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Writing in the Wake of Empire

When Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake in 1922, the British Empire was already beginning to disintegrate. In India, Gandhi had begun the first of several satyagraha campaigns against British rule. In East Africa, more than 200 men and women were killed by police in Nairobi during a March, 1922 demonstration against the colonial government, sowing the seeds of a violent resistance movement. In Ireland, the establishment of the Irish Free State (1921) prepared for the independence of the 26 counties of the South. These cracks in the imperial edifice were to deepen during the 17 years in whichJoyce wrote the Wake in self-imposed exile from the first colony to break away from the modern British empire. Long considered either a purely formalist tour deforce or a curiosity for linguists, myth critics and source-hunters, Joyce's last work has recently begun to be read as being deeply involved in the political currents of the period between the wars, and of early twentieth century European history in general. [1] In particular, the historical reality of decolonization became one of the conditions for Joyce's last work, which makes decolonization into a discursive as well as an historical event. To read Joyce as a decolonized writer is to recognize that his historical perspective on the final stages of the imperial era coincides with his creation of a text which calls into question, formally and thematically, the structures of power from which writing is inherited. It is also to begin the process of rethinking Joyce's place in the context of European modernism, especially insofar as modernism has been held to represent a privileged aesthetic domain of an imperialist European society. For if one aspect of modernism was to resolve the contradictions