Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (review)

In 1943 Eamonn De Valera made a famous speech on Irish national radio, invoking the halcyon image of “comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.” Except that he didn’t. This is the most famous Irish speech that never happened. While De Valera may have said something like it, no one seems sure, and the speech is repeatedly invoked, only to be dismissed as fiction. Notoriously misquoted and apocryphal in its status, the speech has made its way into the vocabulary of the nation. Indeed, it works as the perfect metaphor for Ireland itself: contradictory, permanently contested, formed through rhetoric and fantasy.

Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh have borrowed the image of crossroads for the title of their volume on Irish culture and performance, aiming to establish some “new paths” for the field of Irish studies by crossing it with a range of performance studies paradigms. A study of Ireland offers a treasure trove of cultural objects, such as famine memorials, political murals, nationalist sporting events, pilgrimages, and riots, all of which are tackled in this volume. Indeed Anne Pulju’s excellent essay on De Valera’s political oath-taking makes his political performance a rich site of analysis. This volume functions as a “call to performance” for Irish Studies.

In fact, as Brady and Walsh point out, this call to performance articulates a desire to move beyond the literary fixation on the Great Irish Writer towards the investigation of the range of performances that circulate under the rubric of “Irishness.” Indeed, given that, globally, Irishness stands in for St. Patrick’s Day, Riverdance, green beer, and leprechauns, a focus on the oeuvre of Brian Friel or Samuel Beckett doesn’t seem an entirely adequate account of the complex performative dimensions of Irish popular culture, and the volume offers a remedy with essays on a range of Irish cultural forms and practices.

Switching the focus from a literary approach to a material or popular lens poses a set of critical challenges, however. After all, one of the strengths and limitations of a literary focus is its possession of a set of creation myths, which delineate and determine the field. The sometimes violent founding of both the Abbey Theatre and the nation, and latterly the Troubles in Northern Ireland, all form a “before and after” structure to which studies of Irish drama can be pinned. To move away from an emphasis on drama means that alternative histories necessarily begin to suggest themselves. Indeed, one of the sections of this volume is named “Tradition, Ritual and Play” and tradition is more or less overtly posited as an alternative to history. Essays such as Bernadette Sweeney’s on strawboys and wrenboys, Jack Santino’s on parades in Northern Ireland, Mike Wilson’s account of storytelling practice, and Scott Spencer’s excellent investigation of memory and technology in the performance of traditional Irish music, all negotiate chronologies that are alternatives to the official histories offered by the state. Equally, embodiment is frequently cited as an alternative to literary or “official” forms of knowledge. David Cregan’s essay on pilgrimage and Gabriella Calchi Novati’s study of the performance artist Amanda Coogan posit the body as a site of resistance that offers alternative or even radical formations of national identity. On the other hand, Matthew Causey’s investigation of the violent legislative performances of biopolitics, Charlotte McIvor’s analysis of the myth of Bridgie Cleary, and Fintan Walsh’s essay on beauty pageants all suggest that the body is itself imbricated within legislative and gendered norms that necessarily regulate the performance of the body and its appearance in the public domain.

Of course “official” versions of history or Irishness have always been contested, implicated as they are within political conflict. The challenge for this volume then, is to find ways to interrogate the role that performance plays in these narratives. One approach is to offer detailed readings of specific cultural performances. The most successful of these essays, such as Emily Mark...