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cling to the idea of the legitimacy of the imperial union and colonial settle¬
ment of Ulster.”*! This tangible sense of unresolved historical narrative is also
noted by Richard Kirkland in his observation of the pattern of the exhibition
in the Ulster Museum. At the time of his enquiry, the institution identified
as the “national museum for Northern Ireland”?? would not “stray beyond the
post-partition development of Ulster”,?® which he reads as a fragmented nar¬
rative and an expression of discontinuity, challenging historical totality, for
which condition he employs the term “interregnum’”.** The implications of the
term involve other elements beyond the principally suggested temporal ones,
with a strong consequence for the sense of identity and the resulting cultural
narratives that are eventually characterised by “ellipses, gaps, discontinuities
and silences”.*° Such an approach also facilitates the acknowledgement of the
simultaneous presence of different traditions and plural narratives, endowing
the concept of place with a more dynamic set of features and potentials in its
relation to the matter of identity.
The (post)colonial situation of Ireland, however, poses a number of ques¬
tions due to the particular position of Ireland relative to other former col¬
onies. While the postcolonial approach to modern Ireland is frequently em¬
ployed in critical discourse, it does not happen without questioning it at the
same time, therefore it is important to point out some decisive elements that
set the country apart in terms of its colonial experience. As Lloyd sums up, Ire¬
land is “geographically of Western Europe though marginal to it and histori¬
cally of the decolonising world, increasingly assimilated to that Europe, while
in part still subject to a dissimulated colonialism.”*’ Though his list does not
include the explicit reference to a shared western Christian cultural founda¬
tion and some clearly identifiable ethnic relations, the association of Ireland
with Europe as a concept implies these elements as well, which eventually
represent a significant set of differences compared to colonies located on other
continents. This atypicality of the Irish (post)colonial experience requires
caution when applying concepts regularly used in postcolonial discourse, even
in the case of the term “hybridity” which appears to have more relevance than
others to describe certain aspects of contemporary Irish culture and does
even more so in the context of Northern Ireland. The most intriguing conse¬
quence, however, of this distinct colonial heritage is discernible in connection
with the concept of place: “[w]ith peculiar intensity, Irish culture plays out the
31 Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, 46
32 Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London:
Longman, 1996), 1
33 Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 2
34 cf. Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 7
35 Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 11
36 cf. Sarah Fulford, Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 18-22
37 David Lloyd, Anomalous States. Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press,
1993), 2