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  • Chapter 16 - Conflict and Care: Edna O’Brien’s Girl, Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, and the Limits of Interculturality

  • from Part IV - Transnational Futures
  • Edited by Cóilín Parsons, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    13 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024, pp 300-316

  • Summary

    This chapter sets out to explore the potential decolonial politics at stake in two recent novels by Edna O’Brien and Colum McCann. These novels, set outside Ireland (in Palestine and Israel in the case of McCann and Nigeria in the case of O’Brien), raise uncomfortable questions about interculturality, empathy, and the notion of care. My central consideration is whether these well-meaning narratives of the fallout from violence and conflict in turn produce a form of epistemic violence which belies the poetics of care they strive so hard to foreground. Ultimately, I contend that notwithstanding these authors’ evident wish to foster empathy, their novels potentially function as aesthetic smokescreens, dissimulating structural inequalities on a local, national, and global scale, and indulging in a depoliticized form of interculturality which impedes a robust criticism of coloniality.