Imperium Hibernicum? Finnegans Wake and the Pacific

Abstract

Abstract:This essay argues that the linguistic and historical connections Joyce draws between Ireland and Great Britain’s other conquests tend to position Ireland at the center of a network, primus inter pares in a coalition of the subaltern. Looking especially closely at Joycean references to the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake, this essay asks how the text’s assimilation of Māori and other Indigenous people/languages with the Irish people and language instates a complexly defined Irishness as the ur-condition of all colonized people.