formation.^19 For Smyth, this involves thinking otherwise or towards
‘the other’, transgressing ideological boundaries that uphold
sectarianism as a way of ethically forging a differential perspective
that embraces alterity rather than seeking to delimit subjectivities
within a fixed model of identification.
For the Southern Irish critic Declan Kiberd, an antidote for
sectarianism is understood in terms of the hopeful metaphor of a
‘patchwork quilt’ of identities to suggest that the formation of identity
is dialogic. In Inventing Ireland (1995), Kiberd develops the idea of
identity being a perpetual dialogue and draws on the Myth of Babel,
where God punishes ‘Semite imperialists who built their own tower
“ as high as heaven.” ’^20 Kiberd reads the myth as a warning against
‘all who would seek to impose an official language of enlightenment’:
the ‘builders of the tower were guilty of wanting to make a name for
themselves.’^21 Here we can see sympathy for Bakhtinian dialogism as
it imagines that language is essentially ‘dialogic’ and that every
speech act springs from previous utterances, being structured in
expectation of a future response. This has implications beyond the
field of literary studies as it conveys that a given utterance may be not
just the representation of something in the world but also a
representation of another speech act about that thing.^22 Mikhail
Bakhtin’s essay ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’
([1940], 1967), addresses ‘cultural bilinguism’, the hybridity of
languages, ‘other-languagedness’ or the ‘polyglot’ which would surely
appeal to Homi Bhabha.^23 This notion of a never ending dialogue,
translation or negotiation between terms can be imagined at a political
level as more democratic since, in constant process, no one term is
allowed an end point or to dominate an ‘other’. Although such a
liberal vision is seductive it is hardly constitutive of a practical politics
19 Ailbhe Smyth, ëBorderline Cross Talkí, ëThe Women on Ireland Network
Conference: Women and Ireland: Social, Historical and Cultural Perspectivesí,
St. Maryís University College Strawberry Hill, Saturday 27th June, 1998.
20 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p.636.
21 Ibid.
22 Mikhail Bakhtin, ëFrom the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourseí, Modern
Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed., David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988),
pp.124ñ156.
23 Ibid., pp.141ñ3.