Queering the Nation: Hegemonic Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way

Juan Meneses

European Review, 2021, vol. 29, issue 3, 354-369

Abstract: This article examines how Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel A Long Long Way explores the impact of the First World War in the construction of a sovereignty that is, against the grain of a teleological understanding of history, not incorporated in the official chronicle of the Irish independence from the British Empire. Through the lens of what I call ‘negative sovereignty’, which describes a form of agency that amounts to something less than nothing and is located in the obverse of the official historical record, I argue that the novel thematises the disruption caused by the war as a crisis in the hegemonic masculinity at the core of the national imagination. This article, thus, reads the novel’s protagonist, Willie Dunne, as a ‘queering’ subjectivity that embodies this kind of sovereignty, provoking a suspension in the patriarchal foundation of nation-building as symbolised by the severance of his relationship with his father.

Date: 2021
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