Shinjini Chattopadhyay (Univ. of North Carolina): Critical cosmopolitanism and Irish identity in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

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 (1882–1941) and Joyce attempts to design an Irish identity that is undergirded by principles of cosmopolitanism. The philosophy of cosmopolitanism designates how an individual can develop flexible affiliations with multiple socio-cultural communities and ultimately imagine themself as a citizen of the world. But the process of creating concurrent affiliations becomes complex in the twentieth century in the context of ethno-linguistic nationalism, rising fascism, burgeoning imperialism, proliferating anticolonial nationalist movements, and mass migration. Joyce revises the erstwhile Stoic and Kantian models of cosmopolitanism to envision a modern postcolonial Irish identity that challenges imperialist principles of nation formation. In this presentation, I argue that Joyce models an Irish identity that is underpinned by principles of critical cosmopolitanism which rejects British colonialist stereotypes of framing Irish national identity as primitive and antimodern and also challenges Irish nationalist tropes which ironically reinstate colonialist logics by defining Irish identity in exclusionary autochthonous terms. I particularly turn to Finnegans Wake (1939) to examine how Joyce deconstructs colonialist epistemologies of nation formation to develop a cosmopolitan paradigm for a postcolonial Irish national identity. I investigate how within 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.

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