Northern Soulscapes: Writing through Brexit in the work of Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham and Dara McAnulty

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.

From Patterns to Freefall: Exposing the Vulnerability of Human Predicament in the Times of the Pandemic

COVID-19 demands a paradigm shift in modes of human interaction and challenges hegemonic social structures to adapt and evolve themselves to the altered reality of human existence. Across the world, these shifts have been triggered by the new social order threatening to erase existing social systems. My paper attempts to look at the lives of the precariats, caught up within neoliberal structures, assuming these structures to be hegemonic normative systems, and the manner in which they refuse to change, thereby putting the precariats into a more exploitative crisis situation, dehumanizing them, demonizing them, thereby risking their erasure from the socio-political and legal systems that rule the world. I have used the context of India to substantiate my argument. My paper is divided into the following sections: a reading into the concept of precarity and contextualizing it in the neoliberal framework, analysing the pandemic against precarity using examples from Indian society.

Viewing the American West as a Chicana in China

In both scholarly work and popular imagination, the American West is the final destination of migrant from Europe and Mexico. The stories of those migrants, however, obscure the first migration (12,000 BP) from Asia into North America. That migration across the now-submerged land bridge of Beringia ended humanity’s millennia-long journey across the globe that originated in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier. Using two examples, this essay reflects on how the Asian origins of the first Americans have been transformed into myths that conceal humanity’s migratory nature. First, in Chinese Communist propaganda, those origins are transformed into the myth of Peking Man as a branch of humanity originating in China rather than Africa. Second, in the writing of Rudolfo Anaya, those Asian origins are transformed into the myth of homogenous “Brown Brothers” united against white imperialists. Rather than rely on a myth of racial unity in some original homeland, this essay urges reliance on the shared experience of migration and home-making in hostile environments as the true source of our common humanity. Anaya’s Golden Carp, symbol of the life-giving fierce of water in an arid environment, captures this common human predicament stretching from Tibet and Xinjiang to New Mexico, epitomizing the American West as the place where humanity has been reunited, the home to the last wanderers of the human race.

Scrutiny of Self in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

An Outstanding novelist of human predicament, Arun Joshi is ranked with the great masters of contemporary Indian fiction in English. He believes that reality lies within the consciousness of isolated individuals. As he is the great writer of psychological perception, he envisions the inner crisis of the modern man in his five novels. In particular, his second novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas is the apple of his eye. It portrays the story of the protagonist who is dragged by the mysterious world of the tribal society. The protagonist, Billy’s strange quest leads him to leave his position as the sole inheritor of a wealthy family and lead to live a natural life. There is no comfort in his American life as well as in his marital life too. Further, the story visualises Billy’s quest for individualism and self-identity at the cost of leaving materialistic world. This paper focuses on the clashes between the civilised world and the primitive one as well as it looks at the root of the protagonist Billy’s quest for the self.

Paul Tillich: Samarbejdet mellem menneskets ontologiske ophav og eksistentielle vilkår

Mainly working with Paul Tillich’s lesser known works and one unpublished text, this article seeks to examine how his ontological approach to the doctrine of God and humanity inevitably must interact with an existential approach to the human predicament, which is characterized by estrangement and separation from the essential being of human beings. On this view, theology must include an ambiguity consisting in the use of an essentialist perspective and an existentialist perspective in combination with a need for both a vertical and a horizontal way of thinking.

Anxiety, alienation, and estrangement in the context of social media

This article applies Paul Tillich's existentialist analysis of the human predicament, particularly what it means to exist and to be fallen, to social media. I argue that social media heightens feelings of alienation and estrangement, supporting this claim with evidence from empirical research in psychiatry and communication studies. Thus, I offer an application of a Tillichian approach to an area of culture previously unexamined in this way. I identify three primary ways in which social media exacerbates existentialist emotional states: (1) social media allows us to construct artificial versions of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software; (2) it provides the means to quantify social approval in groups the size of which the human brain has not evolved for; (3) it extends the size of our social networks but decreases the quality of interactions. Social media is yet to receive significant philosophical or theological engagement despite its prevalence, particularly within younger generations. I argue that this is a mistake – philosophy has a duty to engage with such a ubiquitous feature of modern life.