"Ivy Day": Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce's Race-Society Colonial Irish Jew

By introducing Albert Altman, an Irish-Jewish politician of Joyce's era, as an absent center of the Dubliners' story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," I show how the text's representations of post-Parnell Irish nationalism become more historically accurate, localized, and nuanced. Altman's position as a left-leaning liberal Dublin Corporation Councilor is illustrative of the precarious position of "the Jew" in colonialized countries during the era when race and race-societies transformed outposts of late Empire. Leopold Bloom's future politics appear to draw on Joyce's memories of Altman, and "Ivy Day" is the earliest piece in which Altman's career influenced Joyce's interest in labor as a promising route toward colonial independence. This was also the moment Joyce first recognized what Hannah Arendt would later examine as the Jewish third racial-space between colonized and colonizer, which she argued eventually became a germ of totalitarianism when racialized imperial politics "boomeranged" back to the Continent.