Nationality is a topic that rests heavily on the minds of Irish people, finding itself as perhaps the dominant subject of the island’s thought and expression since the 19th century. This thesis is an attempt to understand the ideological development of that expression, focusing mainly on music, in order to contextualise its contemporary form. Beginning with the mid19th century ballads of the Young Irelanders, an intellectual group whose work laid the foundations for the cultural nationalism of the late 19th century Gaelic Revival and the early 20th century independence movement, the thesis will look into certain symmetries, grounded in the construction of a Celtic Other, between Irish cultural nationalism and Anglo-French Orientalist imperialism, in order to provide a tentative intellectual origin story for the Catholic nationalism of the early Irish Free State (1922-37), and the absence of a strong leftist politics therein. This will provide the basis for an exploration of certain legacies of this Orientalist conception of Irish culture, in particular its symbolic role across a spectrum of traditional and popular music production following the South of Ireland’s modernisation in the 1950s and 60s. It will conclude with remarks about how a kind of auto-Orientalism may today describe a strategic mechanism used by artists and musicians to resist forces of late capitalist alienation by articulating an Otherness to American global hegemony.

Author: Seán Bean