Suchergebnisse

In bulletins from Britain and Ireland since 1969, Glengormley, like dozens of other place-names in Northern Ireland, has come to signify a site where more violence has occurred: another shooting, bombing, riot. In the context of a politics so grim that it never allows cultural productions the luxury of mere introspection, Mahon's surreal figure of earnest and extravagantly self-tormented intellectuals becomes a vivid image of victims of Irish political violence. Given that the "Troubles" (as the violence is known) in the North of Ireland have lasted for a quarter of a century, and that they are the current manifestation of a history of violent opposition to colonial oppression in Ireland, Irish writing, more than any other from Western Europe, seems to support Fredric Jameson's controversial opinion that postcolonial literatures, whatever else their effect, also function in the final instance as national allegories. In his brilliant and deeply committed discussions of a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and genres, David Lloyd implicitly accepts the notion that Irish literature works as national allegory, but he does not leave unquestioned the terms upon which this relation between text and nation is negotiated. In readings of texts ranging from Irish nineteenth-century street ballads to Samuel Beckett's first work in French, he meticulously delineates the overlapping of the political and the poetic in Irish writing. He wants his readers to be clear about whose interests are being served and whose are being ignored when the political realities underlying Irish literary production are obscured. For Lloyd, Irish political reality is the result of the island's, or at least the Republic of Ireland's, postcoloniality; one claim implicit in the title of the collection is that while this postcoloniality, given the particular divisions marking Irish politics and culture, is anomalous, from the viewpoint of the diasporan intellectual this very anomaly can be a useful challenge to accepted models of postcolonial history. Lloyd's essays contribute to, and critique, debates in Ireland on viable versions of postcolonial identity; they do so by raising issues that reach beyond the matter of Ireland. In particular they encourage diasporan intellectuals to examine more rigorously the nation-state's function as clearinghouse of ideologies of community.

Maintains that racism in GB was viewed as either psychological misunderstanding or culture clash until a 1999 report found widespread institutional racism. The history of race theorizing is traced, noting a post-1972 shift in research from black people to white institutions. Examination of the Race Relations Act of 1976, which outlawed indirect discrimination in employment, education, housing, & provision of goods, contends that it was not enough to stem growing discontent among blacks or prevent the 1981 Brixton riot. It is argued that the report of a judicial inquiry whitewashed the rioting, set back analyses of racism, & led to a series of ineffectual antiracist programs. The effects of the 1999 report are discussed. It is maintained that the concept of institutionalized racism is being diluted & ways of dealing with it are being undermined, primarily because of an unwillingness to address state racism that determines race relations in society through immigration/asylum laws & the administration of public services. 37 References. J. Lindroth

[First paragraph]Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. DANIEL MILLER. Oxford: Berg, 1997. x + 357 pp. (Cloth £39.00, Paper £17.99)Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. RHODA E. REDDOCK. London: Zed, 1994. vi + 346 pp. (Cloth £39.95, Paper £15.95)Despite the underdeveloped state of the scholarship on its admittedly short sugar plantation slavery period, we now have a corpus of studies on various aspects of capitalism in Trinidad - from its historical advent (Sebastien 1978) to its twentieth-century manifestation in the petroleum sector (Seers 1964; Sandoval 1983), and from the ethnic structure of labor markets (Camejo 1971; Harewood 1971) and the role of capitalism in racial/ethnic inequality (Henry 1993; Coppin & Olsen 1998) to the way ethnicity affects business, big (Button 1981; Parris 1985; Centre for Ethnic Studies 1993) and small (Ryan & Barclay 1992; Griffith 1997), and the way ethnicity and gender are used in class recruitment (Yelvington 1995). There are also a number of fine working-class histories (e.g., Rennie 1973; Ramdin 1982; Basdeo 1983) and important works on the labor riots and strikes and the nature of the colonial state during the crises of the 1930s (e.g., Thomas 1987; Singh 1994). The two books under review here complement the works mentioned above, and they complement each other as well: Reddock's deals with the way capitalism up to the mid-century was buttressed by colonial politics, and explores how this formation engendered certain kinds of political responses, while Miller approaches capitalism through the assumption that fundamental changes in the post-Oil Boom period (ca. 1973-80) brought about considerable autonomy between production and consumption that can and should now be read through an analysis of the cultural circulation of images and commodities in the society. These books are both noteworthy because they engage in explicit theorizing on what capitalism was and is, and what it did and does.