'Insubordinate irish' : travellers in the text / Micheál Ó hAodha.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ó hAodha, Mícheál, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Irish Travellers (Nomadic people).

Irish Travellers (Nomadic people)--Ireland--Social life and customs.

Manners and customs.

Ireland.

Physical Description:

x, 228 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, [2011]

Summary:

This book traces a number of common themes relating to the representation of Irish Travellers in Irish popular tradition and how these themes have impacted on Ireland's collective imagination. A particular focus of the book is on the exploration of the Traveller as 'Other', who is perceived as both inside and outside Ireland's collective ideation. Frequently constructed as a group whose cultural tenets are in a dichotomous opposition to that of the 'settled' community, this book demonstrates the ambivalence and complexity of the Irish Traveller 'Other' in the context of a European postcolonial country. Not only has the construction and representation of Travellers always been less stable and 'fixed' than previously supposed, but these images have been acted upon and changed by both the Traveller and non-Traveller communities as the situation has demanded. Drawing primarily on little-explored Irish language sources, this volume demonstrates the fluidity of what is often assumed as reified or 'fixed'. As evidenced in Irish-language cultural sources, the image of the Traveller is inextricably linked with the very concept of Irish identity itself. They are simultaneously the same and 'Other' and frequently function as exemplars of the hegemony of native Irish culture as set against colonial traditions.

This book is an important addition to the Irish Studies canon, in particular as relating to those exciting and unexplored terrains hitherto deemed 'marginal' - Traveller Studies, Romani Studies and Diaspora/Migration Studies to name but a few. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Irish Travellers and the nineteenth century 'Others' 1

2 The Traveller colonised 9

3 Irish Travellers and the bardic tradition 26

4 Theoretical perspectives and the Irish context 36

5 Mapping 'difference': Irish Travellers and the Questionnaire 50

6 Travellers as countercultural 80

7 Narrative and the Irish imaginary: Contested terrains 91

8 Anti-Traveller prejudice: The narrative within the Irish imaginary 103

9 The counter-tradition and symbolic inversion 152

10 The dichotomy of Self and Other: Some considerations 193.

Notes:

Includes bibliographic references and index.

ISBN:

0719083044

9780719083044

OCLC:

744523910