But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I.–Adrienne Rich, “In Those Years“[1]
To write this essay, I had to break off from an article I was writing about bardic poems in which castles metamorphose into women. The file (poet) stands by a ruined tower-house which he knew in happier times, enjoying the hospitality of a now-dead lord. Looking at the broken building, he remembers the court in its glory: thoroughbreds cutting up the turf; poets reciting in the banqueting hall; ladies in silk dresses embroidering in the grianán;[2] boatbuilders, masons, cabinetmakers, armourers, cutlers making sparks fly in the workshops; lawyers, genealogists, historians conferring quietly in a chamber. But now, on the wet hillside, he sees only ‘luit gan leigheas’ (‘ruination without remedy’):[3] battlements pulled down, casements smashed, curtain walls broached, stone on stone. But our bardic poet doesn’t just see a ruin. For him, such a castle is also a ‘síothbhrugh’, a fairy hostel, a place touched by the chthonic forces of the supernatural embodied in the word ‘síthe’.[4] A castle enlivened by such residual forces of magic remains open to the possibilities of animism – and, crucially in the context of defeat, of reanimation. Castles come alive and, ventriloquised by the poet, they dream of restoration; the past is anything but over.[5]
But while I fixate on sixteenth-century talking castles, the world goes to hell in a handcart. The polar ice-caps melt.[6] The sixth extinction devastates life on earth.[7] Just when a unified response at a global level is most needed, democracy, never fully present to itself, turns illiberal: populists, under the cover of nativism, throw extractive capitalism’s last, loaded dice. I’m still writing it when it when these conjoined crises metastasise into a global pandemic. How, against this background, can I who have always imagined myself to be ‘doing political criticism’ ‘cocoon’[8] myself from the crisis by toying with anthropomorphic castles? The reproach implicit in George Steiner’s observation which has haunted me since my undergraduate days rings out even more forcefully than usual:
The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside.[9]
How can the cry of an early seventeenth-century Irish poet commandeer my attention at a time like this? I have my excuses to hand. I can say, in exculpation, that to recover the voice of a vanquished poet – a poet who shapes defeat into defiant form and finds, amidst the ruins of his civilisation, stirrings of life in the subversive energy of the síth – isn’t to turn one’s attention away from the calamities of the present. Rather, I can continue in my defence, it is only by understanding the deep structures of both oppression and resistance can we see the constructedness of the ostensibly ‘natural’ order – and learn that what was once placed on a pedestal can also be pulled down. This paper is an attempt to see if my pat excuses hold water.
The unsteadiness of the present unsteadies our relationship with the past as well. For quite some time, it has been apparent that the critical discourses – new historicism, postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, feminism, queer studies – which made Renaissance texts speak with such urgency to the issues of the 1980s and 90s – power, conquest and exploitation, gender, race, sexual orientation – have little purchase on the crises of the present. Their power to make history’s underclasses visible – those on the rough end of empire and patriarchy, the queer, the indentured, the enslaved – may, in the end, have been too easily co-opted by the distracting identity (pseudo)politics of neoliberalism.[10] In any event, theory’s critical edge can be blunted; moves that once seemed challenging become little more than templates for grinding out the ‘outputs’ demanded by an increasingly marketised ‘HE sector’.[11] The neo-antiquarian discourses that succeeded them – the non-dialectical materialisms of thing theory and history of the book – fitted with the consumerist and curatorial fixations of the unfettered market. The new-materialist turn orientated itself unthreateningly, and often reverently, to the past as something that is over. History is handled with white cotton gloves and the past enters the present as yet another culture-trophy, confirming a ‘great tradition’ – a rejigged and more inclusively defined tradition but a tradition safely sequestered in the past nonetheless. Research of this nature is more likely to come bearing gifts for the heritage industry than to agitate the present with the news that the past is a challenging, unconcluded site of contestation.[12] With its period-instruments fetishising of authenticity and oldness, the new materialism coincided with a revanchist English nationalism steeped in nostalgia for imagined imperial glories. Alienated by this new critical dispensation and bereft of the theoretical discourses which had once given me at least the illusion of ‘doing’ political criticism, I have to ask what exactly I thought I was doing when I thought I was doing political criticism.
My notion of ‘political criticism’ rested on an under-interrogated assumption that if we read a text closely enough, equipped with a knowledge of history and a sceptical stance, we could read the world that produced it. My attempt to trace the genealogy of my own critical practice makes me realise how heavily my belief that I was doing political criticism rested on a kind of adapted Foucauldian genealogy. It rested on an ardent conviction that one could understand and, ideally, intervene in the predicaments of the present by uncovering their putative ‘originary’ moment. My commitment to seeking in the past an understanding that might offer resolutions in the present rested on another article of faith, that literature and politics move in lockstep. To go through the Irish education system in the 1970s and early 1980s was to accept that link as an article of faith. The energy of the Literary Revival infused the 1916 Revolution; three of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of Independence were published poets – one a university lecturer in English Literature[13] – and the most astringent critics of the subsequent Republic’s backsliding from the revolution were also writers. In those years, too, politics – the women’s movement, the clash of Church and State and, in the North, political violence – was inescapable.
First thing on so many mornings of my childhood (as of my adolescence and young-womanhood), the radio news delivered its formulaic announcement of sectarian assassination: ‘The body of a young man, believed to be in his early 20s, has been found with multiple gunshot wounds near/in/at…’ Transfixed by the political, I went to university to study English, on the unexamined assumption that, since literature was a form of politics, literary criticism must (somehow, osmotically) be political too. Reading Joyce or O’Casey or Heaney in University College Cork gave me a sense of engaging with a history still in play. But then I went to Oxford during the IRA Hunger Strikes, to write a D. Phil. on Shakespeare and Ovid, and the music stopped. The frail apparatus of formalism, UCC-style, which I brought with me was powerless when cut adrift from the historical understandings which underpinned it. As the hunger strikers died and the May Balls rolled around, everything was more political than ever – except for the language of criticism at my disposal. The dry-as-dust historicism of Oxford’s Prolegomena deployed palaeography and philology as gatekeepers that gave restricted access to a past-without-politics, a past that had no purchase on the present – apart from the privileged entrée to the liberal professions which it conferred on its initiates.
This was my first crisis of political criticism and it brought my untheorised musings on Pyramus, Thisbe, and metamorphosis-over-time to a standstill. When I returned to study in Oxford in the late-90s, distance – work in Brussels, travels in South America, and the open wounds of colonisation there[14] – had made the relationship between language and conquest in Ireland visible to me in new ways. Somewhere along that journey, I had become a Foucauldian genealogist rather than an Old-Historicist one: I switched from tracing the line of succession from Ovid through Chaucer to Shakespeare to exploring the genealogy of conflict in Ireland. I began work on my D. Phil. on linguistic colonisation and the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland just as the Peace Process was getting underway. The first, tentative steps towards resolving The Troubles (1968-98) were structured around a ‘twin-track process’: the peace talks moved in lockstep with the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. We, the small community of Irish postgraduates clustered around the English and History Faculties, lived ‘the talks’ and the breakdown in talks – the horror of the Docklands bombing – day by rollercoaster day. The split of the old Prolegomena days, between scholarship and criticism, between book-world and ‘real’ world, was over. I was living my own ‘twin-track process, researching the origins of the very conflict which now, 400 years later, was entering its endgame. There were days in the Bodleian Library when I scarcely knew whether I was reading the newspapers or the State Papers. Hugh O’Neill’s 1590s’ fastidiousness about definitions (his soldiers weren’t ‘rebels’ but ‘men in action’; he would sign a ‘truce’ but not a ‘cessation of armes’)[15] didn’t seem a million miles away from the Peace Process’s ‘talks-about-talks’, ‘proximity talks’, and forms of words (‘the three strands’, ‘the Irish dimension’, ‘an agreed Ireland’).[16]
There was an element of déjà vu about the delicate choreography of Gerry Adams’s first handshakes for anyone familiar with O’Neill insisting that the Earl of Essex negotiate with him, on saddleback, in the middle of the Blackwater River. Language – including the failure of language and a refusal to comprehend – was central to a conflict rooted not just in colonisation but in linguistic colonisation. Behind ‘The Troubles’ lay a long history of incommensurate understandings and entrenched incomprehension. If we were to escape the past, my reasoning went, we had first to understand it. By going to the Tudor conquest and the Stuart plantations in search of first causes, I was locating the politics of my work in the claim that to shed light on the early-modern ‘origin’[17] of the conflict was to deploy genealogy as a way of ‘writing the history of the present’.[18] In those days before, as Heaney declared, ‘hope and history rhyme[d]’,[19] literary-historical critique and realpolitik seemed to manage at least a half-rhyme.
Inside the broad framework of Foucauldian genealogy, I could add a variety of ‘political’ reading strategies to the rigorous formalism of my undergraduate formation. Feminism gave me a language for analysing the way Irish-speaking natives were silenced and ventriloquised.[20] Deconstruction steeled the insights of postcolonial theory with a discourse honed to pick away at the onto-theologico-political absolutes and anathemas of colonial discourse; Derrida’s deconstruction of ‘the present’ opened up the indeterminacy of the past.[21] But formalism remained at the centre of my critical practice – a forensic formalism that has some kinship with Richard Strier’s ‘indexical formalism’. ‘Indexical formalism’ (which Strier contrasts with ‘aesthetic formalism’) operates on ‘the premise that questions of style, minutely conceived, can act as indices to large issues’; close reading can be ‘a historical tool’.[22] From a distance, perhaps, I could be mistaken for a New Historicist. But for anyone working on what Walter Mignolo calls ‘the dark side of the Renaissance’,[23] the interests of self-identifying New Historicists could seem a bit like the dark side of the moon. For them, the still-often-canonical literary work remained the cynosure; the anecdotal witches, cardinals, and cutpurses which furnished colour-story ‘context’ for metropolitan masterpieces was a world away from the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland with its heads on poles, crop-burnings, and squalid massacres. Viewed from 1580s’ Munster, ‘document[s] of culture’ looked more than usually like ‘document[s] of barbarism’.[24] But, once you put the Faerie Queene’s ‘pitch[ing] of Pollente’s head ‘vpon a pole’ alongside Secretary Spenser recording receipt of Sir John of Desmond’s actual head (‘a New Year’s gift’ for Lord Grey), my privileging of the ‘grafted tongue’ over the ‘severed head’ – of language over silence and violence – began to look distinctly lopsided.[25]
So, my second book started as an attempt to redeem the omissions of the first. If Language and Conquest had focused so intensely on the language shift from Irish to English as to whistle past the violence that underpinned it, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue confronted atrocity head on. As work proceeded, I realised that the politics of the book, this time, rested not so much on genealogy as on analogy. When Sir Henry Sidney complained that ‘the late beheaded Hydra began to put forth a new head’,[26] he was refusing to learn a lesson – that repression won’t end resistance to an ongoing oppression – which the powerful still find hard to learn. Written in the years following the Good Friday Agreement, when a curmudgeonly peace descended on Northern Ireland, the book seemed to be less about the continuing play of the past in the present than about the lessons which the past has to teach the present. I started the book just as the ‘coalition of the willing’ moved from toppling statues in Baghdad to sowing dragons’ teeth throughout the region.
Late sixteenth-century Ireland showed that there was a direct bleed between the literary severed heads of, say, The Faerie Queene and the literal beheadings that made it happen: heads on the page – the ‘headlesse Ladie[’s]’, Pollente’s, Radigund’s – bear the imprint of real heads, skewered on the sword-tips, carried in sacks, exchanged for ‘hedd monie’.[27] One of the stories which Spenser’s epic-romance can’t help telling is that there is a link between dehumanising the other and lurching, oneself, towards inhumanity. For a second time, I was finding a disconcerting symmetry between breaking news and the broken record of the archive. I was effectively channel-hopping between the neocons bogged down in a neo-colonial ‘crusade’ against Iraqi ‘terrorists’, and knights on similarly tendentious ‘civilising’ quests (Artegall, say, or Ercilla’s alter ego in La Araucana) bogged down in earlier, precursor quagmires. Those sixteenth-century wars of conquest speak directly to the present. There is nothing archaic about the pitilessness unleashed by a sense of superiority and the failure to imagine the other; or the easy slippage into atrocity by knights (or squaddies) far from home, schooled by a bogus sense of superiority into seeing, in difference, only the incorrigible perversity of the foreigner. There is nothing surprising, either, about the Hydra-headed nature of recrudescing insurgency. But here the questions really begin to pile in: just how political is it to keep on flogging the long-dead horse of that particular analogy – Vietnam, the Somme, the Peloponnesian War? Are we merely signalling our own virtue when we imagine ourselves teaching a lesson which those committed to decapitating Hydras seriatim have, in any case, a vested interest in not learning?
For the early modernist, the possibility of doing political criticism rests on the understanding that, as Goldberg and Menon put it, ‘the past is never fully over’.[28] But, as I learned from writing Language and Conquest and The Severed Head, the trick lies in how we mobilise that insight: there is nothing intrinsically ‘political’ about simply demonstrating the continuing play of the past in the present (the work of genealogy) or warning against its replay (the work of analogy). Both genealogy and analogy are caught in a teleological trap: they lead us to this present and no other; they explain our contemporary predicaments and they identify the recurring patterns from which we need to break. They offer, at best, a warning. But such warnings need to be issued to – and heard by – an audience beyond our recondite monographs and micro-circulation journals. Yet, the spirit of the backlash politics that announced itself at the polls in 2016, the demonisation of experts and expertise so expertly mobilised by the Brexiteers, the ‘spirit of resentment’, ressentiment, diagnosed by Jacques Rancière, has had it with history:
The object of resentment, Nietzsche tells us, is time itself, the ‘es war,’ ‘this was.’ Resentment is sick of hearing about the past of the future, which is also a future of the past. It has had it with those two tenses.[29]
Of course, at another level, ‘the spirit of resentment’ loves history, a history of past greatness, imperial history, Confederate history, history whitewashed and guilt-free. This is the history-as-nostalgia that can conceive of post-Brexit Britain as Empire 2.0; it is the dreamtime future-past tense of ‘Take back control!’ and ‘Make America great again!’[30]
At a time when fake-history threatens to keep us busy merely firefighting amnesia and false memory, we need to embrace the more transformative potential of Goldberg and Menon’s reminder that ‘the past is never fully over’. That potential lies in the fact that a present shot through with the residues of an uncompleted past is itself alterable; far from being the finished product of a teleological process, it is the provisional – and enablingly unstable – manifestation of forces still in play. If the past could have been otherwise, our present, too, could have been different. The conditionality of the present is the necessary condition for its potential transformation: it still can be (or can become) otherwise. The necessary corollary of ‘Another world is possible’ is the fact that, once upon a time, ‘another world was possible’ – and that possibility remains, latently, potent.[31]
Jonathan Gil Harris gestures towards the mobilisation of an as-yet unexhausted past when he declares that ‘elements of the past are always part of the polychronic assemblage that is the present’. Exoskeletons, material that endures across periods such as ‘the longue durée of lithic structures’ – his focus is archaeological – can serve to ‘interrupt’ the present.[32] What can seem like the past isn’t yet over; it can still interrupt the present. Indeed, the signature of what I’ve been loosely calling ‘political’ criticism is the belief that we can find in the open-weave – and, often, the open wound – of the past, a sensitivity to both the running wounds of the present and its alterability. That non-linear temporality, where the memory of the past and the redemption of the present spark off one another leads us, of course, to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin rejects a teleological model of history which, in recording ‘the triumphal procession’ of the victors, offers no court of appeal to the defeated and the oppressed.[33] Instead, he insists, ‘History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but … a past charged with now-time [Jetztzeit], a past… blasted out of the continuum of history.’[34] The open wound of history remains open; moreover, it becomes available as an impetus to transform the present whenever contemporary inequalities and injustices suddenly recover the urgency and relevance of a moment of historical oppression.[35] ‘Articulating the past historically’, Benjamin argues, ‘means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’.[36] That crisis or ‘moment of danger’ makes a hitherto occluded moment in the past newly visible – and newly mobilising. That conjunction of past and present effectively reorders temporality into a ‘constellation’ that ‘make[s] the continuum of history explode’.[37] The resultant breach in what can seem like an unassailable, teleologically determined outcome lets the past in as more than just an analogy, as more than a piquant precursor that, itself, remains immured in the past and which can address the present only as a warning. For Benjamin, that breach offers a way of redeeming the past: it offers ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’.[38] Benjamin’s wager is that, by fanning ‘the spark of hope in the past’, we can make a ‘tiger’s leap into . . . the open air of history’.[39]
How does this pan out in practice? How do we orient the unresolved business of the past towards the present? How, when the storm blowing in from Paradise vitiates even the Angelus Novus’s desire to ‘awaken the dead’,[40] can a poor literary historian hope to do anything more than arrange a wake for the dead? There is always a danger that, once the injustices of the past have been made visible by that present-tense ‘moment of danger’, they will seduce us into inverting the priority; by focusing on past catastrophes, we privilege the oppression of the dead over that of the living. We do well to remember Max Horkheimer’s riposte to Benjamin’s messianism: ‘Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain.’[41] We run the risk of practising, amid the humanitarian and ecological crises of the present, a bizarre humanitarianism to the ‘slain’. To believe we can ‘do politics’ by immersing ourselves in the past is to find ourselves, at times, wondering if we haven’t chosen elegy over activism and, in the process, indentured ourselves towards the past rather than the present? But that is to presume that elegy is the opposite – or, at any rate, the enemy – of activism. That presumption would leave me in an embarrassing situation: the concluding chapters of both my books are, essentially, elegies – envoies, respectively, for a vanished culture and a vanquished populace. The centrepieces of The Severed Head’s last chapter are four bardic elegies addressed to the staked heads of decapitated patrons. It is easy to see this elegiac turn, with its orientation towards the lost and what is over, as symptomatic of a left-melancholy, of the ‘acedia which despairs of appropriating the genuine historical image as it briefly flashes up’.[42] It seems to sail dangerously close to the prevailing wind of what Rancière calls ‘the ethical turn’. For Rancière, the ethical turn is a turning away from politics: resistance and the old emancipatory vocation of the arts gives way to bearing witness to the ‘catastrophe’ and, beyond that, to ‘nothing but the infinite work of grieving’.[43] In seeking to find out how we got to this state, does our contrapuntal reading[44] of the past serve only to land us, at journey’s end, embarrassingly close to the reactionary temporality of ‘we are where we are’ and the endgame enunciated by Margaret Thatcher: ‘there is no alternative’.
But, I would argue, it is precisely to show that there was – and therefore is – an alternative that we can indeed bring the elegies of the defeated back into circulation without falling into a post-Levinasian ‘deliberation on mourning’.[45] After all, elegy is a genre of defiance rather than defeat. For the bardic poet with whom I began, there is nothing abject about reimagining a ruin as a ‘fairy castle’; by imagining a ‘síothbhrugh’, a ‘fairy hostel’, coming alive again, the bard deploys elegy like a gauntlet thrown down to the future, intimating a return of the oppressed. Far from mystifying atrocity as ‘unspeakable’, such elegies gives it a voice; far from slipping into frictionless mourning, they are fiercely attentive to a longer durée than that of their immediate defeat – to a future where things could again be different.[46]
Art, as John Berger reminds us, is the ‘activity of rendering the absent present’.[47] A critical practice that inserts what has been absent – forgotten, discarded, repressed, recalcitrant – into the present is also an ‘activity’.[48] The great absence in the writing of English colonialism in the early modern world is the voice of the conquered. Sometimes, the colonial silencing was so thorough that the stories of the enslaved and the exploited have to be reconstructed almost exclusively from the archive of their oppressors. Such scholarship can explain what happened; it can show how we got to where we are; what it cannot do, however, is draw on a counter or dissenting narrative.[49] But in Ireland, the counter-narratives survive. The massive paperwork of a bureaucratised conquest is counterbalanced by the generically distinct but potent outpourings of a professional intellectual caste of poets, jurists, and chroniclers, as well as the polemics of continentally trained clergy. The truly remarkable thing, however, is that scholars have consistently shied away from Irish-language works, choosing instead to fill their buckets from the colonial well. The rich irony is that modern scholarship replays what was, in fact, a knife-edge battle between Anglophone assertiveness and the hegemony of Irish as a rout.[50] What if, instead of operating teleologically, examining the past as if what came to pass only after bitter contestation was the inevitable, predestined outcome, we were to reset our engagement with early modern Ireland to reflect the actual wide-openness of the time? What if, instead of accepting our entrapment inside the English-language bubble of an anglophone order that only emerged from the encounter – rather than somehow, proleptically, fully articulated it – we were to reproduce the cultural and linguistic complexity that actually existed? This is precisely what my current response to the challenge of Ireland’s colonial past and slowly decolonising present attempts to do, through the MACMORRIS project, funded by the Irish Research Council. MACMORRIS (“Mapping Actors and Contexts: Modelling Research in Renaissance Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century”) is a DH project which aims to compile a complete cast-list of cultural actors operating, across ethnicities and languages, in Ireland from 1541 to 1691. Drawing on and supplementing the Dictionary of Irish Biography and the Bardic Poetry Database (the editors of both have generously shared their data with us), the project aims to provide biographical and bibliographical data for the writers, soldiers, administrators, nobles, and others who played their part shaping a time of convulsive change. From that, we will be able to reconstruct patterns of contact, exchange, and patronage, within and between communities. As much of this data as possible will find its way onto an interactive deep map that will allow us to visualise, among other things, the inescapable contiguity of natives and newcomers. Instead of seeing Edmund Spenser, for example, in a sequestered annex of the English Renaissance in Kilcolman Castle, we will finally catch sight of him cheek by jowl with Gaelic poets in their bardic schools, Old English manuscript collectors, and translators of all hues. More importantly still, we will get, for the first time, a snapshot of a Renaissance European hotspot, a place of linguistic pluralism (Irish and English alike drew not just on their vernacular but on Latin, Italian, and Spanish), of extraordinary cultural vitality, and of violent expansionist energies.[51]
MACMORRIS’s immediate intention is to bring the forgotten history and long-overlooked works of cultural actors – actors themselves overwhelmed by the work of history – back into the conversation.[52] MACMORRIS’s cast – caste – of Gaelic writers change the conversation by adding arrestingly unfamiliar ways of seeing and articulating the world to our understanding of early modernity. A small example: the article on house poems with which I began this essay – an early spin-off of the project – has given me access to a most unlikely aesthetics of resistance: the house-poem genre is itself a form of engagement. The house poem imagines the earth itself as animate. The lord’s rights of possession (which are definitely not property rights) are articulated in terms of a relationship with nature and the chthonic which is always gendered and often queer, forcing us to enter a world of unfamiliar forms and radically discombobulating perspectives. The intuitions of such poetry present Object-Oriented Ontology with a spiky test case. Above all, in dramatising pasts-not-taken, such old new voices extend the range of what is thinkable in the present.
Mapping is central to MACMORRIS (Mapping Actors and Contexts, etc.): it seeks to make knowledge of the early modern Ireland active now by mapping research about the past onto the cartography of the present. The two-dimensionality of mapping can work temporally as well as spatially: past and present can be brought together on one plane. The possibility of activating that conjunction and opening the present to the unfinished business of the past is where, for me, the politics of literary and historical criticism lies. If MACMORRIS is, therefore, a form of pedagogy, it is so because one of the most important ways of activating the past happens through teaching and, in the final section of this essay, I want to move from the archive and into the classroom. Teaching is where early modernists have a chance to map the past on to not just the present but the future. By making two worlds collide – the moment of present reading and the long-ago moment of writing – the classroom avoids being merely a place of privileged time-travel, an escapist wonderland that revisits, in a past-directed and past-fetishising way, the ‘timeless’ monuments of national, class, or race ‘greatness’. Rather, it keeps the diachronic and the synchronic in view, allowing the dilemmas of both past and present to spark off one another, to illuminate both.
So, in King’s College London about 10 years ago, I set about shaping a curriculum (and a pedagogy) that found a way of structuring the traffic between politics and literature, between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, and between ‘now’ and ‘then’. The result was a second-year module initially called ‘Forms of Engagement’ and later ‘Language on the Edge’. It had two axes: one intensely focused on the early modern; the other followed the connections into modern times. The early modern axis had two objectives. First, it sought to recapture the polyphony of the past, the plural and contested possibilities which had once been in play. Secondly, it posed Seamus Heaney’s great question, ‘How does the real get into the made up?’, and went in search of answers.[53] Country-house poetry, for example, provided rich material for reopening early modern debates. With Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, and Irish country-house poets like Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa in the mix, there was no escaping the politics of form or the role of genre in articulating ideologies of class, gender, property, and colonisation. Equally, the comparative dynamic didn’t just allow us to see ideology taking shape and moving into action; those contending visions of the future showed that the present, too, could have been otherwise (there is nothing either neutral or ontologically predetermined about the current regime of property, for example). When it comes to answering Heaney’s question, perhaps no other period illustrates quite so graphically the bleed between the real and the ‘made-up’. The breaking of the fourth wall in Henry V, for example, where the Chorus’s ‘lower but as loving likelihood’ which compares Henry returning in triumph to London to Essex returning from Ireland with ‘rebellion broached on his sword’, allows the climax of the Nine Years War to burst in.[54] The second axis was diachronic. It played with echoes and connections (not a genealogy of cause and effect) as a way of exploring how forces set in motion in the early modern period continue to haunt the present. More than just a reversed direction of travel connects Father Niger’s journey to ‘Albion the fair’, in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, with Marlow’s journey down a Thames heavy with Elizabethan reference (Drake, Chapman, Shakespeare, Marlow[e] himself) in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart helped us follow those connections in a way that was not simply dedicated to ‘furnishing the society of the victors with the encyclopedia of its prehistory’.[55] A similar diachronic journey, from Penshurst through Cookham and Appleton House to Yeats’ ‘Ancestral Houses’ and Walcott’s ‘Ruins of a Great House’, allowed us to see form and history intersect in a different way to a purely synchronous study of seventeenth-century country-house poetry: it allowed us to explore history forming and reforming and to realise that the present settlement is just as contestable as the past had proved to be.
The module set out to challenge both the sequestration of the historical (the ‘then’) from the political (the ‘now’) and its spatial corollary, the separation of English literature’s ‘here’ from the ‘there’ of its politico-imaginative interventions – Spenser’s Ireland, Jonson’s West Africa.[56] The real innovation of ‘Language on the Edge’, however, was that I developed it in partnership with the Michael Uwemedimo, an Honorary Fellow in King’s and director of the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP), which began as an NGO resisting evictions in Port Harcourt’s informal waterfront settlements.[57] CMAP uses arts activism to engage with questions of inequality, land ownership, violence, gender discrimination, and representation (in the sense of legal and political representation as well as image-making and stereotyping).[58] The grotesque inequalities and environmental calamity amid which CMAP operates are rooted in colonial and neocolonial logics of extraction that treat people and the environment alike as, simultaneously, raw material and waste products. The syncopated reading practice we developed, intercutting early modern texts with Uwemedimo’s documentaries from the frontline of a planet in peril, allowed us to explore questions of origin, recurrence, and continuity by analysing how structures of power and resistance operate rhetorically. We weren’t so much playing havoc with chronology – riding roughshod over the disciplinary end-stops of ‘early modernity’ – as recognising the complexity of a history that is still in play.
Almost half a million people live in informal settlements along the waterfront in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital. Their precarity, poverty, and lack of access to either state services, personal safety, or security of tenure makes them grimly representative of the cities-in-crisis of the Majority World.[59] CMAP emerged in response to demolitions unleashed by the Rivers State governor in 2009 but it quickly moved from documenting violence to imagining a model for an inclusive and sustainable urbanisation. The uniqueness of the project lies in its mobilisation of arts activism and strategies of representation as modes of both resistance and proposition. Uwemedimo, CMAP’s director, is a filmmaker who takes Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that ‘tracking shots are matters of morality’ seriously; he has written on the vexed relationship between the aesthetic and the real,[60] as well as using documentary footage, broadcast by Amnesty International, to record and resist forced evictions and demolitions. As Judith Butler notes in her reflections on political assembly, ‘sometimes the fight is for the platform itself’[61] and, in the absence of any public space in the slums, CMAP set about creating their version of a Habermasian public sphere through a pop-up cinema where hundreds of people can gather around an inflatable screen to watch world cinema – and footage of their own activism.
The ‘People Live Here’ campaign used portraits of waterfront residents, exhibited on billboards and public transport, to give a face to a community facing eviction. To give communities whose voices are not normally heard – and rarely listened to – a platform, CMAP built a community radio station, Chicoco FM, which provides the training, recording, and creative space for local writers and musicians to produce their own content. But the most obvious way to put Port Harcourt’s half a million disregarded slum dwellers on the map was, literally, to make that map. The only official maps of Port Harcourt are colonial-era maps produced by oil companies; the waterfront communities simply don’t exist on those maps, and settlements that appear only as blanks on a map can be bulldozed back into oblivion. If MACMORRIS seeks to put the overlooked actors of early modern Ireland on the map, CMAP is doing the same for twenty-first century communities. CMAP became the portal through which we entered ‘Language on the Edge’.
The opening lecture on the module began with a close reading of Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658). De Hooch keeps us in history’s backyard even as its almost through-views – those complex geometrical perspectives and multiple shuttered and occluded apertures – gesture to a world beyond the courtyard. But, ultimately, they keep to the busy colonial comings and goings of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie out of the picture. We had Heaney to remind us that ‘Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.’[62] We had Derek Mahon supplying, in his ‘Courtyards in Delft’, what de Hooch left out:
For the pale light of that provincial town
Will spread itself, like ink or oil,
Over the not yet accurate linen
Map of the world.[63]
And we had Michael Uwemedimo to help us fill in the gaps in that ‘map of the world’ by following the oil stain all the way to the Niger Delta and the price paid, in violence and evictions, by those at its source: https://www.cmapping.net/they-came-with-their-bulldozers-they-came-with-their-soldiers/ With that framing device in place, we studied the past on its own terms, conscious that it was a place of very real otherness. But if we avoided the anachronisms of Presentism, we never lost sight of the fact that the emergence of capitalism and early stirrings of globalisation made it an ongoing constituent of our present. So, we examined Book 5 of The Faerie Queene in terms of form – stanzaic, allegorical, generic – in its own terms. But in exploring the conjunction of aesthetics and violence, we were taking not just a deep plunge into the 1590s: we were exploring a conjunction still very much with us. The modern material framing each text allowed us to time-travel between past and present. Films and newspaper articles functioned like provocative secondary readings; they syncopated with the primary texts while never blurring the distinction between past and present.[64] So for example, the suggested viewing to accompany The Faerie Queene was Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Art of Killing. In reconstructing the MO of an anti-Communist death squad which, in mid-1960s’ Indonesia, performed their executions within the generic conventions of Hollywood movies, Oppenheimer raised questions about violence and the aesthetic which sent us back into Spenser’s text with renewed insight.[65]
During the second half of the semester, Uwemedimo would hold a workshop in King’s which explored, first, whether and, if so, how the initial CMAP framing had shaped our reading of early modern texts and, secondly, whether that analysis, in turn, could return the compliment by furnishing insights for slum dwellers in Port Harcourt. For the students, the takeaway from the first question was clear: the CMAP frame had made the disjunction between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, the ‘historical’ and the ‘political’, fall away. Questions of power, class, race, and gender relations, along with structures of neo/colonialist exploitation, extraction, and dehumanisation which, when encountered in early modern texts, can seem like abstractions, land very differently when they are seen to be still in play. As they grappled with concepts that straddled the early modern moment of writing and the twenty-first-century moment of reading, ‘theory’ suddenly offered not just a way of reading texts but of reading the world. Strategies of aesthetic analysis such as the ‘regime of visibility’[66] or ‘mapping the spatiality of politics and history’[67] turn out to be equally valuable as strategies for action. They were, after all, precisely what CMAP’s mapping and other representational projects were doing. The students saw metaphors by which to think being literalised into imperatives by which to act: they saw a community that really does hover on what Rancière calls ‘the threshold of the visible’ go out and actually ‘draft maps of the visible [to thereby] reconfigure the map of the sensible’.[68]
In terms of returning the compliment, it was crucial, if the module were to avoid reproducing the West’s extractive relationship with Africa, that CMAP didn’t simply occupy the position of supplying illustrative material for deliberations in a London classroom. King’s Cultural Institute ensured that the benefits would flow both ways by awarding Innovation Funding for a follow-up project called ‘Reimagining the City: Cultural Advocacy, Sustainable Urban Development in Port Harcourt’. The project opened with a knowledge-exchange workshop in King’s, where Africanists, urban geographers, planners, and public-space designers, urban ecologists, literature, media and performance-studies scholars from King’s shared ideas, via video, with community activists in Port Harcourt. In Port Harcourt, the Cultural Institute sponsored a series of community-mapping workshops, enabling a CMAP team to undertake a participatory survey of two informal waterfront settlements. It funded a script editor whose radio-writing workshops led to ‘Angala Community’, a 15-part serial dramatising a waterfront settlement mobilising itself to tackle a range of interlocking issues – economic, housing, and health insecurity, police and sexual violence, and environmental degradation. https://www.cmapping.net/communicating-and-campaigning In the final phase of the project, I went Port Harcourt to lead a series of writing workshops which used some of the materials from ‘Language on the Edge’ to explore whether the ‘political’ theories we studied in London would actually have any purchase in an informal settlement in the Delta. Would Rancière’s claim that ‘literary locutions produce effects in reality’ resonate here?[69] The answer that came back was a resounding ‘yes’, but it was a ‘yes’ that, simultaneously reversed and clarified the priorities of criticism in the Majority World. In Port Harcourt, there is no need to search for the politics behind the appearance: there, power operates with barefaced impunity and feels no need to mask its workings. There is no need to delve deeply to expose an underlying ideology when politics is a matter of life and death, and the legacy of past exploitation is anything but history.[70] Rather than reading literature to uncode the world as a prelude to a possible intervention in it, literary analysis and theoretical concepts provided the young CMAP trainees with a critical distance and an intellectual framework from which to mount a critique of present policies and practices, and for shaping resistance and alternatives. Both offered a way of moving from the particular to the abstract that, in widening the frame of reference, validated the community activists’ deployment of their own aesthetic resources, as musicians, radio producers, writers, photographers, to resist exploitation. The classroom in Chicoco is where literature and theory go live. One morning, the group treated Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to the most high-voltage close reading I’ve ever witnessed. They saw in the scattered feathers of the fallen boy not just their own marginalisation but a way to reframe the composition, to reposition themselves in relation to a narrative which ‘turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ and sails calmly on.[71] One student, Abiye Mac Dappa, came in the following day having written the theme song for the radio drama, ‘Angala Community’. ‘After that workshop, my songwriting has changed. I realised I could sing what I saw. I took a walk with a notebook and open eyes. That’s what the song became: a songful of what I walk past every day but had never really seen before.’ The strangeness of the past – and then, suddenly, its even stranger familiarity – is truly eye-opening.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
A. Shepherd, E. Ivins, E. Rignot. et al., 'Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018', Nature (2020) 579, 233-239 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1855-2
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford University Press, 1982), 8-9.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1995), 4.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1995), 4.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1995), 4.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1995), 4.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1995), 4.