Book contents
- The New Irish Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Irish Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Legacies
- Part Two Contemporary Conditions
- Chapter 6 The Global Contemporary: The Humanitarian Legacy in Irish Fiction
- Chapter 7 The Queer Contemporary: Time and Temporality in Queer Writing
- Chapter 8 The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique
- Chapter 9 The Maternal Contemporary: Pregnancy, Maternity, and Non-Maternity on the Irish Stage
- Chapter 10 The Aging Contemporary: Aging Families and Generational Connections in Irish Writing
- Part Three Forms and Practices
- Index
Chapter 6 - The Global Contemporary: The Humanitarian Legacy in Irish Fiction
from Part Two - Contemporary Conditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- The New Irish Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Irish Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Legacies
- Part Two Contemporary Conditions
- Chapter 6 The Global Contemporary: The Humanitarian Legacy in Irish Fiction
- Chapter 7 The Queer Contemporary: Time and Temporality in Queer Writing
- Chapter 8 The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique
- Chapter 9 The Maternal Contemporary: Pregnancy, Maternity, and Non-Maternity on the Irish Stage
- Chapter 10 The Aging Contemporary: Aging Families and Generational Connections in Irish Writing
- Part Three Forms and Practices
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines one of Ireland’s longest-lasting sources of engagement with the global South, namely the set of ethical dispositions and embedded practices that we traditionally call “humanitarian aid.” For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s sense of itself as both a postcolonial nation and an advanced Western democracy found expression in an intense preoccupation with humanitarian aid for newly independent African countries. Over the last two decades, this history of humanitarian action has become a prominent motif in Irish fiction, featuring centrally in fiction by Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and J. M. O’Neill. In the hands of these authors, humanitarianism has emerged as a vehicle for reflecting on Ireland’s place in the world – from the ethical attunement to suffering bodies that has dominated Irish representations of the global South to the political stakes involved in refracting such sentimentalized images through the language of anticolonial nationalism.
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- The New Irish Studies , pp. 113 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020