Ireland’s repressed experience of e/migration” (26). Families severed by various forms of forced emigration historically must grapple with the intergenerational trauma as 223 neocolonial regimes and histories of colonial development encourage immigration into and ongoing emigration out of Ireland. These tensions and traumas around migration in Ireland give rise to uncomfortable racial formations that emulate the development of black-white binaries in Britain and the United States. As Steven Loyal explains: “National self-understanding […] no longer used Britain primarily as its negative foil of reference, especially after the Belfast Agreement. In the new socio-economic context of the Celtic Tiger, black asylum-seekers became the negative markers of difference” (149). These black-white binaries come into sharp relief in the wake of the Citizenship Referendum of 2004. Immigration reforms and racial formations in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland offer an uncomfortable echo of post-Windrush British racial formations. Strategic understandings of British whiteness promoted anti-Black immigration policies while continuing to discriminate against phenotypically white ethnicities, including Irish people, in ways that lead to premature death (Walter 276). Such conceptions of whiteness conceal difference through a “myth of homogeneity,” but, as Bronwen Walter argues, “the failure to acknowledge difference does not mean that ‘othering’ has disappeared. Indeed there are strong continuities in reworked forms with denial of difference” (107). Twenty-first century Irish national identity assumes whiteness among diverse and often oppressed populations to perpetuate broader Western forms of antiblackness. Notably, Eastern European workers, often from Poland or Romania, as well as the indigenous ethnic minority, the Irish Travellers (Mincéirí), experience social and economic marginalization that mirrors how “myth[s] of homogeneity” perpetuates discrimination and entrenches social hierarchies of white supremacy and antiblackness, even as they oppress white- 224 presenting populations like Eastern European workers and indigenous ethnic minorities. Scholars must attend to these insidious forms of power to understand how antiblackness reproduces itself to occlude assertions of agency and joy among gendered, classed, racialized, and ethnically marginalized populations. The environmental impacts of empire exacerbate social inequalities as they expose the connections between logics of development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and contemporary racial formations. For example, constructions of property ownership in understandings of civilization during the nineteenth century naturalized how, as Jim Mac Laughlin puts it, “sedentary peoples, particularly those in the more powerful nation-states of Europe, had first claim on the world’s resources because their approach to environmental management was superior to the environmental practices of nomadic peoples and pre-capitalist societies” (26). Colonial hierarchies were based on people’s relationships to their material surroundings, and as Robert Young reminds us: “The culture of land has always been, in fact, the primary form of colonization; the focus on soil emphasizes the physicality of the territory that is coveted, occupied, cultivated, turned into plantations and made unsuitable for indigenous nomadic tribes” (31). Understanding what and how multiple modernities resist the historical flattening of colonization and marginalize ongoing interactions among diverse peoples, ecosystems, and material agencies in environmental surroundings is essential to analyses of how citizenship laws perpetuate the uneven distribution of wealth. These uneven distributions stem from colonial development and persist in neocolonial regimes that fortify national borders throughout the West. In tracing multiple modernities across the environmental 225 impacts of empire in twentieth-century Ireland, “Re-mediating Ireland” shows the importance of heeding Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial experience in broader theories of power and difference in postcolonial ecocriticism. Ireland’s position as both a postcolonial nation and settler-colonial statelet on the geographic and economic periphery of Europe provides unique insight into how colonial logics of development persist and continue to shape what we perceive as progress today. Examining the multiple modernities and processes of remediation across the twentieth century in Ireland thus establishes an important case study of what Byron Caminero- Santangelo calls postcolonial regional particularism, which “emphasi[es] regional alterity that cannot be subsumed by a more universal imperial or postcolonial condition […] [while] still challeng[ing] imperial discourse’s suppression of global entanglement in the representation of difference” (9). Cultural representations of modernization in twentieth- century Ireland demonstrate ongoing local and global relations across complex constellations of colonial and neocolonial power. These constellations of power historically perpetuated emigration out of Ireland and into settler-colonial states elsewhere. Yet similar uneven forms of development draw people from various postcolonial countries, including Ireland, to the British imperial center in what Doreen Massey theorizes as “a perverse subsidy, flowing from poor to rich” in our neocolonial modernity (World City 175). “Re-mediating Ireland” traces the aesthetics of modernity across media in narrative forms that seek to justify these flows, and, in doing so, my project elucidates how multiple modernities emerging alongside sanctioned views of progress demonstrate alternative forms of development that nuance how we theorize race, gender, and class in postcolonial ecocriticism. 226 This study opens new paths of inquiry into how migration and diaspora challenge identity formations attached to understandings of place, belonging, and indigeneity, which are foundational to many studies of literature and the environment, postcolonial nation formation, and Irish history and culture. It also demonstrates more just relationships among people and their material and nonhuman environments embedded in postcolonial Ireland’s cultural consciousness. In doing so, “Re-mediating Ireland” implicitly responds to the question Elizabeth DeLoughrey poses: “what kinds of narratives help us navigate an ecological crisis that is understood as local and planetary, as historical and anticipatory?” (3). Irish cultural production across the twentieth century demonstrates multiple narrative forms, experiences, and ways of life that people and communities remediated and reworked to resist coerced forms of development. These agencies and modes of resistance “help us navigate an ecological crisis that is understood as local and planetary, historical and anticipatory” by demonstrating the social and cultural formations through which multiple modernities emerge and point to alternative ways of being. 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