Literary urban studies is a growing field that juxtaposes the concerns of literary studies and urban studies. The study of cities, including of plans for their futures, can benefit from the individual and critical insights of literary texts and from an understanding of literary forms and genres. Equally, literary scholarship gains from engagement with approaches to urban environments pioneered by sociologists, geographers, planners and historians. Spatial justice is a key area of interest in urban studies, exemplified by the work of Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey and many successors. Literary authors have represented instances of spatial justice in diverse ways as well as using their texts to model possible city futures, good or bad. This session brings together three papers from literary urban studies practitioners addressing justice-related topics in Irish urban literature since the 1930s: Irish migration to London in the twentieth century as framed in the work of renowned exile from Dublin Samuel Beckett; stories detailing inward migration in twenty-first-century Dublin; contemporary writers’ handling of the Irish capital’s internal multiplicity and spatial divisions.
“Beckett and the Bedsit: The London Rented Rooms of Murphy”
Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University
Variations on the near-empty space appear in multiple works by Samuel Beckett. This paper explores those found in his 1938 novel Murphy, asking how its textual space relates to actual rented rooms. Put bluntly, did the bedsit life affect literary content? People’s access to residential property is an aspect of urban spatial justice in which economics figures alongside perceptions of gender and ethnicity. It fits into a broader study of London residential space in literature, which works with the dialectic of slum and neighbourhood. The word slum first (in the 1820s) labelled a crowded central London neighbourhood said by writers to have been packed with Irish immigrants. In the twentieth century, working-class Irish incomers to London faced racism.
Toponymically rich, Murphy depicts both street-level neighbourhoods and neighbour relations inside houses. The former are identifiably those of 1930s London in low-status localities close to industry but also not far from central and wealthy districts. It also has bigger spatial frames: spanning London; using London as a link in a chain from Ireland to France. I read the novel against three contexts. In relation to the spaces of Beckett’s life and works, Murphy’s identifiable topographies distinguish it from Beckett’s post-war works, but I trace connections between the different phases. Second is evidence on the spatial politics of room renting in 1930s London, specifically as they affected incomers from Ireland. Thirdly, the paper adds to a growing body of work investigating housing and modernist-era British literature (Cuming 2016; Finch and Kelly 2021).
“Migrants in the City: Spatial Injustice and Inward Migration in Contemporary Irish Literature”
Deirdre Flynn, Mary Immaculate College
In 2000 the Irish Government established the Direct Provision system as a temporary measure to deal with the growing numbers of international protection applicants arriving in Ireland. Designed to be a short-term solution, it was expected that the direct provision centres would house people for a maximum of 6 months while their application was being processed. Twenty years later the system is still in place, housing nearly 7000 people for an average of 24 – 36 months, with over 5% waiting over 7 years for a decision on their application. Left in limbo, these people are citizens of nowhere.
In 2018, Melatu Uche Okorie published a collection of stories called This Hostel Life, detailing life in direct provision, and the racism experienced on the streets of Dublin for inward migrants to Ireland. In her story ‘Under the Awning’ Okorie, who spent eight years in the Irish Direct Provision system, illustrates how the streets of the city are not a welcoming place for black migrants. Her protagonist is ‘desperate not to stand out…so people were not made to feel uncomfortable’ by her presence (Okorie 2018). For the inward migrant the public space of the global city does not correspond with the public image of Ireland of the Welcomes.
This paper, using examples from contemporary writing on Ireland’s Direct Provision system, will discuss Ireland’s response to inward migration. Focusing on how the global city of Dublin is represented and negotiated in these works.
“Insurgent Spaces: The Many Dublins of Contemporary Irish Literature”
Liam Lanigan, Governors State University
21st-century Dublin has been defined in cultural, socio-economic, and spatial terms by a series of ruptures; the divide between the city’s north and south has been compounded by a division between the “old” city in the west and the new city of the Docklands, for example, or the temporal division between before the Celtic Tiger and after. However, during the last two decades the meaning of Dublin space has also been contested by previously marginalized or silenced groups such as migrants and LGBTQ communities. Within the dominant conceptions of Dublin space, such groups have established “insurgent spaces” that transform existing uses and meanings of the cityscape, creating new cartographies of the city and challenging our understanding of Dublin’s meaning. Focusing primarily on Barry McCrea’s 2005 novel The First Verse, this paper will examine how Irish literature has sought to map these insurgent spaces. The novel captures a moment of profound transformation in Dublin, including the emergence of new transport systems, the financial district, and the city center’s cosmopolitan gentrification. However, it also maps a host of “other” spaces that emerge within this topography, including then-new immigrant neighborhoods in Parnell Street and Moore Street, and an LGBTQ subculture radiating from The George pub. In its representation of these intersecting cartographies, and in its transgression of existing ruptures in the city’s spatiality, The First Verse provides a model for narrativizing the city through multiplicity and interconnection, challenging the economic and social divisions by which it is increasingly defined.