Modern Irish history has ceaselessly grappled with questions of Irish national identity, nation formation, and national belonging. The question, ‘what is a nation?’ consistently haunts the works of James Joyce, who attempts to design an Irish identity undergirded by principles of cosmopolitanism. This presentation argues that Joyce models an Irish identity underpinned by principles of critical cosmopolitanism rejecting British colonialist stereotypes of framing Irish national identity as primitive and antimodern, and challenges Irish nationalist tropes which ironically reinstate colonialist logics by defining Irish identity in exclusionary autochthonous terms. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce deconstructs colonialist epistemologies of nation formation to develop a cosmopolitan paradigm for a postcolonial Irish national identity. In this modern cosmopolitan framework cultural and colonial differences are not dissipated into fictions of unity, but Joyce envisions a postcolonial Irish identity that is inherently heterogenous and is marked by intrinsic asymmetries and aporias which makes it ever evolving.

 Dr Shinjini Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor at the Dept of English and Comparative Literature in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed her PhD at Notre Dame, and works on British & Irish modernism. Her monograph-in-progress, Plurabilities of the City, investigates the construction of metropolitan cosmopolitanism in modernist novels. She is the author of a number of book chapters and journal articles. Most recently, she edited a special cluster on cosmopolitanism for CUSP: Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Century Cultures, and served as a guest editor for a special issue on ‘James Joyce and Networks of Transnationality’ for Joyce Studies Annual. She serves on the board of trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation.

This seminar will be available in hybrid form, in-person and online via Teams. Please indicate your preference. All welcome.