Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Related topics:
Blackness and Blackface
Irish History Transformed
Native and Foreign
Translation
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/joyce-race-and-empire/oclc/30893983&referer=brief_results
Cheng argues that Joyce writes as an Irish colonial subject under the oppressive English empire, and Joyce's works serve as a political commentary on the effects of imperialism in general. Within the Victorian era, Irishness was often classified within a similar category of derogatory racial markers including Orientalness and Jewishness. Joyce, argues Cheng, "reverses all these derogatory analogies to other races by using them in a positive, vital, and enabling manner," thereby creating a "solidarity of the marginalized and othered" (27). Within the nineteenth century, and within Joyce's writing, race becomes a term that is "interchangeable with the concepts of both nation and ethnicity," and when applied to the Irish, race carries an implicit binary between the colonial master England and the colonized Ireland (17). As colonial master, the English speak about and for Ireland, constructing an Us/Them binary based on the image of an unchanging, essentialized Irish ape that only serves to reify the dominant English master. Joyce, then, as a member of the subaltern, must work within the binary dialectic to overturn the cultural assumptions already in place.
Within Ulysses, Cheng points to the opening scene in "Telemachus" (U 1) to demonstrate that Joyce has an acute awareness of the "universalized essentialism of the Other" endowed to the Irish characters—Stephen and Mulligan—by their English master—Haines (Cheng 151). Whereas the opening episode establishes the Us/Them binary that permeates the rest of the novel, "Aeolus" (U 7) and "Cyclops" (U 12) address attributes of Irish nationality specifically. Bloom, who was born in Ireland, finds himself repeatedly stereotyped and othered throughout the novel, excluded from Irishness. Even though he shares both the cultural elevation of the Greeks and the Irish culture's orientalist and racist tendencies found in his Irish compatriots, Bloom's Jewish heritage overwhelms these as a constant source of scorn throughout the day. For Bloom, this scorn leads to the utopic vision of a new "Bloomusalem" in "Circe" (U 15), which is a redefinition of the Irish nation. Ulysses, argues Cheng, seeks to reimagine the acceptance of a "binary polarization" of nationality and race into a "multivalent, inter-nationalist perspective" that allows for a national unity within the many differences that comprise a nation.
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