ABSTRACT: Despite becoming deaf at a young age from Ménière’s disease, Teresa Deevy uses sound in radio dramas to critique how conceptions of the past were materially constraining the possible futures for women in mid-century Ireland. While Deevy remains an understudied playwright, scholars like Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin have shown how Deevy’s stage plays challenge gender hierarchies during the Cumann na nGaedhael government and rework forms of naturalism. Few scholars offer sustained analyses of Deevy’s later plays or work on radio, though Emily Bloom’s foundational work on Irish radio modernisms and theorisation of Deevy’s unique forms of engagement with radio and radio dramas inform my examinations of four plays Deevy wrote specifically for radio. Building on current scholarship, this article examines how Deevy drew on the aurality of radio and the in medias res feel of the one-act radio play to reimagine gendered relationships to narrative, place, history and material and built environments amid shifting media and cultural landscapes in mid-century Ireland. In heeding Deevy’s contributions to radio modernism through feminist, ecofeminist and media studies lenses, my analyses demonstrate methods for reading sounds in scripts that reframe how scholars approach Deevy’s later work as they expand studies of Irish radio modernism. Reading sound elements in Dignity (1939) and Within a Marble City (1949) shows how Deevy reworks realist and naturalist forms limiting women’s agency. The auralities in Going Beyond Alma’s Glory (1951) and One Look and What It Led To (1964) meta-critically reflect on the medium of radio to point to a more modernist multiplicity for women’s self-determination. Sounds and silences in and across Deevy’s four radio dramas revise and expand understandings of mid-century Irish naturalisms, realisms and modernisms as they establish an overlooked feminist Irish radio modernism that points to multiple narrative possibilities for women’s self-determination literally hanging in the air.

EXSTRACT: In 1996, Enterprise Energy Ireland (EEI) found a natural gas field seventy kilometers off the West coast of County Mayo, Ireland (Garavan 134).¹ Despite concerns about safety, EEI got permission to build a liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline and refinery at Ballinaboy, in what became known as the Corrib Pipeline Project (142–46). Nine kilometers of the pipe would run through the local Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking, community in Rossport, in some cases less than a hundred meters from family homes and farms (136, 101). Local opposition to the project began in the early 2000s, as the Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Frank Fahey, created Compulsory Acquisition Orders (CAOs), requiring local property owners to cede land to Shell E&P Ireland (Royal Dutch Shell acquired EEI in 2002) (149). The resistance movement grew in 2003 as “twenty serious bogslides” around the area of the proposed pipeline made residents concerned about their safety (8). Additionally, the pipe was to transport raw natural gas at unprecedented pressures of 345 bars, though recommended pressures were at just 144 bars (9, 135). By 2005, the local community had formed the Shell-to-Sea environmental justice group to protest the Corrib Pipeline Project.

ABSTRACT: Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley’s 2008 documentary film Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie’s 2018 short-story collection This Hostel Life raise questions about Ireland’s postcolonial position on the economic and geographic periphery of Europe amid the added complexity of emerging racial formations. These texts critically depict the racial and cultural barriers that produce a voyeuristic bifurcation between an implied white Irish citizen and a racialized non-citizen. Seaview invokes this voyeuristic bifurcation to critique the segregation and isolation of asylum seekers detained in Direct Provision (DP) centres from the rest of Irish society. Yet moments of ambiguity in filmic strategies of who is looking and who is seen emphasize ongoing colonial and neocolonial histories that continue to impact identity formations in Ireland. The possibilities and limitations of representing Afro-Irish self-determination arises as a site of contestation in Okorie’s 2018 collection of three stories This Hostel Life. The second short story, “Under the Awning,” is a frame narrative that reclaims the liminal elements of second-person narration to assert emerging forms of Afro-Irish self-determination. This story exposes layers of racialization as it also indicates multiple possible voices materializing across multiple possible Irelands. In the seemingly disparate genres and media of documentary film and the short story, Seaview and This Hostel Life structurally challenge Irish racial formations that conform to a default colonial white norm. Reading these texts together exposes connections between postcolonial national identity and colonial racial formations that postcolonial nations willingly or unwillingly inherit through globalized economies and internationally integrated immigration reforms. By critically challenging racializing contexts and narratives during and after the Celtic Tiger, Seaview and This Hostel Life expand the representational possibilities for Afro-Irish self-determination in twenty-first century Irish literature and film.

EXTRACT: During the past decade, there has been a surge of scholarship focused on environmental humanities pedagogy.¹ This scholarship has implicitly favored the study of landscapes that clearly bear the physical changes associated with human habitation. The field’s terrestrial emphasis on landscapes visibly altered by human habitation poses an obstacle for those of us teaching the humanistic study of the sea, or what is increasingly called the blue humanities.² Like land, the ocean has also experienced anthropogenic changes. Resource extraction, industrialization, overfishing, oil spills, seismic blasting, microplastics, nuclear testing and fallout, rising temperatures, and declining pH levels affect ocean ecosystems throughout the water column and around the world. Despite the ocean’s crucial role in global environmental systems and its growing presence in the environmental humanities, the ocean is conspicuously absent as a sustained area of focus in environmental humanities pedagogical scholarship.³ While human effects on the ocean are less visible than on land, they can be tracked in similar ways as anthropogenically altered landscapes. Our approach to teaching the blue humanities is to show students that the ocean, like land, bears the physical and sociocultural markings of ongoing human occupation, which range from resource extraction and international shipping routes to noise pollution and maritime laws. As a result, our students have learned that the marine environment is a social, political, ecological, and geologic space. Through the humanistic study of the sea, students deepen their understanding of the ocean as a planetary environment rich in cultural and material histories.

ABSTRACT: The rivers in Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti (1989) reconceptualise agency and time in histories of power and conflict. While scholars have examined how poets like Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon and Derek Mahon depict deep time, scholars of Belfast Confetti have focused on processes of naming, mapping and surveilling ethno-religiously and socio-economically divided populations. Extending such analyses to representations of Belfast’s riparian environment in Belfast Confetti reveals a dialectic of nonhuman and human histories. The ongoing interactions of these histories co-constitute social and material environments in ways that preclude erasure of even the most submerged, rerouted or culverted histories. Carson’s poems show the rivers of Belfast to be agents of change in histories that persist in the city’s material foundations. Ultimately, Belfast Confetti reimagines Belfast as a complex intermingling of geologic, linguistic, textual, industrial and political histories that reframe time, environment and agency in contemporary Irish poetry.

EXTRACT: The village of Cappagh did not meet the expectations of the Congested Districts Board (CDB) members for what modernity should look like.¹ That is, it was missing the slate-roof houses maintained by women’s domestic labor while men worked the surrounding parceled-out squares of land. Expectations of what was recognizably modern coincided with the evolving field of photography, which by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had come to play a complex role as a conveyer of historical and scientific truth, an artistic medium, and a distrusted new technology. Photographs commissioned by the CDB, like the example produced by Robert John Welch (1859–1936) and captioned “View of Cappagh Village, Castlerea District, Co. Galway,” documented its projects to modernize land and fisheries in the west of Ireland (see figure 1).² [End Page 95]