Introduction: Othering the Animal, Othering the Nation

Abstract

From the shape-shifters of the sagas and the simian Paddies of the nineteenth century to the Celtic Tiger of recent years, nonhuman animals have figured powerfully in representations of Irishness. These portrayals tell us a great deal about the ways discourses of animality inform the human, and often, the subhuman. Indeed, the constructed proximity of the Irish to animals often justified the colonial use of force to subdue and contain them. Conversely, making the ideological connections between the oppression of women, the Irish, and animals, prominent nineteenth-century animal advocates from Ireland like Richard Martin of Galway worked for both human and animal liberatory practices. It’s clear that these fields have much to contribute to one another, with animal studies shedding light on the formation of ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, and Irish studies offering a complex example of colonial, postcolonial, and globalized uses of animal representation. Yet while an emphasis on animal studies is emerging in postcolonial studies with volumes like Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010) and Laura Wright’s Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (2010), and while ecocriticism has begun to be addressed in Irish studies with Tim Wenzell’s Emerald Green: an Eco-Critical Study of Irish Literature (2009) and Christine Cusick’s Out of the Earth: Eco-Critical Readings of Irish Texts (2010), only one volume so far has broached the interrelated animal question in Irish studies, Maureen O’Connor’s The Female and the Species: the Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010).