Angelus Novus

Hii! I know I haven’t updated anyone in a while so this post may address multiple completely unconnected topics! You have been warned.

Sunday was our ND Scavenger hunt around Dublin. My team came second out of 6 teams! We basically had to run around Dublin for 3 hours taking pictures of and collecting the most random things.

Some examples of the photos were:

“take a picture with a giraffe” - we took a pic with a giraffe puzzle. Points for creativity. “catch a shot of a person with a mullet” – we camera stalked a woman on O’Connell St.

“take a picture in a high visibility jacket (fluorescent yellow) – extra points for each worker in a vest who poses with you.” - DUBLIN CITY WORKERS RULE!

“A rabbi” – one group took a picture of Jesus. Hahaha

Some of the items were:

“A copy of Mein Kampf in German” – The Irish watch you very suspiciously if you ask.

“A two dollar bill” – Yeah we had it! Wohoo!

“A TESCO membership application” – we checked 2 of them. They had none L

Anyway…the point is. It was crazy but so so much fun and involved lots of asking random strangers to either take pictures of us or with us. My personal fav. was begging as many strangers as possible to get into a photo of the hags with the bags (5 points per stranger). The only way I can describe how fun it was is by stealing a phrase from the Irish so forgive me but…It was good craic.

Okay, new topic yeah?

FIRST DAY OF CLASSES!!!! Actually it was pretty stressful, not gonna lie. There were at least 5 separate incidents where I just wanted to sit somewhere and cry. BUT I made it through and I’m still alive and I’m actually pretty excited about them. They’ll be hard work (3000word papers!!!) but the topics and lecturers are all really interesting.

I’ll break from my norm of focusing on trivial things for a moment to just reflect on something that occurred to me in Prof. Whelan’s Irish history course today.

He said something to the effect of “the Gothic as a sensibility or a way of writing novels always revolves around unresolved tension between the past and present.” Now, add to that Wolfe Tone’s idea of turning away from “the Gorgon head of history” and focusing instead on the possibilities of the future. Finally, add Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the Angelus Novus as modernity forcing the angel of history to turn from the past and look to the future (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus).

Noticing a theme? Anyway, with all that going on, how could I not string those three concepts together and apply them to other fields?

The tension between past and present inherent in Gothic literature is the same tension that forms the very core of Post-Colonial literature and theory. So much of Po-Co Theory revolves around exploring how the experience of colonisation takes away the voice of the colonised and a sort of “writing back” to the colonisers. The problem is, or at least my problem with Po-Co Lit THEORY, is that all the focus is placed on the past instead of the future. It is no longer the case of “The Empire Writes Back,” Post-Colonial writers don’t expect the former colonisers to read their works. They write for themselves and their own people. If all we theorists do is focus on the past-present tension we completely disregard the future and, in so doing, we fail to prevent so much more. While the colonial experience is no longer the same it is still in existence (I don’t need to list examples of neo-colonialism and economic imperialism) and the academic community, turned to stone facing Tone’s “Gorgon head of history,” has failed completely because they have allowed these modern forms of colonisation to go unchecked.

I will not have my point here turned into petty arguments about examples of modern-colonisation and, as such, I have refrained from listing any examples but I’m sure you can all think up at least one example for yourself. Got one? Good.

NOW, ask yourself where the “intellectuals” were when they could have been speaking out against these things from the very start.

Chances are they were staring at a blackboard covered in words like “slavery” “indentured labourship” “encomienda” “independence” “revolution” and “Uhuru.”