IX INTERNATIONAL

CONFERENCE OF THE SPANISH


 ASSOCIATION for IRISH STUDIES

AEDEI-IX TENERIFE

ABSTRACTS
WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL 2010
16’30-18’30: Session 1
[Panel: FICTION & GENDER: SUBVERTING & QUEERING THE NATION (Chair: Mª Pino
Montesdeoca)
“El ejército de los excluidos en At Swim, Two Boys, de Jamie O’Neill”
Marta González Acosta (EOI La Laguna)
“Overtones & Disturbances in Jamie O’Neill’s Dissidence Novels”
Juan Ignacio Oliva (U. La Laguna)]
“Paula Spencer or the Heroism of Everyday Life”
Aída Díaz Bild (U. La Laguna)
“Under the Heritage Of An Unknown Land And Culture: Anne Rice”
Leonor Ruiz-Ayúcar Bello (U. La Laguna)

“El ejército de los excluidos en At Swim, Two Boys, de Jamie O’Neill”

Marta González Acosta (EOI La Laguna)
La novela At Swim, Two Boys (2001) es el tercer trabajo del escritor irlandés Jamie O’Neill. En su
densa y compleja estructura podemos encontrar algunos ecos de la tradición literaria irlandesa,
desde el título (una reescritura de At-Swim-Two-Birds, de Flann O’Brien), hasta la presencia
recurrente de Oscar Wilde en particular relacion con uno de los personajes, pasando por el estilo
realista y su recreación histórica de principios del siglo XX. Pero fundamentalmente es la temática,
más que la estilística o los ecos intertextuales, lo que hace de esta novela un texto esencialmente
irlandés. Así, analizaremos la recreación hecha por el novelista de la revuelta dublinesa de 1916, en
conexión con la toma de postura social y personal de sus personajes principales, todo ello desde la
perspectiva del Bildungsroman en un contexto heroico y romántico.

“Overtones & Disturbances in Jamie O’Neill’s Dissidence Novels”

Juan Ignacio Oliva (U. La Laguna)
Jamie O’Neill’s novels, Disturbance (1989), Kilbrack (1990) and, especially, At Swim, Two Boys
(2001), portray Ireland as an attractive but complex nation that needs to be deconstructed and
reconstructed to acquire new values and meanings. Thus, the main purpose of the novelist
transforms into a heroic act to demystify (through the reuse of classic narrative style) both the
moral and social constraints of normative rules and to show that ‘Other’ readings and judgments
can be made possible. Through a gender/class twofold perspective, this paper aims at
distinguishing, following O’Neill’s path, the echoes and overtones that prevent Irish citizens from
communicating among them (both individually and collectively). Also, it attempts as well to
analyze the series of disturbances that affect the representation of Ireland as an alma mater land but
rather transforms it into a saturnine stepmother.

“Paula Spencer or the Heroism of Everyday Life”

Aída Díaz Bild (U. La Laguna)
In all his novels Roddy Doyle has proved how the liberating power of laughter allows the
human being to face and transcend painful situations by accepting the incongruities and
tension of life. Comedy leaves us with a growing sense of freedom and a distinct sense of faith
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renewed and hope rekindled. By mixing comedy and tragedy Doyle deconstructs one of the
most pervasive myths of our culture, that of tragedy being profound, wise and sublime, and
comedy a trivial genre incapable of dealing with the great problems that preoccupy man.
Paula Spencer. A Novel, the sequel to The Woman Who Walked into Doors, shows how once
again Roddy Doyle has succeeded in portraying the harshness of real life without falling into
melodrama or false sentimentalism.

“Under the Heritage Of An Unknown Land And Culture: Anne Rice”

Leonor Ruiz-Ayúcar Bello (U. La Laguna)
Anne Rice is one of the most famous writers of the last decades. She has published more than
twenty books dealing with different topics such as vampire fiction, historical novel, religion,
metaphysical thriller and erotic novel. If we could name one common subject in all of them,
it may be the strong catholic environment that seems to pervade the writer’s liberty to express
her feelings and, due to this, the peculiar gender perspective found in her works. Where does
all this come from? An analysis of Anne Rice’s background and childhood in an Irish
neighbourhood of New Orleans will be made. Although many American families come from
Irish origin, and the strong feeling of being Irish is kept in many American writers, the truth
is that they may be, say, the fifth generation of American born and raised children, who have
never really visited Ireland. We will see how and in which depth this affects Anne Rice's
production, and the way in which it is shown in her work. The imaginary land where she
places one of her novels, Taltos, is very highlighting too, as she creates an Irish landscape that
she has never seen with her own eyes. Lastly, a review of the famous Irish writers that have
influenced her work will also be made.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

9’30-11’00: Session 2
[Panel: LANDSCAPE & POETRY: ENVIRONMENT, TOPOPHILIA & IDENTITY (Chair:
Manuel Augusto Hdez)
“La ausencia del naranja en los paisajes de la infancia de Seamus Heaney en Death of a
Naturalist”
Patricia Paredes Martín (U. La Laguna)
“Scraping at the Rocs of Carnac”: Translating Brittany, making an Irish noise
Clíona Ní Ríordáin (U. Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
“‘The dim stone where we were reared’: The long view and lives of Derek Mahon”
Cathal McCabe (Ireland-Poland Cultural Foundation, Dublin)]

“La ausencia del naranja en los paisajes de la infancia de Seamus Heaney en Death of a
Naturalist”
Patricia Paredes Martín (U. La Laguna)
Abstract. Humankind’s universal relationship to landscape is emphasized in Ireland. Irish
people usually remain deeply-rooted to their geographical and cultural origins. The poet’s
meaning of the world depends on what he expects and waits from his environment. In this
sense, Seamus Heaney’s poetic voice is built on the experience of living between two cultures:
protestant and catholic. Heaney’s first poetic volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), explores
those landscapes from his childhood and youth that remain in the poet’s memories. Like
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Wordsworth, Heaney underlines the importance of those childhood landscapes that are
engraved in the poet’s mind and constitute an endless poetic source.
Heaney uses a wide range of colours to “paint” these landscapes. According to Kandinsky’s
and Göthe’s theories, colours express the poet’s sensations. These feelings acquire symbolic
dimensions. Colours express the reality of the world perceived by a young Heaney, his
personal response to experience and the artistic communication of a poetic order. This rich
chromatism forms Heaney’s spiritual and symbolic atmosphere of his psyche landscape. In
relation to this, it surprisingly lacks orange, colour that is unavoidably associated with
orangists, that is, Northern Irish Protestants. This paper analyzes the importance of Heaney’s
landscapes of childhood in Death of a Naturalist as well as investigates the omission of
orange as the achievement of a specific poetic purpose.

“‘Scraping at the Rocs of Carnac’:Translating Brittany, making an Irish noise”

Clíona Ní Ríordáin (U. Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
In a liminal note to a recent translation of Guillevic's "Herbier de Bretagne"(published 2008),
Seamus Heaney describes his early attempts to translate the poetry of Eugène Guillevic. While
Heaney underlines the difference between the two poets ("there was more sea air in Guillevic's
boyish nostrils than there ever was in mine" (Conroy (ed.), p 121), he also highlights the
similarities (heather, bracken gorse and graveyards). This paper proposes to look at Heaney's
translation of Guillevic (whose work has also been translated by John Montague). It will offer
an analysis of how, through translation, Brittany’s landscape becomes a reflection of Ireland
and a means of exploring space and identity through a reappropriation of the Breton
landscape, in a text which is both a rewriting and a reinvention of Guillevic and Heaney.

‘“The Dim Stone Where We Were Reared”: The Long View and Lives of Derek Mahon.’
Cathal McCabe (The Ireland-Poland Cultural Foundation, Dublin)
Taking as its starting point Mahon’s poem ‘The Globe in North Carolina’ – ‘Out in the dark
and staring hard / At the dim stone where we were reared’ – this paper examines and accounts
for the poet’s consistent strategies of viewing Ireland and Irish experience (and by extension
all human endeavour) from an exhilarating and instructive geographical and historical
distance. Against a backdrop of persistently Irish landscapes, Mahon’s work distinguishes
itself through recourse to transformative and liberating perspectives. Surveying the poet’s
abiding interest in the numinous, this paper traces his admiration for what he has called ‘the
long view’, most notably in the work of J. G. Farrell, and his fascination with the kindred and
exemplary oeuvres (and lives) of Yeats, MacNeice and (in particular) Beckett. From the early
and abiding presence of ‘mute phenomena’ via Nerval through to his most recent work’s
affirmation of ‘the spiritual substance / we generate’, Mahon’s decades-long project of
encompassing and appropriating other poetic traditions and voices is also seen to contribute to
his preferred ‘longer perspective’: an ultimately uplifting knowledge of ‘what will remain’.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

9’30-11’00: Session 3
[Panel: FICTION & ALTERITY: CRIME, RACE & MIGRANCY (Chair: David Clark)
“Perseverance in the Face of the Apocalypse”: Brendan and Irish noir.
David Clark (U Coruña)
“Fictionalising Change: Shifting Identities in Contemporary Ireland”
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Stephanie Schwerter (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

“Nacionalismo, neoliberalismo y xenofobia en la Irlanda del Tigre Celta”
Carlos Menéndez Otero (U. Oviedo)]

“‘Perseverance in the Face of the Apocalypse’: Brendan and Irish noir”

David Clark (U. A Coruña)
For Adrian McKinty’s Irish anti-hero, Michael Forsythe, the Brendan voyage is “a manual on
perseverance in the face of the apocalypse”. The same can also be said for a series of recent
crime narratives in which Irish protagonists are placed within a New World context and in
which they are forced to “persevere” in apocalyptic-situations. The Irish obsession with the
American dream is well-known; and the Irish participation in American crime fiction is an
important factor in the development of the genre. Many Irish writers are successfully writing
for the American crime market, although the most successful of these, John Connolly, avoids
explicitly Irish characters or situations. McKinty, however, and other writers, most notably
Ken Bruen, expose their Irish characters to the underside of the American dream and oblige
them to come to terms with both their own and their nation’s demons. This paper will study
the relationship between Irish characters and American society in a series of recent Irish crime
novels, most notably in McKinty’s The Dead Trilogy and Bruen’s American Skin and Once
Were Cops, as well as looking peripherally at works by Declan Burke and Alex Barclay. It
will examine the differing visions which McKinty (from Carrickfergus, in the North) and
Bruen (from Galway) use and the means by which their narratives reveal aspects of the
contemporary Irish condition.

“Fictionalising Change: Shifting Identities in Contemporary Ireland”

Stephanie Schwerter (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
In present-day Ireland – North and South – identity has become a subject of much debate. The
influx of immigrants has led to a radical change in the island’s demography. The arrival of
citizens from different countries has shed a new light on the relationship between the local and
the global, the particular and the general, the universal and the specific. In the context of the
current social transformations, themes such as multiculturalism, pluralism and multilinguism
have become of topic interest. This paper sets out to explore how the notion of a changing
Irish identity is represented in contemporary Irish writing on both sides of the border. In
relation to the demographic changes in the Republic, I shall engage with Chris Binchy’s latest
novel Open-handed as well as Roddy Doyle’s collection of short stories The Deportees.
Giving a voice to the immigrant community, both pieces of writing throw up the question as to
whether political and cultural differences may enrich the local social structures or whether
they give rise to a new form of micro-cosmopolitanism through the experience of
multiculturalism.
The quest for a new identity in post-Troubles Northern Ireland will be explored in the light of
Rosemary Jenkinson’s recent collection of short stories. In Contemporary Problems Nos.
53&54, Jenkinson narrates how the presence of immigrants generates a new sort of cultural
hybridization, making sectarian boundaries appear irrelevant. With the comparison of the
three different pieces of writing, I attempt to illustrate how both parts of the island are
confronted with the necessity of recreating and rewriting their conception of national identity
against the background of a different socio-political history.

“Nacionalismo, neoliberalismo y xenofobia en la Irlanda del Tigre Celta”

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Carlos Menéndez Otero (U. Oviedo)

La espectacular expansión del mercado laboral que experimentó la República de Irlanda
durante la década de 1990 y primeros años 2000, así como la redefinición aperturista y
multicultural de la identidad irlandesa que tuvo lugar en esta misma época, podrían hacernos
pensar en un contexto muy poco propicio para el desarrollo de discursos xenófobos y racistas.
Sin incurrir en falsos maniqueísmos, este artículo recurre a una perspectiva sociológica para
abordar de forma tan sucinta como sincera la existencia de tales discursos en la Irlanda del
Tigre Celta; analizar su intersección dialéctica con discursos identitarios preexistentes y
tratados internacionales de protección de derechos humanos, y explicar la decisiva influencia
que la alterización de colectivos muy específicos de inmigrantes tuvo en 1) la implantación en
la República de políticas de gestión neoliberal de servicios públicos esenciales, 2) la
recontextualización del nacionalismo tradicionalista posterior a la corrupción de los mandatos
de Charles Haughey y Albert Reynolds, 3) la revisión legal del concepto de ciudadanía
irlandesa, y 4) la redefinición de la relación de Irlanda con la Unión Europea en los
prolegómenos de los procesos de ampliación a los países del este y aprobación de la
Constitución Europea.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

12’00-13’00: Plenary Lecture
“Translated Irelands Beyond the Seas”
Laura Izarra (U. São Paulo; President of the Associacão Brasileira de Estudios Irlandeses) (Chair:
Marisol Morales)

“Translated Irelands Beyond the Seas”

Laura P. Z. Izarra (U. São Paulo)
Medieval writings had consecrated, on a symbolic level, a powerful myth in the history of the
great sea voyages, the so called Fortune Islands, the Island of the Blessed – Tír na nÓg - the
promised land, where perpetual spring and eternal youth reign, and where man and animals
coexist in peace according to the Phoenician, Celtic and Iberian legends. The Irish diplomat
Roger Casement, when he was British Consul in Belém do Pará in 1907, wrote a lecture
arguing that the origins of the name Brazil derive from the mythical Hy Brasil, an imagined
island located by Irish monks on the fourteenth and fifteenth-century maps, to the west of
Ireland and south of the Azores. I will deconstruct these mythic echoes with two purposes:
firstly, to discuss the source of the foundational myths of the Brazilian and Irish nations and
their aesthetic resignifications by Irish travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and
secondly, to question the myth of perfection which characterizes the utopian thought
represented in those narratives.
Departing from the concept of transgressive utopianism (Sargisson 1996), a critique that
illustrates the imperfection and openended unresolvability of a utopia, I will focus narratives
of the Irish diaspora to illustrate transnational and translational processes of representations of
the utopian thought in South America and their implied transgressions.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

13’00-14’00: In Conversation with Writer Glenn Patterson (Chair: Inés Praga)
(Sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland)

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

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16’00-17’30: Session 4
[Panel: IRELAND/HISPANIC WORLD (I): RELIGIOUS & CULTURAL SIMILES (Chair: José
Francisco Fdez)
“Not Obvious Countries Like England. Ireland and Spain in the Books of Honor Tracy”
José Francisco Fernández (U. Almería)
“Catholic Ireland and Catholic Spain. One cut off from Europe by the Pyrenees, the other by
the Irish Sea”: Aidan Higgins’s Discovery of 1960s Spain as ‘anOther Ireland’ in Balcony of
Europe (1972)
Ute Mittermaier (Trinity College, Dublin)
“Timoteo O'Scanlan: a Towering Figure in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Medical History”
Mónica Amenedo Costa (U. A Coruña)]

“Not Obvious Countries Like England. Ireland and Spain in the Books of Honor Tracy”
José Francisco Fernández (U. Almería)
When English writer Honor Tracy (1913-1989) published her first book about Spain, Silk Hats
and No Breakfast (1956), she had already written extensively about Ireland. She was
considered a writer of scalpel-sharp wit and satirical talent who was keen on exploring
English-Irish antagonisms. It is the contention of this paper that Ireland for her, served as a
training ground for what she later saw and described in Spain. Her acute vision as a traveller
had been honed in Ireland and this enabled her to easily spot the Spaniards’ foibles. The
cultural implications of this pre-ordained gaze will be a matter of analysis.

“‘Catholic Ireland and Catholic Spain. One cut off from Europe by the Pyrenees, the
other by the Irish Sea’: Aidan Higgins’s Discovery of 1960s Spain as ‘anOther Ireland’
in Balcony of Europe (1972)”
Ute Mittermaier (Trinity College, Dublin)
The Irish novelist Aidan Higgins has received scant critical attention both in Ireland and
abroad. This is partly a consequence of the writer’s troubled relationship with an Ireland he
considered excessively insular and puritanical and the resultant fact that he spent much of his
adult life abroad and set many of his writings outside Ireland, which has complicated his
straightforward classification as an ‘Irish writer’. This paper analyses how Higgins’s love-
hatred relationship with Ireland manifests itself in his highly autobiographical novel Balcony
of Europe (1972), which describes the escapist sojourn of the middle-aged Irish artist Dan
Ruttle, Higgins’s fictional alter ego, in an impoverished Andalusian fishing village amidst a
colony of American and European (would-be) artists in the early 1960s. As a result of the
first-person narrator’s preoccupation with his extra-marital love affair and the turbulent life-
stories of the fellow-escapists he encounters, Higgins’s image of Spain in Balcony of Europe
remains indistinct and suggests neither a particularly pronounced Hispanophilia nor
Hispanophobia; what it does reveal, however, is the author’s and his fictional representative’s
evasiveness and – genuine or faked – disinterest in Spain’s political affairs. By contrast, his
auto-image of Ireland as a drab place with an inhospitable climate and a stifling atmosphere
clearly reflects his personal alienation from his home country in the 1960s. Still, it is
paradoxically both because of his discovery of similarities between the landscapes,
geographical positions, and recent histories of Ireland and Spain and his pose as the apolitical
Bohemian that Higgins did not set Spain up as a colourful, vibrant foil or ‘Other’ to dreary,
depressing Ireland in his autobiographical novel. Rather, ‘his Spain’ ultimately evinces more
parallels than contrasts with Ireland.
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“Timoteo O'Scanlan: a Towering Figure in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Medical

History”
Mónica Amenedo Costa (U. A Coruña)
In the eighteenth century, smallpox was an important endemic disease which had devastating
effects on the population. An Irish doctor, named Timoteo O'Scanlan, worked on the subject
of smallpox and its treatment in Spain. In the second half of the century, he used his
medical knowledge on smallpox inoculation in order to treat children and the population in
general, and introduced the inoculation techniques, which had been already put into practice in
other countries such as Ireland and Great Britain. O'Scanlan's professional background and
research played a key role in the enrichment of medicine and health care in Spain and in the
development of new medical treatment for smallpoll in the eighteenth century.
With this in mind, the aim of this paper is to examine O'Scanlan's contribution to the Spanish
society and to determine the effects of this medical advance, which caused plenty of
controversy and discussion in Spain at that time, and resulted in published material against the
new method and O'Scanlan's work which he defended by detailed empirical studies.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

16’00-17’30: Session 5
[Panel: GENDER & ALTERITY: FEMALE (RE)VISIONS OF IRELAND (Chair: Asier Altuna)
“Challenging stereotypes of the migrant young woman in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn”
Marisol Morales Ladrón (U. Alcalá)
“Presenting The Past: Susan Howe's Contemporary Vision”
María Leticia del Toro García (U. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
“(M)other Ireland revisited”
Asier Altuna (U. Deusto)]

“Challenging stereotypes of the migrant young woman in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn”

Marisol Morales Ladrón (U. Alcalá)
Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Brooklyn (2009), recounts the story of a young woman who
emigrates from Ireland to the United States in the early 1950s. Although reluctant and
discouraged by received idealized notions of “the promise land” and of a hopeful future, Eilis
nevertheless pursues her desire to fulfill a career of her own and to achieve some kind of
independence: two unusual aspirations for a woman of her time. In the author’s attempt at
reversing traditional stereotypes associated to the Irish emigrant, Tóibín explores such themes
as the displacement of the foreign other, the cultural divide, the dislocation of the subject at
home and abroad, and the alienating experience of growth and awakening. Caught in between
two worlds, the apparent liberal values projected by North America are finally engulfed by the
moral duties that an extremely patriarchal Irish society has imposed on the protagonist.
Therefore, bearing all these questions in mind, the purpose of the present discussion is to bring
to the fore matters related to Tóibín’s deconstruction of the Irish diasporic subject, its
subversion and its process of demythologization in contemporary Irish narrative.

“Presenting The Past: Susan Howe's Contemporary Vision”

María Leticia del Toro García (U. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
The North American poet Susan Howe is strongly connected with Ireland. As a child she is
taught by her mother, the Irish playwright Susan Manning, to love a country that she misses
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though is quite unknown for her. A very important part of her work is devoted to Ireland, its
history, people, literature, myths and culture.
As a contemporary writer, Howe mixes tradition and modernity into her work, using old
stories, myths, traditions or facts almost forgotten. She combines them using personal and
original methods, giving origin to a new kind of experimental poetry. She plays with form,
content and the visual presentation of her books demanding an active role from the reader.
The reader has to find the clues that allow him/her to decipher the message of the poems. She
uses resources like fragmentation, plays with words and sounds, palimpsests, images within
her poems, mixing prose and poetry, etc.
Howe wants to show how much she understands Ireland, so she chooses her information from
resources not always available to everybody. Her work becomes a good way of learning both
from Ireland and from contemporary literature and experimentation.

“(M)other Ireland revisited”

Asier Altuna (U. Deusto)
Back in 1976 Edna O’Brien published a series of essays entitled Mother Ireland in which her
aim was to portray an eternal and contemporary Ireland that seemed to be anchored in a line of
ancestry and remembrance, legend and truth. O’Brien’s Ireland had recently joined the
Common European Market together with Great Britain but still retained what was regarded as
the eternal Ireland. That apparently eternal Ireland, even a so-called Ireland of the mind, has
been widely and fiercely contested since from outside and inside the island. Short story writer
Claire Keegan has published two volumes, Antarctica (1999) and Walking the Blue Fields
(2007) in which a distinctly contemporary approach to the Ireland of the twenty-first century
as a whole is presented.
The aim of this paper will be to establish a dialogue in which that Mother Ireland has
transformed herself into a (M)other Ireland with a new contemporary portrayal of her plights
and predicaments. Keegan’s compelling fictional skills offer not only a re-visioning of those
eternal ideals of Ireland’s past, Keegan delves into a sociological depiction of the new Ireland.
Her short stories approach the Irish identity from within, narrating the present from a close
distance.

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010

18’00-20’00: Session 6
[Panel: IRELAND/HISPANIC WORLD (II): NATIONALIST & ARTISTIC SIMILES (Chair:
Marta Ramón)
“(De)Constructing the Canarian Nation Through Irish Narrative: A Guanche Tir na nÓg?”
Enrique Galván (U. Alcalá)
“Irish Musical Identity Abroad”
Gerry Smyth (Liverpool John Moores U.)
“Mavericks and Misfits: Irish Contract Labour and the Cuban Railroad 1835”
Margaret Brehony (Scholar, National U. Ireland, Galway)
“Homage to Cuba: J. J. O’Kelly’s The Mambi-Land”
Marta Ramón (U. Oviedo)]
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“(De-)Constructing the Canarian Nation Through Irish Narrative: A Guanche Tir na

nÓg?”
Enrique Galván (U. Alcalá)
The story of Saint Brendan and his legendary journey is a remarkable example of an Irish
narrative that has travelled way beyond its original context. Its connection with the Canary
Islands can indeed be traced back to the early European expeditions of the late Middle Ages.
However, the story is not only engaged as an exegetical framework (the narrative terms in
which the first Europeans who arrived in the Islands interpreted what they see) back then but
also through the centuries up to the present days. In fact, the many births, apparitions and uses
of the Isle of Saint Brendan (inside and outside the Canaries) as a recurrent narrative metaphor
merit a thorough study.
Nevertheless, this paper aims to focus on a relatively recent phenomenon: the appropriation of
Saint Brendan’s narrative as a tool for utopian Canarian nation-building. Being one of the
favourite lenses of the Canarian imagination it is not surprising that the construction of
Canarian national consciousness (a highly heterogeneous and, till recently, somewhat
marginal, process that stretches from the end of the 19th century up to our days) mines the
Irish narrative for its own purposes. Nonetheless, what is most interesting is the way in which
the Irish narrative haunts representations of (national-ist) Canarian utopias. Thus, it is not only
that Canarian nation-builders appropriate the story of Saint Brendan in order to forge their
political horizon, but also that the story infects, in turn, their discourse, rendering their horizon
utopian. In this paper I look at how such dynamics are instantiated in a number of sources,
stretching from the late 19th Century up to the 1980s.

“Irish Musical Identity Abroad”

Gerry Smyth (Liverpool John Moores U.)
My paper would relate to the ‘Ireland in mind’ element of the conference schedule, and would
discuss my attempts to articulate a sense of Irish musical identity during my four years as a
musician in Puerto Cruz, Tenerife, between 1981 and 1985. This was a time before the Celtic
Tiger and before ‘Celtic Cool’, although it certainly overlapped significantly with the
emergence of the alternative Irish musical discourses associated with The Pogues and U2. The
‘Irish’ material I was recruited to reproduce was one which by and large drew on a canon of
well-known ballads, many of them political in nature, although that political element was
inevitably elided in performance. Rather, the sense of Irishness operationalised in that time
and that place was one which relied to an extreme on a stereotype which I have in my latest
book called ‘Paddy Mad’ – a carnivalesque character who offers temporary respite from the
disappointments of everyday reality. I shall suggest that the attempt to articulate and to
negotiate various forms of musical Irishness in a Spanish holiday destination in the early
1980s affords a valuable insight into the evolution of Irish cultural identity during the modern
era.

“Mavericks and Misfits: Irish Contract Labour and the Cuban Railroad 1835”
Margaret Brehony (National U. Ireland, Galway)
Archival records of Irish migration to Cuba describe a colony of irlandeses contracted in New
York in 1835 to work for the Cuban Railway Commission laying the tracks of the first stretch
of railroad in Latin America. Contract labourers from Ireland and the Canary Islands were
forced into a brutal work regime under Spanish military rule where any attempt to abscond
was treated as desertion punishable by prison or execution.
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At a time of transition from slavery to wage labour, Irish navies who formed part of the
vanguard of the Cuban-Hispano white colonization scheme using contract labour, showed
little promise in the inscription of whiteness and even less as cheap labour. The significance of
‘the wages of whiteness’ to the railroad workers in Cuba is analysed here in the light of their
identification with a subaltern position suggested by the alliances made with freed slaves and
Canary Islanders, starting the first strikes recorded on the island.
Far from being merely a spasmodic and violent upsurge, I argue that social formations and
forms of struggle in the creation of a landless proletariat lay the ground in generating the
conduct of subaltern resistance in this encounter between ‘a roving proletariat’ and
intersecting British and Iberian systems of colonial labour. The trajectory of modernization is
challenged by the apparent unwillingness of this mobile workforce, at the cutting edge of new
technologies, to adapt to capitalist discipline. Counter modern social formations imported and
adapted to the ‘new world’ are further analysed drawing on postcolonial theories which frame
mobile transitory labour as an intrinsic, if recalcitrant, element in the history of capitalist
expansion (Lloyd 2008).

“Homage to Cuba: J. J. O’Kelly’s The Mambi-Land”

Marta Ramón (U. Oviedo)
In 1872 James J. O’Kelly, journalist, adventurer, Fenian, and future Parnellite MP, was sent to
Cuba as a correspondent for the New York Herald. His mission was to contact the leaders of
the insurrectionary Cuban republic and report back on the real progress of the war with Spain.
In The Mambi-Land, Or, Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba (Philadelphia, 1874),
O’Kelly describes a strange and hostile land where Peninsular Spaniards, white Cubans,
Creoles and Blacks rival each other in exoticism and cultural otherness. Meanwhile, his
professed journalistic objectivity soon gives way to open sympathy for the rebels, in
accordance with American public opinion and his own anti-imperialist stance as an Irish
republican.
O’Kelly’s narrative offers an extreme example of the Irish nationalist perception of Spain, but
it is not the only one. Twelve years earlier, William Smith O’Brien, the aristocratic leader of
the 1848 rebellion, had taken a leisure tour of the Peninsula which he recorded in a manuscript
journal. O’Brien’s reflections on Spanish landscape, history and peoples, especially the
Basques, offer a revealing counterpoint to O’Kelly’s orientalist depiction. O’Brien’s account
lacks O’Kelly’s political agenda and much of his culture shock, but behind both narratives lies
a complex interplay of cultural identity and political affinities. The othered Irish now become
the otherers, the ‘traditional alliance’ between Ireland and Spain must be balanced against a
new solidarity with ‘oppressed’ nationalities and a rejection of great-power imperialism, and
all the complexities and contradictions of Irish nationalist identity are thrown into relief.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

10’00-11’30: Session 7
[Panel: DISSIDENT POETICS: LOSS, ILLNESS & DEATH IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH
POETRY (Chair: Luz Mar Glez Arias)
“I Will Not Again”: Selfhood and Loss in Vona Groarke’s Spindrift”
Lucy Collins (U. College Dublin)
“The Body that Shrinks, The Line that Breaks: Anorexia Nervosa and a Poetics of Dissidence
in Ireland”
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Luz Mar González Arias (U. Oviedo)

“Dead and Lost Bodies in Medbh McGuckian’s Drawing Ballerinas”
Borbála Faragó (Independent Scholar, Dublin)]

“I Will Not Again”: Selfhood and Loss in Vona Groarke’s Spindrift

Lucy Collins (U. College Dublin)
This paper will examine the representation of loss in Vona Groarke’s 2009 collection
Spindrift. Since the beginning of her writing career, Groarke has engaged with the complex
nature of human subjectivity and with the ways in which poetry can express at once the
fragility of the experiencing subject and of the act of representation itself. In the past decade,
Groarke’s engagement with existential concerns has intensified, yet this process has been
mediated through poems that remain vivid and specific. Spindrift retains much of this
particularity but goes further in its dispersal of the continuities of form that offer sustained and
sustaining meaning. Spindrift’s transitions of form and perspective, therefore, speak of not
only of loss and change, but also of the imprint that these leave on language. Thus the
presence of water as a unifying image in this collection invokes the freedom of movement
without boundaries, and the risks—both personal and creative—inherent in such a process.
This paper will explore how the recognition of loss tests the possibilities of poetic
representation.

“The Body that Shrinks, The Line that Breaks: Anorexia Nervosa and a Poetics of
Dissidence in Ireland”
Luz Mar González Arias (U. Oviedo)
Our image-saturated culture has triggered the dissemination of thinness as a physical
aspiration for women all over the world. This democratization of physical models has been
held responsible for the spread of eating disorders in women of almost all age groups.
However, in the work of contemporary Irish women poets, starvation becomes a multiple
signifier, a site of resistance against private and/or public forms of gender imbalance. Far from
focusing exclusively on the imperatives of beauty, these poets perceive starvation as a
psychosomatic response to the Troubles, catholic definitions of femininity, masculinist
discourses on the nation, or the trauma of the Famine for the Irish psyche, to mention but a
few examples. This paper looks at texts such as Mary O’Donnell’s “Reading the Sunflowers
in September” to analyze the ways in which the starved body is utilized as a vehicle to explore
and denounce the cultural imposition of received forms on women’s physicality and also on
the poetic text itself. Also, a connection is established between the shrinking body/the
shrinking poetic line and the natural world – flora, fauna, urban and/or rural landscapes – so
that the texts acquire an ecofeminist reading that adds to their dissident spirit.

“Dead and Lost Bodies in Medbh McGuckian’s Drawing Ballerinas”

Borbála Faragó (Independent Scholar, Dublin)
Drawing Ballerinas, Medbh McGuckian’s seventh volume of poetry, was published in 2001,
at a moment in time when the Northern Irish peace process was still on shaky grounds.
Sectarian violence was a simmering force in the background which resurfaced in the summer
of 2001 when a group of Catholic schoolgirls were stoned on their way to school. Medbh
McGuckian at this point in her life had already published 6 volumes of poetry as well as a
Selected Poems which were more often than not reviewed positively, although with covert
criticism for her lack of engagement with the Northern Irish political situation. This was her
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first, and arguably, up to now at least, her only collection, which aims to address this
perceived lacuna in her work. Drawing Ballerinas is permeated with violent images, dead and
lost bodies which act as dual referents to Northern Irish politics and the creative process.
Although the volume directs the readers towards politicised interpretations, significantly, the
poems themselves repudiate political paraphrase. The narrative of violence - be it subjective,
systemic or symbolic - is constantly infused with the aesthetics of violence. Furthermore,
introducing the concept of death to her aesthetic, McGuckian refocuses the reader’s attention
onto negation that creates meaning and energised content.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

10’00-11’30: Session 8
[Panel: FILM & THEATRE (I): MAPPING IRISHNESS (Chair: Luz Glez Rguez)
“Hollywood Offers of Spiritually Recuperative Trips to the Emerald Isle”
Rosa González (U. of Barcelona)
“Urban Bodies: Cartographies of the Global City in Contemporary Irish Film”
Eduardo Barros Grela (U. A Coruña)]

“Hollywood Offers of Spiritually Recuperative Trips to the Emerald Isle”

Rosa González Casademont (U. Barcelona)
The recuperative imaginary trip to Ireland undertaken by W.B. Yeats in “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” in 1888 has been rehearsed again and again by generations of Irish expatriates. In
the same way as the poet’s persona retreats from the drab reality of London’s “pavements
grey” by imaginatively visualising a visit to a scenery of solitude and natural harmony where
he will find “some peace”, rather than by recollecting an actual experience on the isle, the
Ireland conjured up by the diasporic imagination has frequently been tinted with the
mythopoeic impulse to construct a pastoral Arcadia of the mind.
The range of images of the homeland evoked, though, differs substantially. Whereas in many
emigrant songs “the dear island” is conceived as a sort of Tir na nOg, the fabled land of youth
and plenty “wherein a prince might dwell” (“Skibbereen”), literary accounts tend to be more
qualified, and convey a more realistic –and often critical– view of the cultural and social
restrictions of Irish life through the figure of the returnee. It is in the cinematic portrayals of
Ireland made by outsiders where, notwithstanding the changed economic, political and social
circumstances experienced by the Republic, the idealisation of rural Ireland and the
supposedly healing powers that people coming from urban and competitive environments find
in its primitive lifestyle and values, have endured longer.
By considering the presence, and frequently random use, of three alleged signifiers of
Irishness (castles, non-diagetic Celtic music and Stage Irish expressions) the paper will look at
some recent offerings of an Emerald Isle that does not exist beyond the screen.

“Urban Bodies: Cartographies of the Global City in Contemporary Irish Film”

Eduardo Barros Grela (U. A Coruña)
According to urban theory critics such as Henri Lefebvre or Reyner Banham the question of
center and centrality are pivotal to the understanding of city space as 20th century model site
of social growth and development. However, Deleuzian ontological readings of space claim
that arborescent conceptions of the urban space are not suitable for fragmented, globalized, or
postmodern identities. Together with Guattari, he argues that both subjectivities and
spatialities are constructed on a real yet multidimensional pattern of rhizomic epistemological
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devices. The dialectical postures of Lefebvre and Deleuze will function as theoretical starting
point to this essay, which intends to utilize recent manifestations of Irish and Spanish Cinema
to articulate machineries of both centripetal and centrifugal inertias with rhizome-like
tendencies of identity production.
By analyzing recently-produced Irish films, such as 2003 John Crowley´s Intermission, 2004
Leonard Abrahamson´s Adam & Paul, or 2005 Neil Jordan´s Breakfast on Pluto, this essay
studies relations of mutual reconfiguration between Irish urban spaces (or, rather, spatialities)
as inorganic entities and the different processes of identity production performed by subjects
and subjectivities in the context of contemporary Ireland. The aim that this study pursues by
discussing the cohabitation of globalized zones and fragmented identities in contemporary
Ireland is to question the heterotopic nature that is assumed to be a condition of space in the
postmodern era.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

12’00-13’00: Plenary Lecture
“New York Stories: Transnationalism and Contemporary Irish Fiction”
Anne Fogarty (Professor, U. College Dublin) (Chair: Rosa Glez)

A striking feature of recent Irish fiction is the degree to which it has crossed over with the
Irish-American novel. Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls re-envisage,
for example, emigration to the US thereby reshaping the types of story that the Irish novel is
capable of relating and the narrative forms that it can assume.
This paper will examine four signal contemporary texts that hinge on Irish emigration to New
York: Edna O'Brien's The Light of Evening (2006), Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire (2006), Colum
McCann's Let the Great World Spin (2009), and Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (2009). The
structures and themes of these novels will be examined and their symbolic concerns
excavated.
The generic problems that they pose will above all be probed. Do these Irish texts troublingly
mimic or appropriate aspects of the Irish-American novel or of dystopian tales about New
York? Or is it more valid to see them as transnational narratives that trouble the boundaries
both of national fiction and of global narratives? Additionally, the role of gender and
sexuality in these texts will be scrutinised and the differences and points of convergence
between male and female diasporic stories will be analysed.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

13’00-14’00: In Conversation with Writer Jamie O’Neill (Chair: Aída Díaz Bild)

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

16’00-17’30: Session 9
[Panel: GENDERED POETICS (II): SUBALTERNITY, ESTRANGENESS & FEMALE
ARCHETYPES IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH POETRY (Chair: Pilar Villar Argáiz)
“Contemporary Irish Women Poets Redressing Female Allegories of the Nation: A Kristevan
Approach”
Katharina Walter (College of Arts NUI Galway)
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‘A Stranger to Herself’: The Pedagogical Presence of the Other in Paula Meehan’s Poetry
Pilar Villar-Argáiz (U. Granada)
“Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: the right to protest”
Susana Domínguez Pena (U. Santiago)]

“Contemporary Irish Women Poets Redressing Female Allegories of the Nation: A

Kristevan Approach”
Katharina Walter (NUI Galway)
This paper examines the ways in which contemporary Irish women’s poetry revises
conventional representations of female allegories of the nation. The analysis will show that
traditionally female tropes of Irish nationalism inhabit the same cultural location that
characterizes the societal position of motherhood according to Julia Kristeva, who argues that
mothers assume an important function in regulating the drives and preparing children for
entrance into the symbolic order of society, in relation to which they themselves remain
structurally liminal. In “Women’s Time,” Kristeva describes the ‘chora,’ based on Plato’s
amorphous receptacle out of which forms are generated and often identified as the cultural
location of maternity, as both provider (‘matrix space,’ ‘nourishing’) and, as an amorphous
nonentity, outside the realm of the creation it fosters (‘unnameable,’ ‘anterior to the One’).
Éire, the maiden in “The Merchant’s Son,” an example of 17th-century writer Aodhagán Ó
Rathaille’s famous aisling poems, one of the traditions contemporary Irish women poets
contest, echoes important traits of the ‘chora,’ being a potential provider of offspring for Mac
an Cheannaí, the rightful sovereign of Ireland who is held captive abroad, with no independent
existence or identity. This paper will show that contemporary Irish women poets use these
female tropes as a potent site for revising the discourses of femininity and Irish nationalism,
either through aligning these abstract, stereotyped female figures with women’s lived
experience, or by reevaluating them from within their liminal positions.

“‘A Stranger to Herself’: The Pedagogical Presence of the Other in Paula Meehan’s
Poetry”
Pilar Villar-Argáiz (U. Granada)
In this age of globalization, interracial and cross-cultural encounters have become common
aspects of everyday life. This paper aims to examine how Paula Meehan engages in this global
discourse of interculturality by articulating aspects of cross-cultural and inter-ethnical
exchange. I subsequently link to the context of 21st century Ireland Meehan’s openness to
cultural diversity and her alertness to the voices of the marginalised. The first section
discusses Meehan’s subversive representations of the ‘internal’ Others of Irish society. Her
depictions of otherness challenge the often rigid boundaries which define national and ethnic
identities and open a liberating place which successfully accommodates diversity. The second
section focuses on Meehan’s attempt to move away from the ethos of individual egotism
which marks contemporary life. In particular, she advocates a model to confront the
experiences of ‘foreigners’ based on the self-exploration of one’s own subconscious. In line
with Kristeva’s argument, Meehan implies that discovering the ‘stranger’ hidden in oneself is
an essential prerequisite to accept, in an unconditional and genuine way, the presence of
external ‘Others’ in Irish society. While this can easily be dismissed as an abstract utopia,
Meehan’s ideal becomes ethically and politically relevant in the contemporary context of a
multi-cultural society open to large-scale immigration.
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“Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: the right to protest”

Susana Domínguez Pena (U. Santiago)
Evan Boland and Eilean Ní Chuilleanain are but two examples of the rise of women as
successful writers in poetry, in the second part of the twentieth century.The poems “Woman in
the Kitchen” by Eavan Boland, and “Medb Speaks” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, deal with the
topic of women subordination to men, but while in the first case, the woman´s voice is passive
and silent, in the second poem a cry of war is heard high and clear to give clear evidence of
male domination. Boland´s “Woman in the Kitchen” is part of the collection Outside History,
written in the decade 1980-1990, and it is set in the kitchen. The poem reflects the feeling of
being trapped as a housewife facing the thread of losing her identity and artistic creativity.
“Medb Speaks” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill positions the female gender through the voice of the
legendary Queen Medb, and offers a rebellious female who is determined to bring about
change in a society ruled by male values.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

16’00-17’30: Session 10
[Panel: FILM & THEATRE (II): PROBLEMATIZING IRISHNESS (Chair: Munira H. Mutran)
“Elizabeth Kuti’s Representation of Ireland in The Sugar Wife”
Munira H. Mutran (U. São Paulo)
“Liminal Identities in Contemporary Irish Drama”
Jochen Achilles (U. Würzburg, Germany)
“Re-Awakening the ‘Wake’: Contested Images of ‘Irishness’ in Colonial Australasia”
Peter Kuch (U. Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand)

“Elizabeth Kuti’s Representation of Ireland in The Sugar Wife. The Sugar Wife”
Munira H. Mutran (U. São Paulo)
The action of The Sugar Wife (2005) takes place in Dublin, from January 8 to March 20, 1850.
The choice of such an important date in Irish history cannot be overlooked for it conjures
images of the Great Hunger which devastated the country from the 1840s onwards. The main
characters of the play, Hannah and Samuel, of the Quaker religion, are members of The
Society of Friends that for years attempted to mitigate the tragedy of the Famine; however, in
1849, the Society gave up relief work because the problem “was far beyond the reach of
private exertions”. Hannah still tries to help some poor in Dublin but she has now her heart set
on another cause, the abolition of slavery in the United States. Sarah, who had been a slave,
and Alfred, who had bought her at an auction for three hundred dollars so that he could let her
free, arrive in Dublin to deliver lectures against slavery. During their stay many conflicts
come to the surface: first, there is the problem of an unhappy marriage between a tea and
sugar merchant and his fanatical Quaker wife who imagines that his business is the source of
suffering and poverty in the world; then there are the issues of freedom and slavery, wealth
and poverty. Are we enslaved by work, by fanaticism, by human bonds, by money, by
obsessions? Most of all The Sugar Wife shows irony of situation and an ironic treatment of the
four characters.
In attempting to reflect upon the complexity of the issues presented by Elizabeth Kuti, this
paper will also deal with the expected effects of a play which takes place in Dublin in 1850 on
a 2005 audience, and will discuss the parallels that can be drawn between the two periods.
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“Liminal Identities in Contemporary Irish Drama”

Jochen Achilles (U. Würzburg, Germany)
Since the period of the Celtic Renaissance and plays such as William Butler Yeats's Cathleen
ni Houlihan (1902), the debate of authentic and de-anglicized versus colonized and outer-
directed Irish identities in Irish drama has long developed in new and different directions.
Under the impact of universal globalization and the concomitant mediatization of realities
both national and ethnic stereotyping has gained unprecedented power. In this process, the
colonizing and alienating influence of Britain has been replaced by the United States as the
dominant Other. The worldwide proliferation of American media and mass culture tends to
homogenize lifestyles, attitudes, and mores all over the globe, as Fredric Jameson has
repeatedly pointed out. A liminal zone develops in which identities tend to merge and
coalesce.
Irish drama has registered this problematic in different ways. In his first stage success,
Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), Brian Friel depicts his young and impressionable Irish
protagonist Gareth O'Donnell as a vessel filled with stereotypical notions of Horatio Alger's
version of the American Dream. Friel later wrote a little-known short play entitled American
Welcome (1980) satirizing the American adaptation of a fictitious Irish play which totally
distorts it. More recently, Sebastian Barry's White Woman Street (1992) juxtaposes the
exploitation of Irish peasants at the hands of the British and the exploitation of Native
Americans by white America. His The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (1995) alludes to the
Irish music hall artiste Lizzie Finn's and her cancan show partner Jelly Jane's meeting with
Colonel Cody, alias Buffalo Bill, in Weston-super-Mare, Avon, in the 1890s in what may be
considered a prefiguration of globalized entertainment. In their criticism of the exploitation
and commodification of Indianness Barry's plays coincide with Arthur Kopit's American play
Indians (1969). Similarly, Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West (1997) implicitly
juxtaposes the erosion of religious sense and moral significance in Ireland with the simulacral
quality of the American West, exposed in Sam Shepard's True West (1981).
Against this background, my paper will more specifically explore the portrayal, as well as the
distortion, of Ireland and the Irish in film in two contemporary plays, Marie Jones's Stones in
His Pockets (1999) and Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan (1998). Both plays
focus on the intercultural representation of Ireland and the Irish in Hollywood movies. Both
plays are intermedial or metadramas in the sense that they take film productions as their
subject matter. Both plays will be analyzed against the background of Fredric Jameson's
theory of global commodification and Jean Baudrillard's arguments on simulated realities.

“Re-Awakening the “Wake”—Contested Images of ‘Irishness’ in Colonial Australasia”

Peter Kuch (U. Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand)
Theatre played a major role in the social, cultural and political life of metropolitan colonial
Australasia. It provided escape, promised entertainment and provoked debate, even while
persuading those who lived in Sydney, Melbourne, Dunedin and Auckland that what had just
premiered in London and New York would be opening shortly at a theatre near them. Dion
Boucicault’s The Shaughraun provides a case in point. After opening to rave reviews at
Wallack’s Theatre in New York in December 1874, followed by a long run at the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane, early the next year, it went on to achieve approximately a thousand
performances in Australia and New Zealand between August 1875 and December 1895.
Colonial audiences thrilled to its plot; were astonished by its stage machinery and special
effects; laughed uproariously at its comic interludes; and identified with its virtuous characters
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to the point that, when requested, they were willing to pardon the Fenian protagonist, even
though the newspapers of the day were fulminating against Fenian outrages such as: the
bombing of the Salford Military Barracks in Lancashire (1881); the Phoenix Park murders
(1882); and the dynamiting of the Tower of London, Westminster Hall, and the House of
Commons (1885). The Shaughraun, of course, as is well known, had been deliberately written
to reshape the public image of the Irish and create such a groundswell of public opinion that
Disraeli would be forced to pardon those Fenians still languishing in prison who had merely
been accessories after the fact of the Clerkenwell bombing of 13 December 1867. In the event,
Boucicault was unsuccessful despite the simultaneous publication of a petition in 200
newspapers and his claim that of the 90,000,000 people who had seen the play worldwide the
overwhelming majority had voted for the release of the symbolic Fenian in the play. Though
the diaspora Irish of New Zealand and Australia were sympathetic to Boucicault’s project,
they were sharply divided as to whether or not The Shaughraun genuinely challenged
perceived images of Irishness or simply exploited current stereotypes for commercial gain.
This paper will focus on a key aspect of that debate—with reference to relevant contemporary
discourses of identity—by analysing the commercial use of and public reaction to the “Wake”
scene as evidenced in the newspapers of the day.

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010

18’00-19’00: Poetry Reading Session
Cathal McCabe (Director of The Ireland-Poland Cultural Foundation) (Chair: Juan Ignacio Oliva)