"Alter-Nations" explores resistance to British colonial domination.
Mount Holyoke Professor Amy E. Martin with her boo, "Alter-Nations." In her new book, Amy E. Martin, associate English professor at Mount Holyoke College, looks at the way that Irish nationalists resisted British colonial domination of Ireland during the mid-19th century.
"Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland" examines the relationship between Irish anti-colonial nationalism and British imperial nationalism, Martin said.
The combining of the British and Irish states in 1800, in response to a rebellion in Ireland in 1798, was a “new form of colonialism,” said Martin, who teaches nineteenth century British and Irish literature, Irish studies, post-colonial theory and visual culture.
As one of the main arguments of the book, Martin suggests that anti-Irish racism was often used as a way for the British to “de-legitimate anti-colonial politics.”
The British response to Irish resistance to colonialism included declaring martial law, suspension of basic human rights, mass internment of those suspected of sympathizing with the Irish anti-colonial struggle and even executing members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a group that supported military insurrection in Ireland, she said.
Another primary argument in the book is that during that time in Irish history, in about 1865, “we see the modern conception of terrorism as we understand it today,” Martin said.
One of the reasons she wanted to engage in this project was to “have us understand the kind of contemporary war on terror in the early 21st century differently,” she said.
“A lot of contemporary writings on what’s happened post-9/11 suggest that the moment that we’re in…is very much an unusual 21st century phenomenon. And that’s not true. This has a much longer history and I think it’s important to understand that,” Martin said.
Before 1865 when someone used the word “terrorism” they were likely referring to the French Revolution and not the way people use the term today, she said.
“The word terrorism was used to describe the Irish rebellion and new forms of Irish resistance but Irish nationalists resisted that term,” Martin said. “They suggested the real terrorism was in fact what the British state was doing in Ireland.”
Irish nationalists countered the British actions in a number of ways, including through political and literary writings about Ireland for an Irish audience, Martin said.
“They wrote a series of kind of weird memoirs and history and prison narrative where they look back on the early years of Fenianism and try to write the history of the Irish nation in unusual forms, in part anticipating that Ireland will gain its independence soon,” she said.
“So they are writing in the face of what seems like impending decolonization.”
Martin said her interest in Irish studies developed in part from her own family’s Irish background with her mother’s family having emigrated to the U.S. in 1922 after Ireland divided into the British-run Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland, known as the partition of Ireland.
“I grew up hearing stories of Irish history of the early 20th century. That sort of fueled my own interest from my time as an undergraduate through graduate school in the story of colonialism in Ireland and also resistance to colonialism in Ireland,” she said.
The book is available on amazon.com