Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This presentation draws connections between exiles in Joyce’s texts, LÉ James Joyce’s rescue missions, and twenty-first-century refugees. Joyce’s Ulysses, as a meditation on exile understood expansively and inclusively, foreshadows and anticipates the contemporary refugee crises in Ireland, the rest of Europe, and elsewhere. In Ulysses and other works, Joyce links mythological wanderers (Odysseus-Stephen, Telemachus-Bloom) with historical exiles (the Jewish diaspora, Irish emigrants), bringing our attention to the metaphor of contamination in xenophobic rhetoric in turn-of-the century Ireland. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake attempt to approximate the condition of cultural and linguistic displacement. The multi-lingual, multi-form, and multi-voiced narratives echo the lived experiences of displaced people for whom communication often means survival. Nevertheless, the essay calls for a careful use of language about exile and migration. To discuss Joyce’s voluntary migrations East in the context of the experiences of the Jewish diaspora in the twentieth century or the refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan—or now Ukraine—is to diminish the humanitarian crises and suffering of true exile-refugees.