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Alterity, literary form and the transnational Irish imagination in the work of Colum McCann Alison Garden PhD in English Literature University of Edinburgh 2014 1 Declaration of own work I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. Where I have reproduced material and ideas from other sources, this has been fully acknowledged and referenced. I can also confirm that thesis has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Alison Garden 25th September 2014 2 Acknowledgements It is an absolute pleasure to be able to thank the many people who have supported this thesis with their assistance, advice and affection. My first expression of gratitude must be to the late Professor Susan Manning. Were it not for her early guidance and encouragement, I would not have reached this stage and, while it was a great loss to complete this project without her, I do hope it is testament to her influence in some small way. I would like to begin by thanking the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding that made this research possible, including a research trip to New York to interview Colum McCann. I would also like to thank Colum McCann himself for being so generous with his time and thoughts. I was delighted to be able to publish this interview in Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations (2014); and it is partly reproduced here as an appendix thanks to the generosity of the editors, Dr Christopher Gair and Professor Philip Tew. The online version of this interview can be accessed via this link: http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com/news/. I was also incredibly lucky to receive funding from the Council of Europe to attend a Critical Theory school at Utrecht University, where I learnt a great deal from the scholarship of Rosi Braidotti. I am also greatly indebted for the additional funding I received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to attend their ‘Speaking my Language’ programme in Brazilian Portuguese, which expanded my transatlantic scholarship and opened up future research possibilities. I am very grateful for all the fantastic work that the Graduate School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures’ (LLC) administrative and support staff put into the culture of LLC; special thanks are due to Sarah Harvey, Gordon Littlejohn and especially Linda Grieve. I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Dr Aaron Kelly; I have been very lucky to benefit from his critical insight, intelligence, knowledge and kindness. He has also been unswerving in his support for all of my many, many extracurricular endeavours. I am incredibly grateful. Thanks also to Dr Andy Taylor, my secondary supervisor, who has been similarly encouraging and generous with his time. A special acknowledgement is due to them both for stepping-in at a critical juncture. Dr Fiona Mackintosh has also been a source of great support and kindness. I would also like to thank my excellent examiners, Dr Sinéad Moynihan and Dr David Farrier, for their insightful and helpful critique. I would also like to express my thanks to Dr Enda Delaney and Dr Niall Whelehan for convening the excellent Diaspora Studies and Irish History seminars and for helping to broaden my understanding of Irish Studies. I would also like to say a further thanks to Sophie Cooper, for being very generous with her awe-inspiring knowledge of modern Irish history. 3 I have been lucky to have such supportive friends and colleagues. I would like to thank Eystein, Dawn, Lucy, Mikey, Lizzie, Cormac and Sarah; my cousins, Alexandre Johnston and Felicity Loughlin; plus, a special thanks to my fellow transatlanticists, Brian and Dorothy. I must also express my sincere gratitude to my old officemates, Fiona, Stuart and Victoria, for enduring my spontaneous bouts of obscenities and song. I also need to say a huge ‘thanks’ to Steph, Harriet, Diletta and Lauren for the wonderful long-distance support. Extra-special thanks are due to Muireann, who not only proofread this thesis, but was also a stalwart of support, wisdom and dangerous ideas; and to Kate, for being so brilliant and brave in all she does. Thanks to Sophie, the kindest flatmate and best baker you could ever wish for, and for bringing much joy to many a dark Edinburgh evening! I must also thank Marta and the rest of the van Zeller and Corrêa Mendes families for their love and encouragement. It would be wrong of me not to mention the McCanns within my own family: Linda, Leo, Annie and Eóin have been the source of much happiness and affection. Living in Scotland while I studied in Edinburgh has given me the chance to both think of and spend more time with my grandparents. I want to thank my Grandpa Charlie Johnston for reading me ‘Tam O’Shanter’ as a child and henceforth instilling in me a great love of literature and a great fear of the Scottish countryside at night. I’d like to thank my Granny Jean for being the best of friend, and ensuring I knew the essential baking skills necessary to survive. For my Grandpa Norrie Garden, who I hope (fingers crossed!) will soon be able call me ‘Doc’, and my Granny Ann, both of whom I cannot thank enough for looking after me so well on many a weekend. Both of my grandfathers left school at 14, so this achievement is as much theirs for instilling such a love of learning in their children and grandchildren. Finally, I convey my thanks to Tomás, my mum, dad and sister for supporting this project far before it began: to Tomás for displaying the patience of his namesake but providing much more fun, muito obrigada; to my sister, Moira, for being such a pal; and to my parents, for everything. My gratitude is far greater than I can begin to express. 4 Abstract This thesis explores selected texts by the contemporary author Colum McCann (b.1965), situating his work within a larger transnational Irish canon. The project traces how notions of Irish identity interact with experiences of diaspora, migration and race; throughout the thesis, close attention is paid to the role and function of literary form. After an introduction which maps out the material covered in the thesis, the project opens with a contextual chapter entitled ‘Deoraí: Exile, Wanderer, Stranger: (Post)colonial Ireland and making sense of place’. This chapter sets up the methodological frameworks that guide the thesis through a meditation on exile in an Irish and postcolonial context. My second chapter, ‘Deterritorialised novels: McCann’s short stories as Minor Literature in an (Northern) Irish Mode’, focuses on McCann’s short stories, paying particular attention to those set in the North of Ireland. Invoking Thomas MacDonagh’s notion of an Irish Mode and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Minor Literature, I argue that the rejection of the novel in favour of the short story is a form of literary politics inflected with anti-colonial sentiment. Continuing my examination of literary form, my third chapter, ‘Nomadism and Storytelling in Zoli: oral culture, embodiment and travelling tales’, highlights the ambivalence of orality within McCann’s novel Zoli and works towards establishing what a textual practice of storytelling might be, in addition to probing at the representation of nomadic peoples across McCann’s work. The next chapter is entitled ‘Topography of Violence’: race, belonging and the underbelly of the cosmopolitan city in This Side of Brightness’. This discusses the cosmopolitan ethics that underpin McCann’s novel and how these are grounded by the close attention McCann pays to the experiential realities of America’s (often racialised) underclass through McCann’s depiction of interracial love. My final chapter ‘TransAtlantic: Frederick Douglass, the Irish Famine and the Troubles with the black and green Atlantics’, maps out the overlapping histories of the black and green Atlantics, tests the validity of the ostensible affinity between the two groups and asks how useful conventional chronological narratives are in the representation of their histories. Finally, I finish with ‘Minor Voices, race and rooted cosmopolitanism’, which concludes that McCann’s fiction articulates a need for rooted cosmopolitan and critically engaged nomadic thought which embraces Minor Voices and rejects exclusionary politics. 5 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................3 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................5 CONTENTS .....................................................................................................................6 INTRODUCTION: ALTERITY, LITERARY FORM AND THE TRANSNATIONAL IRISH