Irish Studies: Field Day has been many things: a theatre company (1980-91), pamphlets (1983 -1986), a three-volume anthology of Irish writing (1990), a two-volume annex for women 11 years later, a series of 15 Cork University Press monographs (1995-2005).
Now Field Day's "interventions" into the partitioned history of the island have taken yet another form, a scholarly annual.
At first sight, the production values of the Field Day Review take one's breath away. Then the top-dollar representations of pennilessness - heartrending double-page spreads of unemployed people in Derry, and the hungry faces of Roscommon voters raising their torches to de Valera in the 1940s - make one queasy looking into the hole between medium and message.
The Field Day Review is backed by Donald Keough, a marketing whiz with unmatched "people skills" who was CEO of Coca-Cola from 1981 to 1993. As Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Notre Dame University, he established the Keough Chair which Deane holds, funded the Keough school of Irish Studies there (now up to 14 faculty positions), and refurbished Newman House on Stephen's Green as a Dublin base for the Notre Dame summer school. If he has his name on something, he wants it to be the best and to further his values. What those values are in this case is the question that occurs to a reader.
The core of the volume is a set of lectures given to graduate students of the Notre Dame summer school by Philip Pettit, David Lloyd, Luke Gibbons and Benedict Anderson. These redefine republicanism in a post-Good Friday Agreement, pre-arms surrender period. The essay by Pettit, professor of politics at Princeton University, says that in the 18th century, Irish republicanism like French republicanism valued freedom from mastery and like American republicanism valued a constitution, but unlike either, Wolfe Tone's republicanism was not hostile to Catholicism or religion of any kind.
The final article by Brendan O'Leary, advisor on power-sharing systems for the Good Friday agreement, argues that the IRA, "Old", "Official", and "Provisional", has remained loyal to the constitution of 1922. It has not characteristically (here the text is decorated with coloured graphs) murdered civilians, nor robbed banks to make its members rich, nor acted like a criminal gang dealing in contraband and protection rackets. It is a rational organisation that safeguarded the honour of the republic, protected the people, and served the (shadow) government, Sinn Féin. Finally the IRA succeeded. It forced the creation of a process whereby all its remaining objectives can be achieved, the Good Friday agreement. Mission accomplished, the IRA can retire in honour, while republicanism will go on. In a postscript concerning the Belfast bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney, O'Leary says the shaming of the IRA that these events unleashed (from the likes of Michael McDowell) postpone resolution, but will not prevent it.
In between these two edgy, lucid articles, other contributions are more theoretically concerned with republicanism. In David Lloyd's gorgeously illustrated Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett, the blurring between figure and background in the late paintings is, we are told, a coded expression by Jack Yeats of his disappointment with the Free State: both fail in representation. Luke Gibbons gives a darting tour d'horizon of Joyce scholarship on concepts of time before concluding that a flash-cut paragraph in the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter registers "psychic dislocation under colonial modernity". Mary Burgess, Keough school professor of history, makes a case - founded on an ad hominem study of E Estyn Evans - that historical revisionism is a movement that derives from a desire to defend the border.
The authors, often inspired by the "Critical Theorists" Horkheimer and Adorno, are adept at discovering, in places they were not found before, the evils of commodification, hegemonic elites, globalisation, and the cooptation of personal freedoms; it is a wonder they have not found them nearer home. The Keough/Field Day enterprise has skilfully used brand identification and advertising; its capital has called the tune in Irish Studies; it has given a global reach and a specific new meaning to Irish Studies, which is different from the collective scholarship on life on this island by people in all disciplines.
As an academic department unto itself, Irish Studies has evolved in the USA since the 1990s along the lines of Africana Studies, Women's Studies, and Latin American Studies of the 1980s, as a multi-disciplinary recognition of the demands of a minority in the USA; and each developed its own discourses, often devolved from French or German theorists popular in the 1960s and 1970s, like Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, and Horkheimer. In general, the institutionalisation of minority studies has been accompanied by a partial improvement in the lot of those minorities, and the sequestration of their most intellectually talented representatives. This was achieved not by silencing but by honouring them. They go on theorizing about the evils of men, the white race, Europeans, the British Empire, or capitalism, and rightly biting the hand that feeds them, but it is doubtful that the blatant beast takes notice of their teeth.
If there comes a time for a history of a united Ireland to be written, the work of Seamus Deane will plausibly be part of the story. The most fascinating essay in the collection is his brotherly tribute to Edward Said, the great Palestinian demystifier of the imperialism of western cultures. Deane, however, believes that Said made one intellectual error. During the dispute between Foucault and Derrida in the 1960s, Said thought Foucault right and Derrida wrong, as the latter depoliticised writing by making everything undecidable. That, however, was no mistake. Prior to coming upon Foucault, Said had cultivated his mind in the traditions of the Columbia University English Department, the Partisan Review set, mostly Jewish, liberal, democratic, and socialist, such as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv and Irving Howe. Like them he loved great literature, believed in truth, and wished to be understood, as that was the way an intellectual played a part in a democracy. Said recoiled from the relativism, jargon, and gamesmanship of Derrida.
It is also doubtful that Said "sought always to find a way of agreeing with Adorno's belief that the intrinsic difficulty of thought requires a style of writing wholly answerable to it", that is, an obscure style. The Palestinian exile had as much reason for gloom as the Jewish refugee, but Said was neither so bleak nor oblique nor contemptuous of the way of the world as Adorno. Single-malt Scotch, the best concert music, the great post at Columbia, the chance to speak out in high places for the PLO and against its enemies - life was not all bad.
No doubt, there is a baffling double-bind for the radical genius in an elite university, feted yet inconsolable, because unable to put right past injustices to the tribe. Even when one has become, to borrow a business cliché, not part of the problem but part of the solution - even an important part - a certain unidentifiable element of autonomy is suspected to have been stolen. Deane's essay poignantly captures that sense of failure in triumph.
Adrian Frazier, director of the MA in Writing and MA in Drama and Theatre Studies in NUI Galway, is working on a book about Abbey actors in Hollywood (1930-1950).
Field Day Review, Vol 1, 2005, edited by Seamus Deane and Breandán Mac Suibhne Field Day Publications, in association with the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 287pp. €35