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Modernism/Modernity 9.4 (2002) 711-712



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Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago. Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth (eds). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 214. $69.95 (cloth).

The question of cultural identity is a tricky one, and the question of cultural marginality even trickier. To think through the trickiness it is best to refer to those who have addressed these questions with a passionate intensity for, literally, their lives have depended on it. Take, for example, Jean Améry's reflections on the meaning of "home." Home, for the Jewish exile, means security, full command of the "dialectics of knowledge and recognition, of trust and confidence." 1 Améry admits the possibility that what we today call globalisation could "expel the homeland and possibly the mother tongue and will let them exist peripherally as a subject of specialised research only" (ATML, 57)—subjects which are indeed addressed in the book reviewed. However, experience of the absolute marginality of the European Jew obliges him to believe one simple fact: "it is not good to have no home" (ATML, 61). Take, as a further example, Andre Gorz's meditations on identity. For Gorz, the intellectual, especially the marginalized intellectual, seeks to define a world in which being an outsider has been overcome. The defect of all existing identities, therefore, is "their very particularity and their historicity," what Gorz calls that "great flabby body" of nationality whose incarnation cannot be deduced by reason and in which everything is "permeated by the smell of wine, vodka or beer." 2 The intellectual's quest remains that of an identity "relieved of the contingency of existing and the 'metaphysical fault' of finitude." 3 What is sought is absolute abstraction. In short, Améry and Gorz expose the twin illusions of modernity: the illusion of cosmopolitanism in which the local is exchanged for the world and the illusion of provincialism in which the local sustains its authenticity against the world.

In their thoughtful introduction to this collection of essays, Norquay and Smyth note a similar "negotiation" between these illusions across the cultural margins of these islands. (Since they claim that the term "British" cannot now be used unproblematically, J. G. A. Pocock's expression "Atlantic archipelago" is adopted as an alternative.) In their words, the recognition by contemporary thought "that in a sense all national identities are 'constructed'" operates alongside "an awareness that culture nevertheless continues to be practised and, perhaps more significantly, understood, in terms of national affiliations" (6). Scepticism of cultural identities co-exists with the (selective) celebration of such identities. The contributors consider, from a number of angles, the respective merits of scepticism and celebration. As the editors admit, "this disparate range of interests and material" may create "tension" (6). It may also create incoherence, that curse of such books compiled from conference papers.

The essays are arranged into two sections. The first section attempts to theorize identities across the archipelago and comprises five essays exploring language, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and postcolonial theory. The second comprises five further essays on poetry, ethnicity and popular music, Welsh drama, Scottish art, and contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction. The aim is to move away from that model of political and cultural relations which assumes an English core and a Celtic periphery, and "to question the term 'marginal' itself, to hear voices talking 'across' borders and not only to or through an English centre" (2). That is an important critical enterprise. [End Page 711] However, if one is invited to read across borders then one would appreciate some greater reflection by the authors across their own individual chapters. Rarely is this the case. More importantly, if the enterprise is to initiate a new critical subject, then it requires some clearer mapping of terms by Norquay and Smyth (4).

Nor does "theory" link the essays because theory is mostly incantatory (ritualized references to Barthes, Bhabha, Bakhtin, Spivak, Said, Memmi, Deleuze, and Foucault) rather than explicatory (a systematic exposition of how postcolonial theory illuminates relationships within the...

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