{"id":81,"date":"2020-02-07T14:04:17","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T18:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/?p=81"},"modified":"2020-02-24T19:24:23","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T23:24:23","slug":"belonging-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/2020\/02\/07\/belonging-and-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Belonging and Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

The point that resonated with me most this week was when we discussed Gulliver\u2019s placelessness and how that simultaneously allowed him to be placed in or participate in the Circum-Atlantic.\u00a0 <\/span>Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/span><\/i> makes sense in the Irish context, particularly with the lens of colonialism.\u00a0 In the past, when analysing this book, my class placed a lot of emphasis on text itself within the narrative and the relevance of language to the Irish, whose cultural identity is largely predicated on the preservation of their language.\u00a0 What we didn\u2019t consider as fully was Swift\u2019s identity as Anglo-Irish, rather than monolithically Irish. This nuance of his identity, and the way we conceptualized it in class, makes some of the more complicated or seemingly contradictory elements of Gulliver work for the text. Is he truly the colonizer or the colonized, victimized or victim or rather is he some placeless in-between? These questions of identity drive his constant movement within the text and his inability to reconcile whether he is superior or subservient to the peoples he interacts with.\u00a0 Thinking about our readings last week, I wonder if placelessness isn\u2019t also a facet of Irish-American identity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was also amused by our discussion in class of production and productivity being good for society. I\u2019m equally as uncomfortable as the rest of us seemed to be with the idea of a wholly unproductive society like that of the Houynhmns, sitting in seeming judgement of all others while doing nothing worthwhile themselves \u2014 I don\u2019t think idleness leads to bliss, particularly when that idleness isn\u2019t a break from productive tasks.\u00a0 Our discomfort with an unproductive society, however, demonstrates the lingering power of the ideas Swift was activating and working with. We can\u2019t conceptualize of a different societal structure because our structure and judgement of what is societally good is so formed by the universal progress ideologies of the Enlightenment. For many in that period, the industrial revolution and the changes it brought were threatening to established ways of life, to folk cultures, and to those who didn\u2019t have access to the intellectual elite.\u00a0 Swift\u2019s concern about burgeoning modernity and the dangers of a society built on progress for the sake of progress are represented in the Houynhmns’ culture and our inherent discomfort at Gulliver\u2019s adherence to it. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The point that resonated with me most this week was when we discussed Gulliver\u2019s placelessness and how that simultaneously allowed him to be placed in or participate in the Circum-Atlantic.\u00a0 Gulliver\u2019s Travels makes sense in the Irish context, particularly with the lens of colonialism.\u00a0 In the past, when analysing this book, my class placed a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Belonging and Society”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3672,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[413938],"tags":[44620,8878,407004],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-placelessness","tag-enlightenment","tag-identity","tag-modernization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3672"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}