Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T02:05:25.485Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Protestantism and Settler Identity

The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland

from Part VII - Northern Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

Nadim N. Rouhana
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Massachusetts
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London
Get access

Summary

This chapter addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.

Type
Chapter
Information
When Politics are Sacralized
Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism
, pp. 309 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abunimah, Ali. 2014. “Israeli Lawmaker’s Call for Genocide of Palestinians Gets Thousands of Facebook Likes.” Rights and Accountability (blog), The Electronic Intifada. July 7. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes.Google Scholar
Adalah, . 2017. “The Discriminatory Laws Database.” Special Reports. www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771.Google Scholar
Adalah, 2018. “Israeli Parliament Votes to Approve Nation-State Law That Enshrines Jewish Supremacy Over Palestinian Citizens.” Press Releases. www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9565.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Bell, Geoffrey. 1976. The Protestants of Ulster. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Bew, Paul, Gibbon, Peter, and Patterson, Henry. 2002. Northern Ireland, 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes. Rev. ed. London: Serif.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. 1990. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In The Nation and Narration, edited by Bhabha, Homi, 291322. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brewer, John D., and Higgins, Gareth I.. 1997. “Northern Ireland 1921–1998.” In Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: The Mote and the Beam, edited by Brewer, John D. and Higgins, Gareth I., 87134. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Byrne, Siobhan. 2009. “Women and the Transition from Conflict in Northern Ireland: Lessons for Peace-Building in Israel/Palestine.” Working Papers in British-Irish Studies, no. 89. Dublin: Institute for British-Irish Studies. http://irserver.ucd.ie/dspace/bitstream/10197/2416/1/89_byrne.pdf.Google Scholar
Canny, Nicholas. 1979. “The Permissive Frontier: Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550–1650.” In The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650, edited by Andrews, Kenneth R., Canny, Nicholas P., and Hair, P. E. H., 1744. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Carson, Ciaran. 1989. “Question Time.” In Belfast Confetti, 5763. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press.Google Scholar
Clayton, Pamela. 1998. “Religion, Ethnicity and Colonialism as Explanations of the Northern Irish Conflict.” In Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology and Colonialism, edited by Miller, David, 4054. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Cleary, Joe. 2002. Literature, Partition, and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Colmer, John, ed. 1976. Editor’s Introduction to On the Constitution of Church and State: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 10, xxxiiilxviii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Crozier, Maurna, ed. 1989. Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Institute for Irish Studies, Queen’s University.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Niall. 2013. “‘The Doctrine of Vicarious Punishment’: Space, Religion and the Belfast Troubles of 1920–22.” Journal of Historical Geography 40: 5266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deane, Seamus. 1986. “Civilians and Barbarians.” In Ireland’s Field Day, edited by Field Day Theatre Company, 3342. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Evelyn, Robin. 1978. Peace Keeping in a Democratic Society: The Lessons of Northern Ireland. London: C. Hurst.Google Scholar
Falk, Richard, and Tilley, Virginia. 2017. “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.” Palestine and the Israeli Occupation, no. 1. Report to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Beirut: United Nations. www.scribd.com/document/342202464/Israeli-Practices-towards-the-Palestinian-People-and-the-Question-of-Apartheid.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Feldman, Allen. 1989. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, John Wilson. 1988. “Culture and Colonisation: The View from the North.” The Irish Review 5: 1726.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, R. F. 1989. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, edited by UNESCO, 305–45. Paris: UNESCO.Google Scholar
Heaney, Seamus. 1975. “The Ministry of Fear.” In North, edited by Heaney, Seamus, 6365. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Hewitt, John. 1991. Collected Poems. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.Google Scholar
Hilal, Jamil. 2014. “What’s Stopping the 3rd Intifada?” Commentary. Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/whats-stopping-the-3rd-intifada/.Google Scholar
Holmes, Oliver. 2021. “Israel Is a Non-democratic Apartheid Regime.” The Guardian, January 11. www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/israel-is-a-non-democratic-apartheid-regime-says-rights-group.Google Scholar
Kelly, Paddy, and Vince, Harry, eds. 1996. “What Peace Process?” Special edition. Irish Reporter 21.Google Scholar
Kelly, Susan. 2007. “Ulster Must Be Defended! On the Uses of Cultural Translation in Northern Ireland’s Race War.” Translate. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/04/kelly-strands01en.html.Google Scholar
Kirkland, Richard. 2002. Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Google Scholar
Laffan, Michael. 1983. The Partition of Ireland, 1911–1925. Dundalk, Ireland: Dundalgan Press.Google Scholar
Lustick, Ian. 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Makdisi, Saree. 2008. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Makdisi, Saree 2018.“Apartheid, Apartheid, [].” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 2: 304–30.Google Scholar
McGarry, John, and Brendan O’Leary. 2006. “Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland’s Conflict, and Its Agreement: Part 1: What Consociationalists Can Learn from Northern Ireland.” Government and Opposition 41, no. 1: 43–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGovern, Mark. 2004. “‘A Besieged Outpost’: The Imagination of Empire and the Siege Myth, 1860–1900.” In Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800, edited by George Boyce, D. and Swift, Roger, 3253. Dublin: Four Courts Press.Google Scholar
Memmi, Albert. 1967. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Books.Google Scholar
Memmi, Albert 1990. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. Introduction by Liam O’Dowd. 3rd rev. ed. London: Earthscan Publications.Google Scholar
Murphy, Andrew. 1999. ““White Chimpanzees’: Encountering Ireland.” In But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism and Renaissance Literature, edited by Murphy, Andrew, 1132. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
O’Leary, Brendan. 2017. “‘Cold House’: The Unionist Counter-Revolution and the Invention of Northern Ireland.” In Atlas of the Irish Revolution, edited by Crowley, John, Drisceoil, Donal Ó, and Murphy, Mike, 818–27. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press.Google Scholar
Pappé, Ilan. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.Google Scholar
Rifkin, Mark. 2014. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Brian. 2001. “Negotiations: Religion, Landscape and the Postcolonial Moment in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney.” In Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, edited by Scott, Jamie S. and Simpson-Housley, Paul, 536. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. 2005. The Question of Zion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Todd, Jennifer. 1988. “The Limits of Britishness.” The Irish Review 5: 1116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomlinson, Mike. 1995. “Imprisoned Ireland.” In Western European Penal Systems: A Critical Anatomy, edited by Ruggiero, Vincenzo, Ryan, Mick, and Sim, Joe, 194227. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Traub, James. 2010. “Mixed Irish Blessings.” Foreign Policy, August 27. https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/08/27/mixed-irish-blessing/.Google Scholar
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2006. Israel and Settler Society. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
von Tangen Page, Michael. 1998. Prisons, Peace and Terrorism: Penal Policy and the Reduction of Political Violence in Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country, 1968–97. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Brian. 1992. “1641, 1689, 1690 and All That: The Unionist Sense of History.” The Irish Review 12: 61.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 2001. “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” American Historical Review 106, no. 3: 866905.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×