This book was shortlisted for the ESSE Junior Scholars book award for Cultural Studies in English, 2012 Since its inception cinema has served as a powerful medium that both articulates and intervenes in visions of identity. The experiences of British colonialism in Ireland and India are marked by many commonalities, not least in terms of colonial and indigenous imaginings of the relationships between colony or former colony and imperial metropolis. Cinematic representations of Ireland and India display several parallels in their expressions and contestations of visions of Empire and national identity. This book offers a critical approach to the study of Ireland's colonial and postcolonial heritage through a comparative exploration of such filmic visions, yielding insights into the operations of colonial, nationalist and postcolonial discourse. Drawing on postcolonial and cultural theory and employing Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the author engages in close readings of a broad range of metropolitan and indigenous films spanning an approximately fifty-year period, exploring the complex relationships between cinema, colonialism, nationalism and postcolonialism and examining their role in the (re)construction of Irish and Indian identities.

This book engages with the socio-cultural imaginings of Gandhi in literature, history, visual and popular culture. It explores multiple iterations of his ideas, myths and philosophies, which have inspired the work of filmmakers, playwrights, cartoonists and artists for generations. Gandhi’s politics of non-violent resistance and satyagraha inspired various political leaders, activists and movements and has been a subject of rigorous scholarly enquiry and theoretical debates across the globe. Using diverse resources like novels, autobiographies, non-fictional writings, comic books, memes, cartoons and cinema, this book traces the pervasiveness of the idea of Gandhi which has been both idolized and lampooned. It explores his political ideas on themes such as modernity and secularism, environmentalism, abstinence, self-sacrifice and political freedom along with their diverse interpretations, caricatures, criticisms and appropriations to arrive at an understanding of history, culture and society. With contributions from scholars with diverse research interests, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers of political philosophy, cultural studies, literature, Gandhi and peace studies, political science and sociology.

This collection explores the multifarious manifestations of gender intrinsic to national ideologies, the use of gender in the construction and development of nation states, and the role of political, literary, and cinematographic discourses in cultural debates that define national and international borders in post-colonial societies. The selected essays focus primarily on Europe and Latin America and consider the implications of colonialism, dictatorship, and the transition to democracy on national identities as well as the deliberate use of gendered language and images in the development of discourses of hegemony, frequently used to underpin support for individual political regimes, or as a call to arms to defend national patrimony. (Series: Cultural Studies / Kulturwissenschaft / Estudios Culturales / Etudes Culturelles, Vol. 55) [Subject: Gender Studies, Politics, Sociology, Cultural Studies]

This collection examines the presence of minority communities and dissident voices in Ireland both historically and in a contemporary framework. Accordingly, the contributions explore different facets of what we term “Irish minority and dissident identities,” ranging from political agitators drowned out by mainstream narratives of nationhood, to identities differentiated from the majority in terms of ethnicity, religion, class and health; and sexual minorities that challenge heteronormative perspectives on marriage, contraception, abortion, and divorce. At a moment when transnational democracy and the rights of minorities seem to be at risk, a book of this nature seems more pressing than ever. In different ways, the essays gathered here remind us of the importance of ‘rethinking’ nationhood, by a process of denaturalisation of the supremacy of white heterosexual structures.

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger's Tales is an interdisciplinary collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, analysing the shifting representations of Irish men across a range of popular culture forms in the period of the Celtic Tiger and beyond.

This book examines theatre within the context of the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, with reference to a wide variety of plays, theatre productions and community engagements within and across communities. The author clarifies both the nature of the social and political vision of a number of major contemporary Northern Irish dramatists and the manner in which this vision is embodied in text and in performance. The book identifies and celebrates a tradition of playwrights and drama practitioners who, to this day, challenge and question all Northern Irish ideologies and propose alternative paths. The author's analysis of a selection of Northern Irish plays, written and produced over the course of the last thirty years or so, illustrates the great variety of approaches to ideology in Northern Irish drama, while revealing a common approach to staging the conflict and the peace process, with a distinct emphasis on utopian performatives and the possibility of positive change.

Through the concept of ‘Romantic nationalism’, this interdisciplinary global historical study investigates cultural initiatives in (British) India that aimed at establishing the nation as a moral community and which preceded or accompanied state-oriented political nationalism. Drawing on a vast array of sources, it discusses important Romantic nationalist traits, such as the relationship between language and identity, historicism, artistic revivalism and hero worship. Ultimately, this innovative book argues that because of the confrontation with European civilization and processes of modernization at large, cultivation of culture in British India was morally and spiritually more important to the making of the nation than in Europe.