Over the summer, I studied abroad in Ireland, and learned about Irish culture and history. That experience made me more interested in the representation of Ireland from England’s literary point of view. Specifically, I thought about the fetishization of Irish culture in the colonial project. Spenser is a name that comes to mind regarding that. Using Irish folklore and culture to write The Faerie Queene while portraying Ireland as brutish and barbaric is a fascinating place for Spenser to be writing in. I haven’t figured out, obviously, how this mental tangle works out, or really where specifically I would want to go, or even if I want to use Spenser for this at all. I think a post-colonial lens could be a decent place to start, but I’m not sure what my other options are yet. To that end, Frantz Fanon might be a good place to begin, because I remember thinking about his writings while in Ireland learning all of this and drawing connections at the time to what I was learning.
I don’t have my notebook from Ireland with me, but I plan on getting it to me soon so I can pinpoint specifically what I was thinking regarding Fanon and Ireland. I remember that I learned about how Ireland is often treated in media as a sort of untouched paradise of European countryside because the Roman Empire never reached Hibernia, as they called it. The west coast of Ireland, especially, is fetishized due to being the edge of Europe and therefore some kind of separate land that is wild and untouched by civilization. This language is used by Ireland for tourism purposes, but it can be dangerous when it becomes a fantasy of the “simple life” or the “wild west coast”, ignoring the hardships faced by its inhabitants, or making it out to be savage or wild, without civilization. Edmund Spenser was mentioned quite a few times regarding the colonization of Ireland, and I took Colby Gordon’s Faerie Queene class last year, so he was on my mind. His use of the lore of faeries, his setting in ambiguous forests of Ireland, and his language regarding the inhabitants of that fictional land were all running through my mind as I learned about the settlement projects and fetishization.