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Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (review)

The streets, bridges and monuments of Dublin, many of which bear contested and politically volatile histories, are the subject of Yvonne Whelan’s provocative new book, Emerging from the cultural geography movement, which examines landscapes as culturally produced spaces, and incorporating the theoretical work of Lefebvre and Foucault, Whelan analyzes Dublin’s statuary—as well as the nomenclature of its streets and bridges—as symbols of the changing political landscape of the city. Whelan’s study calls to mind Carl Sauer’s The Morphology of Landscape (), Louis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities () and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (), with its flaneuresque examination of “landscape as text, and the iconography of the landscape.” Whelan emphasizes the distinctive ways in which Dublin, as a colonial and postcolonial city, embodies the spatial invention and reinvention of occupation and resistance. The study also claims a place among more recent cultural geography studies, such as The Iconography of Landscape (), produced by Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, as well as recent debates between Donald Mitchell, Peter Jackson, Denis Cosgrove, and James Duncan surrounding the relationships between culture and geography. Reinventing Modern Dublin will prove of value to anyone interested in Irish political and social history, or to any reader interested in the cultural implications of constructed urban landscapes. Whelan offers a thorough overview of Dublin’s political evolution. Using commemorative monuments and street nomenclature as the common thread, she introduces readers to Dublin as the Loyalist “second city” of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, then moves into its conflicted postcolonial nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whelan concludes with an analysis of twenty-first century Dublin, engaging it as a city characterized by an increasing acceptance of such emblems as a legitimate part of its political and social history. Whelan’s book also succeeds as a fascinating cultural study and as a history of Dublin. After developing her theoretical foundation in “Unraveling the Cultural Geographies of Landscape,” Whelan’s next section, “City of Empire, City of Resistance,” examines the presence of British monarchic and military monuments in the city, detailing the complex parliamentary discussions that both sanctioned and resisted the decisions to erect monuments and their geographic placements. For example, Nelson’s Pillar figures prominently as the most famous, recognizable and troubled emblem of Dublin. Erected Léirmheasanna: Reviews