Subaltern Ulysses

Might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's "Ulysses" have anything in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the first post-colonial novel? Exploring the relation of "Ulysses" to the colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a post-colonial modernism - and so, traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a violent anti-colonial war. Duffy juxtaposes "Ulysses" with documents and photographs from the archives of both empire and insurgency, and with recent post-colonial literary texts, to analyze the political unconscious of subversive stategies, twists on class and gender that render patriarchal colonist culture unfamiliar.
"Ulysses", he argues, is actually a guerrilla text, and here he shows how the book pinpoints colonial regimes of surveillance, mocks imperial stereotypes of the "native", exposes nationalism and other chauvinistic ideologies of "imagined community" as throwbacks to the colonial ethos, and makes way for the post-colonial subject. A critical intervention in the massive "Joyce industry" founded on the rhetoric and aesthetics of high modernism, his book shows us Ulysses, as well as the origins of post-colonial textuality, in a startling new way.