This article is a response to Bill Ashcroft’s ‘Critical Utopias’, which appearedin this journal in 2007. In his earlier piece, Ashcroft offered a summary genealogyof the historical and literary historical links between Utopian Studiesand Postcolonial Studies.While ‘CriticalUtopias’ was a salutary interventionin this discursive dialogue between these two fields; by including the Irish casethis article is designed as an extension to the geographical and historical limitsof Ashcroft’s piece. Therefore, my article offers a substantial outline of somerecent work within Irish postcolonial studies and identifies the Utopian energiesthat sustain such criticism. Positioning Irish postcolonial critiques asdifferential, yet conversant, engagements with the processes of late twentiethcentury Irish modernisation, the article treats the issues such as: the philosophicaland political subtleties of Edmund Burke; the civic republicanism ofthe United Irish movement; the imbricated political, cultural and socialmovements of the Irish Revival; the Socialist nationalism of James Connolly,as well as the recalcitrant local practices of counter-modern social formationsmined by Connolly’s proto-subalternist historiography. My ‘Response’,therefore, is intended as a supplement to Ashcroft’s initial intervention, butalso as a reminder that Ireland should not be easily elided from postcolonialdebates, as it so often has been. Finally, the article has a particular focus onmatters that pertain to the utopic in terms of the literary historical and the historiographicalwithin Irish postcolonial studies, and will, one hopes, catalysefuture interventions that might engage with other facets of Irish colonialhistory and postcolonial criticism.
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