Locating the transnational: representations and aesthetics of the city in contemporary European cinemas

This thesis focuses on two Western European cinematic cities, and two unique periods of their respective nations’ histories, in a bid to “locate” the transnational within a contemporary European milieu. I argue that my geo-cinematic case studies are emblematic of broader questions of the problematics of national identity in contemporary Europe in the face of cross-national flows yet, as a result of their representations as cities both “anchored” and “in flux”, they reject a European postnational identity. Through its engagement with cinematic Rome as the “Eternal City” of Europe and cinematic Dublin as the “newly Europeanised” city, my thesis traces how representations and aesthetics of the urban spaces of these two cities correspond with the tensions at the heart of the respective eras in question. Via the figures that inhabit it, navigate it and search for it, the city is utilised to highlight fixity and mobility, centrality and dislocation, in explicit and implicit ways, amid the rapidly changing landscape of its national terrain. It is through my analyses of the filmed places and sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural spaces of these capital cities under the rubric of the transnational that this research demonstrates the “pluralities” of the construct in its cinematic manifestations. It is also my aim to evaluate the concept of cinematic transnationalism when identifying and accounting for representations of a specific national, historical timeframe, when the momentousness of the changes that occur is not bound by the national, but rather is reflective of the influence of both domestic and external forces. To this end, my thesis draws attention to instances in which the nation is shown to persist and resist dilution, arguing that it is only against the backdrop and continuity of the nation (in its evershifting guises) that the transnational can be conceived in representative and aesthetic terms.

'Corkonian exceptionalism': identity, authenticity and the emotional politics of place in a small city's popular music scene

Drawing from ethnographic research on Cork city’s popular music scene, this article explores meanings of ‘authenticity’ as constructed through geographical, social and ideological referents. It unpacks local music producers’ position-takings within the local field of cultural production, and locates their narrative claims to authenticity with respect to the city’s strong sense of cultural identity. Their authenticating discourses are revealed as complex, often produced through building imagined communities of ‘us’ (in Cork) versus ‘them’ (in Dublin). The analysis indicates local actors’ deep sense of emotional attachment to place and to others within the music-making community, which impacts on their self-conception as creative labourers, sustains DIY, collaborative practices, and promotes a solidaristic ethos within the local music scene.

Claude McKay and the transnational novel

This thesis considers the three works of fiction of the Jamaican author Claude McKay (1889-1948) as a coherent transnational trilogy which dramatises the semi-autobiographical complexities of diasporic exile and return in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter One explores McKay’s urban North American novel, Home to Harlem (1928). I suggest that we need to ‘reworld’ conceptions of McKay’s writing in order to release him from his canonical confinement in the Harlem Renaissance. Querying the problematics of the city space, of sexuality and of race as they emerge in the novel, this chapter considers McKay’s percipient understanding of the need to reconfigure diasporic identity beyond the limits set by American nationalism. Chapter Two engages with McKay’s novel of portside Marseilles, Banjo (1929), and considers the homosocial interactions of the vagabond collective. A comparison of North America and France as supposed exemplars of individual liberty highlights the unsuitability of nationalistic prerogatives to an internally diverse black diaspora. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic construct provides a suggestive space in which to re-imagine the possibilities of affiliation in the port. The latter section of the chapter examines McKay’s particular influence on, and relationship, to the Négritude movement and Pan-African philosophies. Chapter Three focuses on McKay’s third novel, Banana Bottom (1933). I suggest here that the three novels comprise a coherent New World Trilogy comparable to Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite’s trilogy, The Arrivants. This chapter considers both the Caribbean and the transnational dimensions to McKay’s work.

Scientism and instrumentalism After the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash and The Wire

This thesis argues that through the prism of America’s Cold War, scientism has emerged as the metanarrative of the postnuclear age. The advent of the bomb brought about a new primacy for mechanical and hyperrational thinking in the corridors of power not just in terms of managing the bomb itself but diffusing this ideology throughout the culture in social sciences, economics and other such institutional systems. The human need to mitigate or ameliorate against the chaos of the universe lies at the heart of not just religious faith but in the desire for perfect control. Thus there has been a transference of power from religious faith to the apparent material power of science and technology and the terra firma these supposedly objective means supply. The Cold War, however was a highly ideologically charged opposition between the two superpowers, and the scientific methodology that sprang forth to manage the Cold War and the bomb, in the United States, was not an objective scientific system divorced from the paranoia and dogma but a system that assumed a radically fundamentalist idea of capitalism. This is apparent in the widespread diffusion of game theory throughout Western postindustrial institutions. The inquiry of the thesis thus examines the texts that engage and criticise American Cold War methodology, beginning with the nuclear moment, so to speak, and Dr Strangelove’s incisive satire of moral abdication to machine processes. Moving on chronologically, the thesis examines the diffusion of particular kinds of masculinity and sexuality in postnuclear culture in Crash and End Zone and finishing up its analysis with the ethnographic portrayal of a modern American city in The Wire. More than anything else, the thesis wishes to reveal to what extent this technocratic consciousness puts pressure on language and on binding narratives.

Between respectability and disgrace: schismogenesis and the regeneration of inequality, stigma and social exclusion in Limerick

The thesis examines cultural processes underpinning the emergence, institutionalisation and reproduction of class boundaries in Limerick city. The research aims to bring a new understanding to the contemporary context of the city’s urban regeneration programme. Acknowledging and recognising other contemporary studies of division and exclusion, the thesis creates a distinctive approach which focuses on uncovering the cultural roots of inequality, educational disadvantage, stigma and social exclusion and the dynamics of their social reproduction. Using Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis (1953), the thesis looks to the persistent, but fragmented culture of community and develops a heuristic ‘symbolic order of the city’. This is defined as “…a cultural structure, the meaning making aspect of hierarchy, the categorical structures of world understanding, the way Limerick people understand themselves, their local and larger world” (p. 37). This provides a very different departure point for exploring the basis for urban regeneration in Limerick (and everywhere). The central argument is that if we want to understand the present (multiple) crises in Limerick we need to understand the historical, anthropological and recursive processes underpinning ‘generalised patterns of rivalry and conflict’. In addition to exploring the historical roots of status and stigma in Limerick, the thesis explores the mythopoesis of persistent, recurrent narratives and labels that mark the boundaries of the city’s identities. The thesis examines the cultural and social function of ‘slagging’ as a vernacular and highly particularised form of ironic, ritualised and, often, ‘cruel’ medium of communication (often exclusion). This is combined with an etymology of the vocabulary of Limerick slang and its mythological base. By tracing the origins of many normalised patterns of Limerick speech ‘sayings’, which have long since forgotten their roots, the thesis demonstrates how they perform a significant contemporary function in maintaining and reinforcing symbolic mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. The thesis combines historical and archival data with biographical interviews, ethnographic data married to a deep historical hermeneutic analysis of this political community.

The Shawlies: A study of early neoliberal ‘gender-fication’. The Street Trading Act, 1926, modern gender-fication, and the implications for Cork’s women street traders

For centuries Cork’s Shawlies, working-class women, survived by trading on public streets. My study explores how the first Irish Free State government, and Cork’s local authority, limited the rights of poor women to earn by subsistence trading with The Street Trading Act, 1926. The government insisted this would regulate street trading. In practice it further marginalised the women economically and socially, containing them outside the privileged, commercial city centre. In Cork the legislation facilitated the gradual disappearance of the Shawlies amid entrenched social processes and relations, contingencies that allowed for the abuse of their rights in the service of amalgamated business interests. This study address the role of discourses in deepening this marginalisation. My theoretical framework is designed to demonstrate how a seemingly innocuous piece of legislation would, in practice, do this. I set out the concepts of ‘Thriving State’, ‘Prosperous State’, and state of ‘Best Intentions’ that uses gentrification to meet these goals. The existing knowledge on women in trade is then examined, highlighting the gaps in what is known about the Shawlies. Chapter 3 details the theory behind my genealogical method. The legislation, debate, and other data produced at the national level is then examined, before moving to the local data. Chapter 6 is devoted to the Shawlies, setting their stories in the larger context of the debates. An examination of studies of contemporary women street traders in poor nations follows, along with a brief history of the decline of street trading in New York city under gentrification. Points of convergence between that process and the one in Cork are identified, along with convergences between contemporary traders and the Shawlies. The conclusion sets out my methodological, theoretical and substantive discoveries, and comments on current nostalgic renderings of the Shawlies in Cork’s newly gentrified Corn Market Street.

Afterwords: reparative queer death and the contemporary Irish novel, 1960-2000

Given that an extant comprehensive study of homosexuality and the twentieth century Irish novel has yet to produced, this thesis is an attempt at rectifying such a gap in research by way of close textual analysis of writing from the latter half of the century—that is, from 1960-2000. Analysis of seven novels by four male authors – John Broderick, Desmond Hogan, Colm Tóibín and Keith Ridgway – lead to one overarching feature common to all four writers becoming clear: the homosexual or queer is always dying or already ‘dead’. ‘Dead’ is placed in inverted commas here as it is not only biological death that characterises the fate of gay men in the aforementioned literature. In the first instance, such men are also always already ‘dead’—that is, by light of their disenfranchisement as homosexual or queer, they are, in socialized terms, examples of the ‘living’ dead. Secondly, biological death neither fully obliterates the queer body nor its disruptive influence. Consequently, one of the overarching ways in which I read queer death in the late twentieth century Irish novel is through the prism of its reparative ‘afterw(a)ord’. On the one hand, such readings are temporally based (that is, reading from a point beyond the death of the protagonist - or their ‘afterward’); while, on the other hand, such readings are stylistically premised (that is, reading or interpreting the narrative itself as an ‘afterword’). The current project thus constitutes an original contribution to knowledge by establishing variant ways of reading the contemporary Irish novel from the point of view of the queer ‘unliving’. In assessing such heterogeneous aspects of contemporary queer death, the project a) contributes to recent, largely Anglo-American-based literary theoretical research on the queer and the eschatological, and b) provides a more contemporized literary base upon which future research can uncover a continuum of Irish queer writing in the twentieth century, one concerned with writing prior to 1960 and not limited to writing my men, in which death and same-sex desire are at parallel angles to one another.

Creating religious place in Ireland: Hindu public places of worship and the Indian sculpture park

This paper examines the creation of religious place. It argues that the designation of a place as “religious” is a subjective and creative act which is dependent upon the perception and past, or memory, of the viewer. The paper focuses specifically on the creation of public places of worship by Hindu groups in the Dublin city area of Ireland and on the varied perceptions of the Indian Sculpture Park in County Wicklow. The creation of public places of worship results in places classified as “religious” due to the intention of the creator, the terminology used and the types of activities that take place in the space. This is in contrast to places such as the Indian Sculpture Park in County Wicklow which was created as a secular space but which is viewed by some Hindus as an outdoor temple due to the presence of sculptures of the Hindu deity Ganesh. Other Hindus do not view the space as having any religious significance and so its religiosity is contested. This points to the fact that the creation of religious place is a creative act of interpretation which is dependent upon the perception and past of the viewer and which changes over time.