Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (review)

The streets, bridges and monuments of Dublin, many of which bear contested and politically volatile histories, are the subject of Yvonne Whelan's provocative new book, Emerging from the cultural geography movement, which examines landscapes as culturally produced spaces, and incorporating the theoretical work of Lefebvre and Foucault, Whelan analyzes Dublin's statuary—as well as the nomenclature of its streets and bridges—as symbols of the changing political landscape of the city. Whelan's study calls to mind Carl Sauer's The Morphology of Landscape (1925), Louis Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938) and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (1940), with its flaneuresque examination of "landscape as text, and the iconography of the landscape." Whelan emphasizes the distinctive ways in which Dublin, as a colonial and postcolonial city, embodies the spatial invention and reinvention of occupation and resistance. The study also claims a place among more recent cultural geography studies, such as The Iconography of Landscape (1988), produced by Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, as well as recent debates between Donald Mitchell, Peter Jackson, Denis Cosgrove, and James Duncan surrounding the relationships between culture and geography.

Reinventing Modern Dublin will prove of value to anyone interested in Irish political and social history, or to any reader interested in the cultural implications of constructed urban landscapes. Whelan offers a thorough overview of Dublin's political evolution. Using commemorative monuments and street nomenclature as the common thread, she introduces readers to Dublin as the Loyalist "second city" of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, then moves into its conflicted postcolonial nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whelan concludes with an analysis of twenty-first century Dublin, engaging it as a city characterized by an increasing acceptance of such emblems as a legitimate part of its political and social history.

Whelan's book also succeeds as a fascinating cultural study and as a history of Dublin. After developing her theoretical foundation in "Unraveling the Cultural Geographies of Landscape," Whelan's next section, "City of Empire, City of Resistance," examines the presence of British monarchic and military monuments in the city, detailing the complex parliamentary discussions that both sanctioned and resisted the decisions to erect monuments and their geographic placements. For example, Nelson's Pillar figures prominently as the most famous, recognizable and troubled emblem of Dublin. Erected in 1808 on what was then Sackville Street, the "towering pillar" was a tribute to Lord Nelson's victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Trafalgar. For 168 years it dominated the Dublin skyline, but as Ireland's move toward independence progressed, many began to question the presence of Nelson's Pillar and the dozens of monuments like it that commemorated the heroes of Great Britain.

As Ireland sought to define itself culturally and politically, visual emblems of Dublin's identity as a colonial city were increasingly troubled by spoken and written protest, or outright vandalism. Part three, "A Capital Once Again," discusses the de-commemoration that occurred as Dublin began to assert itself as an entity separate from the Empire. Whelan examines the reclaiming of cultural spaces through legislative or even destructive means. Detailed accounts of editorials printed in the Nation, the Irish Times, and Dublin University Magazine, as well as records procured from the Dublin City Archives, provide a comprehensive understanding of the dialogue surrounding statues, the names of streets and bridges, and the attempts to replace them with a distinctively Irish iconography. Some monuments, like the statue of Queen Victoria that had been erected outside of Leinster House, were discreetly sold to other colonial cities in Australia and Canada. Whelan includes pictures of the ungainly monument being dislodged and hoisted away from its location, while the citizenry of Dublin looks on. She also provides a list of damage to public monuments done between 1952 and 1962, which shows a striking amount of activity. In those ten years, twelve...