Commemorating the anonymous. British imperialist discourse in China and its backlash among the Irish

Sean Golden gave a talk on "Commemorating the anonymous. British imperialist discourse in China and its backlash among the Irish" at the  First Annual Conference of the  Irish Association for Asian Studies (IAAS) at Dublin City University (Ireland), 17-18/06/2016.

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Abstract

John Mitchel on his way to exile conversed with naval officers responsible for British conquests in China. In his translation of the 三字經 Sanzijing, Sir Herbert Giles, an English diplomat in China, glossed jiā as ‘a pig beneath a roof’, and remarked to his intended British readership that ‘our’ Irish neighbours would certainly understand this. His discourse demonstrates the effects of attempting to master the colonised ‘abroad’ on his attitudes toward the colonised ‘at home’. Anonymous Irish soldiers and police helped colonise the British Empire. Some later turned against colonisation and fought to liberate Ireland and other colonies. The major source of information about the Taiping movement in Nanjing in the mid-nineteenth century was an anonymous Irishman who became a mercenary. Roger Casement went from being an agent of imperialism to an agent of the Easter Rising; his reports on colonisation in Africa and in Latin America inspired Joseph Conrad to write Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. W.G. Sebald, starting from the connection between Casement and Conrad, portrayed in The Rings of Saturn the decadence that British imperialism produced at home. Postcolonial studies tend to concentrate on the experience of the colonised, but not on the impact of imperialism on the colonisers themselves, or on the underclasses created in the metropole by colonialism. Commemoration of the anonymous agents and victims of British imperialism in Asia and its backlash among the Irish is a challenge for Asian Studies in Ireland.

Keywords: postcolonialism, discourse analysis, Chinese Studies, Irish Studies



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