Editorial: Postcolonial Connolly

Morris, Catherine and Thompson, Spurgeon (2008) Editorial: Postcolonial Connolly. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 10 (1). ISSN 1469-929X

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Abstract

The people must be rallied with a call

The call requires a voice

— ‘The Non-Stop Connolly Show’ (D'Arcy and Arden Citation1977)

In her 1929 autobiography, the novelist and Irish language activist Lily MacManus recorded how she had been educated in Southern Ireland during the late nineteenth century to believe that England was ‘the greatest, the most magnificent, the freest, the most beneficent Empire in the world’ (MacManus Citation1929: 1). The country of her birth, in contrast, was demonized throughout her upbringing as a primitive and savage land:
I believed Ireland had no history but a history of disgraceful tribal squabbles of half-naked people who had to be held down by a civilised conqueror, and who, whenever I caught a glimpse of them in the histories of England, were turbulent and barbarous. There was nothing to feed my imagination in their uncivilized lives, neither romance nor heroic deeds. They were always rebels. (ibid.: 2)

Like James Connolly, MacManus taught herself an alternative, ‘distinct history’ when she began to study ‘everything that related to Ireland’ in Dublin's National Library. The anticolonial narratives that MacManus discovered in histories written by Irish authors inspired what she described as a political epiphany that marked a sea change in her allegiances. MacManus regarded the British and Irish flags as signifiers of two competing and mutually exclusive histories that were vying for legitimacy and dominance in Ireland. She used these emblems of identity and belonging to describe the symbolic moment of her national awakening: ‘I came to the point where the two Flags stood, and then without a pause, without hesitation, I turned to that of Ireland’ (ibid.: 3–4).
The coexistence of the British and Irish flags as described by MacManus certainly reflected the divided consciousness of many in Ireland. But for Marxists like James Connolly there were not two flags but three: the British, the Irish, and the International. The context of Irish insurrection, however, charged the Irish flag with a powerful cathexis. The Abbey Theatre actor and Irish Citizen Army General, Séan Connolly, raised an Irish flag on the stage of Liberty Hall a week before the insurrection during the final act of James Connolly's play Under Which Flag (published for the first time in this journal). In Staging the Rising: 1916 as Theatre, James Moran records that ‘while Séan Connolly was attempting to unfurl the very same tricolour during the Rising he was spotted by a British sniper and shot dead’(Moran Citation2006: 18). Flags remained a central motif for James Connolly throughout his career as a socialist agitator because he understood Ireland's anticolonial struggle in the broader context of the intercontinental workers’ fight for social democracy. The competing allegiances of the red flag of international revolution and the green flag of Irish liberation symbolized the tensions in Connolly's work. The unique perspective of his national and socialist praxis would be put to the ultimate test in 1916.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Catherine Morris
Date Deposited:	24 Apr 2023 10:47
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2024 12:26
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3885

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