Whiteness and Identity in Dubliners

Abstract:From an overt engagement with orientalism in "Araby" to the subtle discourse of blackness in "The Dead," Joyce's short-story collection, Dubliners, offers readers a multidimensional perspective on the overlapping discourses of race, class, and colonialism that defined Irishness in early-twentieth-century Dublin. This essay considers Joyce's canonical collection through the lens of a post-Celtic-Tiger understanding of race, where difference is an unavoidable and necessary component in discussions of contemporary Irish identity. Just as William Shakespeare's fools ironically invoke elemental words of wisdom, one character's drunken questions about American blackness at the dinner table in "The Dead" and the unspoken resistance to racial diversity in the paralytic lifestyles of Joyce's other characters point us to one of many prophetic moments in Joyce's work: a diagnosis of an Ireland that cannot move forward into modernity without recognizing the multiplicity of cultural voices that overtly challenge nationalist calls for a unified declaration of Irish identity.