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Book Review: Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature

League took place in London in 1887. It formed part of the making of an Irish cultural tradition in the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th century in Ireland and also by Irish cultural nationalists in London. This extra-territorial dimension of Irish dance is paralleled in the case of Riverdance, an interval act in the 1994 Eurovision song contest in Dublin, but watched across Europe, which was the foundational moment for the global phenomenon of Riverdance: the Show. Both examples reveal the diverse geographies of dance practices, as well as becoming associated with forms of collective identity that centre on or complicate an idea of a unitary Irish national culture. This includes local and regional dance traditions and affiliations in Ireland as well as diverse diasporic identifications with Ireland through dance. The book’s title, The Irish Dancing, aptly conveys the ways in which Barbara O’Connor avoids treating ‘Irish dance’ as a singular cultural form, given the book’s focus on how dance has and continues to be understood in relation to a national tradition, and the practices of regulation and contestation that surround what dance forms count as Irish and what sorts of dance Irish people should do, in Ireland and beyond. This is particularly vivid in the accounts of people’s enthusiasm for modern ballroom dancing in public dance halls in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, defying the strictures of the Gaelic League, Catholic church and state, epitomised by the League’s Anti-Jazz Campaign of 1934, to protect the nation’s cultural, moral and sexual purity by resisting the appeal of foreign and often racialized dances. Contrasts between the modern and traditional, urban and rural, commercial and authentic have run through debates about dance in Irish culture since the early 20th century. This attentiveness to the plurality of dance forms (and efforts to police that plurality) is also a feature of O’Connor’s treatment of the category ‘Irish’. This includes addressing Irish identities as immigrants and diasporic communities and how dance was a means of asserting, resisting and differentiating a collective diasporic identity and also the way in which class distinctions shaped the nature, meaning and practice of dance. The approach to gender is similarly subtle, in engaging not simply with the ways in which anxieties about the cultural purity of dance were so strongly linked to those surrounding feminine sexuality but also with women’s agency in asserting forms of modern femininity and negotiating sexual risk in the dance halls of the 1950s and practising preferred forms of gendered sociability in the set dancing revival of the 1990s. Despite the broad attentiveness to themes of embodiment and mobility, it is in the discussion of set dancing where a much more experiential rather than symbolic sense of dance comes through most strongly. Dancers talk of flow, rhythm, shared embodied knowledge and shared pleasures of dancing well. How much it is possible to address dance in this way depends, of course, on the sort of sources that are available to reach beyond recent memory and on the development of methodologies for getting at the embodied and practiced as well as material and semiotic dimensions of dance. With its historical breadth, spatial sensitivity and analytical depth, The Irish Dancing provides an inspiring foundation for future work that will take up this challenge in Irish studies and dance studies, as well as cultural geography.