David Lloyd. Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity. Dublin: Field Day in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2008. ISBN: 9780946755400. Price: US$30/£25

For a collection of essays organized around questions of the untimely, David Lloyd’s Irish Times is a surprisingly timely book. As Ireland confronts increasing unemployment, the bust of the property bubble, and a growing depression, Lloyd’s critical assessment of the Celtic Tiger economy is apposite. But Lloyd does more than simply point out the problems associated with Ireland’s rapid economic growth; he also questions why capitalist growth implies modernization within a historicist framework. Adding a postcolonial dimension to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “dialectic of enlightenment,” Lloyd draws attention to how colonial modernity produces a number of contradictions: between modernity’s “emancipatory possibilities” and its “concentration and consolidation of power,” between tradition and modernity, and between colonial periphery and the imperial center (2). According to Lloyd, these implicit tensions require us to pursue an alternative conception of historical time which approaches remnants of the past not as elements to overcome and put behind us, but rather as utopic possibilities for the future. The collection moves easily from discussions of Irish history and culture to Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theory, and a shared interest in the question of representation unites the essays. Like Lloyd’s Ireland after History (2000) – a collection of essays that highlights the value of subaltern studies for Irish studies – the essays point to the people, experiences, and cultural formations that are unrepresentable within traditional historicism: the victims of the Famine, the collective labor and culture associated with the clachan, and forms of tradition that remain opposed to the postcolonial state and global capitalism. In the new collection, however, colonial modernity is the primary focus as Lloyd pursues alternative forms such as myth, the sublime, and fragmented narratives, to convey a more ambivalent and just understanding of modernity. For Lloyd, these alternative forms allow us to recognize the past in its diversity: the past as a possibility, and, importantly, the continued violence within the present. Such forms resist the domination of the state and its historicism by opening themselves up “to the diverse and divergent human and natural ecologies whose very multiplicity is incommensurable with domination in any form” (9). In the process, they prompt a reassessment of early nineteenth-century Ireland by resisting its representation as a pre-modern past. The essays perform the movement between past and present which Lloyd advocates. The opening essay reads the ruins of the Irish landscape alongside Allana O’Kelly’s video installation No Colouring Can Deepen the Darkness of Truth (1992-5); the second and third essays consider how to remember and historicize the Irish Famine without further obscuring its victims; the fourth essay examines the postcolonial temporalities of James Joyce’s writing as a model of an alternative historical time; the fifth essay reads James Connolly’s “Celtic Communism” in order to challenge the assumptions of Western Marxism; and the final essay closes the collection with a reading of Allan deSouza’s Irish photography which invites readers to take up the legacy of Walter Benjamin and embrace a form of history that is not closed and certainly not fixed. Although the essays focus on the particularities of Irish experience, they situate Ireland amongst other postcolonial states, especially India. Lloyd’s discussion of the Famine is, perhaps, of greatest value to scholars of the nineteenth century. For Lloyd, the Famine is a traumatic event that reveals the limits of historicist discourse by evoking the “indigent sublime.” The indigent sublime not only suggests the indescribability associated with trauma – the focus of many studies of the Famine – but also a specific aesthetic experience “rooted in an apprehension of the insistent duality of human being, at once subordinate to …