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Towards a subaltern aesthetics : Reassessing Postcolonial Criticism for contemporary Northern Irish and Scottish Literatures

Borders and Boundaries: these terms appropriately describe a certain tendency prevailing in Irish and Scottish Studies which delineates and thus delimits their field in terms of national concerns. While postcolonial criticism shows the potential to adhere to national boundaries whilst embedding them in an international context, this paper aims to shift its relevance from questions about the nation to the sectional interests of subaltern concerns for a reading of contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literatures. A postcolonial approach for these cultures is problematic, as both Ireland and Scotland were themselves part of the colonisation process. Whereas Irish writing has been increasingly refigured in postcolonial terms, Scotland remains overlooked. Contemporary critical examinations of the crosscurrents between Scottish and Irish literatures emphasise, as Marilyn Reizbaum justifies her own cross-marginal approach, ‘their status as minority cultures’ with ‘comparable “colonial” histories with respect to England’ (Reizbaum, 1992, p.169). The predominance of issues of identity, which traverse through Irish and Scottish Studies respectively, seems to justify the preoccupancy with national paradigms. However, these, as this paper will argue, have proven the capacity to subsume identity markers such as class and gender. As postcolonialism has tended to uphold a resurgent nationalism which recuperates colonial structures, the method of the Subaltern Studies Group offers possibilities to trace affiliate concerns within the socio-cultural archipelago of my survey. Concerns such as class and gender permit the establishment of affiliations between writers that circumvent the naïve equation of nations as already agreed concepts.