ABSTRACT
In the closing scenes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus evokes the strangerhood that exile and migration entail as he looks out beyond the Irish Sea and ponders what lies beyond in a “Europe of strange tongues . . . and of entrenched and marshalled races”. He is torn between trying to reconstruct a sense of “Irishness” and the freedom that the choice of exile might bring for artistic creation. While in Ulysses, Joyce explores notions of disruption and dislocation through the representative “immigrant” figure, Leopold Bloom, who epitomizes a form of Irish cosmopolitanism. In an alternative vein, more contemporary emigrant writers such as Vona Groarke explore the notion of living between “home” and “elsewhere” through the evocation of liminal poetic spaces, whereby emigration or exile becomes a state of being. Such forms of dislocation and exile have long been part of Irish cultural imagination and lived experience. However, until recently the focus has tended to be on outward migration and the tension between notions of an Irish “home” and living “elsewhere”. More recently this sense of dislocation has been shaped by new forms of inward migration, with alternative narratives reshaping the sense of what it might be to “live doubly”, as migrants and asylum seekers grapple with their own narratives of dislocation within Ireland. In this chapter, I explore the notions of exile and dislocation in Irish literary narratives, as well as more recent experiences of dislocation among contemporary Muslim populations in Dublin. The chapter explores the centrality of dislocation to the Irish cultural imagination and then seeks to examine the ways this might be reshaped not only by new forms of migration but also in relation to notions of “home” and hospitality.
