Ferdia Lennon’s recent novel, Glorious Exploits, is what critics would call a “stunning debut”. Set in the city of Siracusa, in Sicily, during the Peloponnesian War, the novel follows the exploits (sometimes glorious, often shambolic) of two Sicilians with a love of theatre. They recruit or dragoon captive Athenian soldiers to teach them Euripides’s newest play, Medea, and then perform it for a public audience. There is nothing Irish about the plot, the setting, the inspiration, the historical moment being recreated, but the entre novel is voiced in an unmistakable Dublin accent.
Colum McCann’s latest novel sees a couple of Irish characters meet in Cape Town and lose touch with each other at the mouth of the Congo river. Naoise Dolan brings her readers to Hong Kong; Caoilinn Hughes embeds her protagonist in Occupy Wall Street protests; Edna O’Brien set a novel in Chibok, Nigeria; Darragh McKeon brilliantly evokes Chernobyl in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear meltdown. These are just a few of many recent Irish novels that travel a long distance, leaving the shores of the island of Ireland far behind. Some have Irish protagonists and some don’t; some feature Irish accents, while others, such as Dolan’s Exciting Times, are in part about Irish accents. Poems, plays, films, visual and performing arts have all been travelling a lot recently, expanding the horizons of Irish culture.
All of these examples might lead us to ask not what is Irish literature and culture in the present age (a perennial question), but where is it now? Where is it set, written, published, read, viewed? If the answer is not simply “Ireland”, then how useful is it to insist on a stable category called “Irish” culture? As Ireland becomes increasingly integrated into Europe, as it welcomes more and more migrants from around the world, and as globalisation (despite recent setbacks instigated by the US) dominates how we source and consume both goods and culture, how has Irish culture responded to, been inspired by, reframed or resisted the dissolution of a long-established relationship between nation, territory and culture?
[ Caoilinn Hughes: ‘I suppose it’s in our DNA, that instinct to leave and to move’Opens in new window ]
In a book of essays that I have recently edited, Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press), the question of how we read for and acknowledge the distant horizons of Irish literature and culture is approached from a variety of angles by leading scholars. Some of the scholars prove that Irish culture has long been transnational — what we now call Irish literature, for example, has been for centuries intimately bound up with networks of writing, publishing and dissemination across the Irish Sea and farther afield. Early Irish novelists such as Maria Edgeworth or Sydney Owenson were not only read across the English-speaking world, but were in constant correspondence with networks of writers around the world. Irish playwright Dion Boucicault was one of the most successful in London and New York in the 19th century, and in plays such as The Octoroon (1859), he weighed in on the question of slavery on the eve of the US civil war. His play was repurposed on the New York stage in 2014 by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in ways that acknowledged Boucicault’s complicity with racism (despite the play’s ostensible abolitionist stance), proving that the long entanglement of Irish and African-American culture remains both timely and complicated.
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In the 20th century, James Joyce was not only one of Ireland’s most famous exiles, but also a lodestar for writers across the globe. In three chapters of the book focused on Joyce’s reception in South Africa, India and the Caribbean, scholars reflect on his outsized influence in the Global South. They recognise and account for his global presence, but at the same time think carefully about his continued centrality as a guiding spirit for writers grappling with new calls for further decolonisation and resistance to the hegemony of the Global North. At what point, we could ask, does the universal appeal begin to wane?
[ Dion Boucicault, the Irish playwright whose life was stranger than fictionOpens in new window ]
[ Forgotten Irish classics: 16 books that deserve to be better knownOpens in new window ]
Ultimately, we cannot be surprised that Irish culture is fed by and speaks to locations far beyond the island. Literature reflects and mediates complex lives that are lived not just in our own immediate surroundings or in our own languages, but in constant dialogue with lives that are not ours and models and influences from elsewhere that help to express what we feel to be our daily realities. But while Irish culture has never been confined to the island, a new set of political, economic and environmental circumstances has engendered a deeper and wider engagement of late between Irish culture and the world.
On a very mechanical level, the successes of the boom generation of Irish writers, from Sally Rooney to Mike McCormack, are not just attributable to the genius of the writers, but also to a global publishing and marketing landscape in which even titles published by small presses such as Tramp are available and visible across the globe. Irish writers and artists, often with the help of organisations such as Literature Ireland and Culture Ireland, have been remarkably successful at marketing themselves and their wares overseas.
There are other ways in which global and transnational flows are impinging in ever more insistent ways on what we might think of as the local, some of them invisible or unfolding over timescales that far exceed the span of human life. While nature writing has been a staple of Irish writing, a focus on place and locality has at times obscured accelerating global processes through which weather, climate, and landscape are formed. Just as climate scientists have taught us to think about what critic Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of invisible or long-term processes of environmental damage, writers from Doireann Ní Ghríofa to Sinéad Morrissey have led the way in imagining how planetary processes become embedded in the local. Irish artists whose work has been oriented toward the shore, the sea, and the ocean (think JM Synge or Moya Cannon) have always understood the tendrils that make the ocean more connective than disruptive – Ireland is not isolated by its surrounding seas, but connected.
At the same time, the identities and life histories of Ireland’s leading artists are changing too. Rapid growth in immigration over the past few decades in particular has resulted in another form of increasing transnationalism in Irish culture – voices such as those of Emma Dabiri, Melatu Uche Okorie, Felispeaks, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, or Cauvery Madhavan necessarily dislocate Ireland in exciting, enriching ways. In doing so, these artists expand our understanding of what the content and the locations of Irishness can be, both at home and abroad.
Lest this feel like a cheerleading call to always think globally and leave the nation behind, there are some clear pitfalls when the (often imagined) geographical integrity of Irish culture is stretched. Mistranslations, both literal and figurative, are common–take – for example, cringe–worthy films such as Wild Mountain Thyme that sell a stereotypical version of Irishness to an eager audience.
Writers such as Colum McCann (in Apeirogon) and Edna O’Brien (in Girl) have sometimes missed the mark when writing about complex, distant political realities. Martin McDonagh erred in representing the American South in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (and set off a firestorm of agonising about what is and is not Irish with The Beauty Queen of Leenane). One of the more interesting cases of the difficulty of translating Irish culture occurred in the early 2000s, when a translation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into Bundjalung, an Aboriginal language, encountered some fundamental differences between the syntax and context of Beckett’s French and English originals and the world into which the work was being transposed.
While Irish literature and culture may have become increasingly transnational, global, or planetary in its outlook in recent decades, it is not the case that it has merely mimicked or responded to globalisation. It would be too easy to think that economic processes that mark one of the most globalised economies in the world set the agenda for the whole of Irish culture.
In many cases we find that writers and artists turn to distant horizons out of a sense of frustration with the continuing grip of the idea of the nation on Irish culture. In other cases, they do so with the express purpose of highlighting, questioning, mediating or disrupting the easy flows of global capital or their doleful consequences. Literature and culture set the agenda for how we imagine ourselves, our affinities, solidarities, and commitments, and a new generation of Irish artists is teaching us that we are global citizens.
Cóilín Parsons is associate professor of English and director of Global Irish Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His most recent edited book is Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and the ideas in this article are drawn from the chapters of that title. He is also a board member of Solas Nua, Washington, DC’s multidisciplinary arts organisation dedicated exclusively to contemporary Irish arts.
