Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press)

Rating:
Summary: fascinating new angle on Irish history
Review: I found this book truly intriguing -- a brilliant new angle on Irish history and culture. I was fascinated by the introductory chapter on ancient Roman visions of Ireland,then found myself carried along on an exotic, compelling ride through India and the East -- meticulously researched, elegantly written, a wonderful addition to the scholarship of Irish culture and letters.

Rating:
Summary: fascinating new angle on Irish history
Review: I found this book truly intriguing -- a brilliant new angle on Irish history and culture. I was fascinated by the introductory chapter on ancient Roman visions of Ireland,then found myself carried along on an exotic, compelling ride through India and the East -- meticulously researched, elegantly written, a wonderful addition to the scholarship of Irish culture and letters.

Rating:
Summary: Great Literary History
Review: Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History by Joseph Lennon (Syracuse University Press) Centuries before W. B. Yeats wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage. Relying on cultural and postcolonial theory, Joseph Lennon examines Irish impressions of Asia and West Asia, understood together as the Orient in the West.
British writers from Cambrensis to Spenser depicted Ireland as a remote borderland inhabited by wild descendants of Asian Scythians-barbarians to the ancient Greeks. Contemporaneous Irish writers likewise borrowed classical traditions, imagining the Orient as an ancient homeland. Lennon traces the influence of Irish Orientalism through origin Iegends, philology, antiquarianism, and historiography into Irish literature and culture, exploring the works of Keating, O'Flaherty, Swift, Vallancey, Sheridan, Moore, Croker, Owenson, Mangan, de Vere, and others. He explores a key moment of Irish Orientalism-the twentieth-century Celtic Revival-discussing the works of Gregory, Casement, Connolly, and Joyce, but focusing on Theosophist writers W. B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, and James Cousins.
Excerpt: The dominant imperial discourse of European Orientalism emerged in Britain and France; this discourse had considerable impact in Ireland, but Irish Orientalism has a distinct history. Native Irish representations of Asian and West Asian cultures date back to an Irish tradition in the ninth century. Many of these representations depict Irish ancestors migrating from Asia. Following these early narratives of the Orient, Ireland has been identified, compared, and contrasted with various Asian cultures. For early modern and medieval Irish writers, parts of the Orient signaled Ireland's ancient heritage. Later, because of Ireland's complex relationship with the British Empire, the Orient also came to signify another arm of British conquest for many Irish writers. Witnessing the process of cultural misrepresentation given by British commentators and historians of Ireland, Irish writers often highlighted the constructed nature of cultural representations when discussing both Irish history and the Orient. Imperial British texts had long compared Ireland with other Oriental cultures, at first in order to textually barbarize Ireland and later in order to discover intra-imperial strategies for governing its colonies. Such British representations further encouraged Irish writers to use the Orient allegorically and indirectly comment on cultural differences, nationalism, unionism, sectarianism, and imperialism. To study Irish writings on the Orient, therefore, is also to study Irish cultural narratives of antiquity, Celticism, and nation.
The pervasive nature of the Celtic-Oriental affinity has long been seen as an underlying tissue of Irish culture, based on legends of successive migrations to Ireland from the Orient recorded as Ireland's origin legends in the medieval chronicle Lebor Gabála Érenn. Evidence of such affinities has subsequently been claimed in race, language, and culture and more particularly in music (Arabian-Moroccan-Celtic), knot work (Ethiopian-Arabic-Celtic), mysticism (Indian-Persian-Irish), travel and trade (Scythian-Phoenician-Celtic), architecture (Egyptian-Indian-Eskimo-Celtic), physiognomy (Mongol-African-Gael), ancient dress (Chinese-Scythian-Celtic), ancient law (Brahmin-Brehon), warfare (Egyptian-Scythian-Celtic), politics (Irish-Indian-Persian-Egyptian-Chinese), and, generally, sensibility ( on the Orient not only brought these origin legends appear in a variety of texts: grammatical texts, genealogies, histories and pseudohistories, pastoral dialogues, pseudo-letter collections, travel narratives, antiquarian studies, Orientalist romances, Celticist studies, popular fiction, anti-colonial critiques, syncretic Irish-Asian works. Viewed apart, these texts have seemed idiosyncratic to literary scholars. Viewed together, they coalesce as a history and constitute an unacknowledged discourse in Irish culture and European imperialism-a discourse that seeded decolonizing critiques of imperialism around the globe.
Scholars have dismissed Irish Orientalist representations as significant because they seem provincial borrowings from British, French, and German Orientalism or because they are based in legend and speculation, not in science or modern historiography. Until recently, studies of Irish nationalism have also passed over Celtic-Oriental and Irish-Asian representations, dismissing them for being self-deprecating or reactionary, for merely reversing the imperial stereotypes of Orientalists and Celticists. Supposedly defined by the semiotic binary of imperial assertions and nationalist reversals, Irish Orientalism has been dismissed as a distinctive discourse, seen as an impossibility by nationalist critics in British, Irish, and postcolonial arenas. But this dismissal is valid only if the supremacy of the imperial-nationalist dynamic is admitted. Because arguments that dismiss Irish Orientalist writers as defensive joiners or opportunistic chanters (on either the imperial or the nationalist side) are discussed later, I will not discuss them here. This study itself runs the danger of also being dismissed as the latest in a long series of illogical discussions about connections between the Oriental and the Celt. But the goal of this work is not to reassert the legendary Oriental origins of the Irish. The goal is to re-veal a semiotic history, as well as the cultural contexts and the ramifications of Ireland's Oriental imaginings.