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Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
, helps us to understand the taken-for-granted ways of being Catholic into which McGahern was socialised and how, due to long-term processes of change revolving around secularisation and sexualisation, these ways became out of sync with the new cosmopolitan society emerging in Dublin. Although there have been many important sociological and anthropological studies on family and community life in Ireland,5 no matter how rich 112 john mcgahern: authority and vision the hermeneutical understanding they provide, they never fully succeed in illuminating people
disposition. Harriet Granville, like other women, rarely mentioned her husband as a direct influence upon her conduct, which begs the question how much training went into the making of an ambassadress. The struggles of gentlewomen to construct public identities for themselves suggest that there were few attractive female role models for this process at home or abroad. Women who learned their trade alongside inexperienced husbands had a good deal of agency. Eleanor Eden and Harriet Granville forged their own paths through cosmopolitan society while Caroline Warren did not
‘Thatcherism’, or present a more progressive, tolerant image. A bitterly divided Conservative Party lost the 1997 General Election by a landslide to a reformed ‘New Labour’ that accepted much of Thatcherism while promising to heal the social divisions it had caused. New Labour’s position appealed to an electorate still coming to terms with the economic restructuring that had damaged communities in the 1980s, and with a younger generation more amenable to an increasingly cosmopolitan society and the European Union. Therefore, the Conservative Party at the end of the twentieth
from which James came, which has led to a certain paucity – or should I say misinterpretation – of his work. After all, is it for nothing that James spent the first 31 years of his life in Trinidad and Tobago? In Beyond a Boundary , his semi-biographical work of 1963, James wrote that he had mastered cricket and English literature virtually on his own. That is only half of the truth. Language and literature were vibrant aspects of the life of nineteenth-century Trinidad. This cosmopolitan society included a great diversity of people
. Unless citizens are to surrender all agency to the state, they must co-operate within their fluid communities and in their collective interest. Mutual engagement with problems at the grassroots level is the ultimate expression of demotic cosmopolitanism, a goal-focused approach to everyday belonging. John Thompson emphasises the contrast between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism: There are profound differences between a multicultural and a cosmopolitan society. For a start, multiculturalism is
outlook in both empirical and theoretical work, launching speculation and debate about the scope and significance of an emergent cosmopolitan society, supported by universalist principles. However, when Hannah Arendt in 1948 adopted the now famous phrase ‘the right to have rights’, she was reflecting on the problematic relationship between citizenship and human rights, especially as illuminated by the position of transnational migrants and asylum seekers. Writing around the time of the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but looking back to the
cosmopolitan society I am afraid’. 68 And that it was believed by the authorities that the very ‘mixed nationality’ character of Egypt would deter the development of patriotic resolve among troops. 69 Thus, it was all that much more important for leaders of the community to fly the flag, deploy marching bands, and conduct nationalistic balls and parties. In short, stern measures were required to
intermarriage was encouraged by the company, in the interests of building up the army. The Anglo-Indians were thus a vital bulwark of the growth of company power in the early stages of territorial expansion. Moreover, Warren Hastings as Governor-General (1774-85) headed essentially a cosmopolitan society in which reciprocal entertainments between Indians and the British were common. In the 1790s, however, these
interventions which forged its vibrant cosmopolitan society. The School History also reused the ‘our island story’ phrase, ‘our’ here suggesting a shared history between the British colonialists and the various peoples of Zanzibar. In the context of the Wembley Exhibition, however, the term can be interpreted as a claim of ownership by the imperial centre. This chapter explores the significance of these