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JOYCE, RACE, AND EMPIRE by Vincent J. Cheng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxii + 329 pages. $59.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.
A movement is afoot to oust the traditional view of Joyce as an apolitical writer. Beginning in 1980 with Dominic Manganiello's Joyce's Politics, this movement has accelerated with recent books by James Fairhall, Robert Spoo, Enda Duffy, and Emer Nolan, among others. Vincent Cheng's incisive study of the politics of race and imperialism in Joyce's fiction makes a significant contribution to that revision. A writer constantly aware of the fact of dispossession, Cheng's Joyce is intensely concerned with ethnicity and structures of power. For Cheng, Joyce's works constitute a "dialogic locus for the many particular, historically based voices of the variant social discourses" of hegemony and resistance.
Cheng's second chapter, "Catching the conscience of a race," persuasively analyzes demeaning nineteenth-century English attitudes about the Irish "race." Cheng makes excellent use of Punch cartoons to demonstrate the simianization of "the Irishman" in English intellectual circles and popular culture. This persistent, pernicious dehumanization of the Irish created a set of binary essentialisms-inside/outside, civilization/barbarism, etc.-that labeled as "Irish" whatever was undesirable in English society. In other words, the "othering" of the Irish unconsciously registered the otherness within the English. Even more damaging was the inscription of these binarisms into the Irish consciousness, resulting in either the "shoneen" mentality (in which Irishfolk imitated English values and behaviors) or a xenophobic nationalism (a la the citizen in Ulysses) that viewed everything English as evil and everything "Celtic" as noble-a myth of racial purity almost as destructive as English racism. Shrewdly mining Joyce's early political essays for evidence, Cheng argues that Joyce transformed these derogatory descriptions of the Irish into "enabling bonds of shared ethnicity," and rejected essentialisms for a fluid, cosmopolitan understanding of race and nationality.
Turning to Du&liners, Cheng interprets its "religious, masculist and racist" tropes as figures for...