of negotiation where decisions will inevitably be made that exclude
certain personalities.
Kiberd’s conclusion to Inventing Ireland (1995) moves away
from reliance on traditional nationalist models of Mother Ireland or
the Emerald Isle wrapped in a green flag:
If the notion of ëIrelandí seemed to some to have become problematic, that was
only because the seamless garment once wrapped like a green flag around
Cathleen nÌ Houlihan had given way to a quilt of many patches and colours, all
beautiful, all distinct, yet all connected too. No one element should subordinate
or assimilate the others: Irish or English, rural or urban, Gaelic or Anglo, each
has its part in the pattern.^24Such a vision of the multicultural is problematic when one patch in the
quilt wishes to dominate or, at a dialogic level, to shout down others,
while another patch may withdraw from discussion altogether. To
ignore this is to overlook a history of sectarian conflict in Northern
Ireland in favour of a liberal utopian vision that, although attractive,
simply does not hold even in the light of peace negotiation. Also,
Kiberd does not ask the important question of conflict analysis: who
exactly would do the needlework or mediate between these different
patches of identity?
Debate about identity formation and achieving a politics of
difference for marginalized groups continues within the field of post-
colonial studies. Gyan Prakash imagines an emancipating politics for
the colonial dispossessed. He uses postmodern theory to attack a
Western humanist tradition (which he strategically essentializes) and
posits ‘a rainbow alliance shared among oppositional voices’.^25
Drawing on the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, Prakash
pays attention to the changing and disparate aspects of identity
formation so as to fly in the face of colonial and nationalist reliance
upon fixed markers of group identity.
However, in his essay ‘Culture’s In-Between’ (1996), Bhabha
acknowledges the problems implicit with theories of border
transgression and multicultural versions of identity:
24 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p.563.
25 Gyan Prakash in Rosalind OíHanlon and David Washbrook, ëAfter Orientalism:
Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third Worldí, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, Vol.34, No.1, p.150.