How did the Fenians—as a figure as well as a force—contribute to the construction of notions of Irish racial difference and British liberal citizenship in the contentious politics of the mid-Victorian era? This is the principal question addressed by Amy E. Martin's Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Taking a stance critical of the state, whether imperial or national, she develops an original approach informed by the work of Marx and Engels, Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Anne Cheng, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Luke Gibbons, Paul Gilroy, Ranajit Guha, Stuart Hall, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Lloyd, Laura Mulvey, Jacqueline Rose, Edward Said, and Gauri Viswanathan. The resulting study, which seeks to bring together the interdisciplinary fields of Irish studies and Victorian studies, is thought provoking but at times perplexing.

Alter-Nations begins from the position that national projects in Britain and Ireland unfolded “both discursively and materially, in a dialectical relation to the other” (1). Martin examines canonical texts and images to investigate the British side of this relation, especially the double moves of a “counterinsurgent” and “antiterrorist” (8) state to repress insurrectionary movements and produce disciplined citizens. The book is divided into four chapters, each of which concentrates on a distinct set of texts or images. Chapter 1 deals with writings on the “capitalist national crisis” (18) between the early and mid-Victorian eras, when a growing number of Irish people were settling in British cities and industrial districts, and observers began to connect their presence to issues of political economy and class relations. Martin's reading of Thomas Carlyle's 1839 essay “Chartism” highlights its racializing attack on Irish immigrants and promotion of a British imperial project, and this discussion leads on to an interesting comparison with various interventions by Marx and Engels on Ireland and the Irish as the weakest links in Britain's colonial and capitalist chains. Chapter 2 gauges the impact of a “decentered” (60) Fenian movement on the consolidation of liberal ideas about law, violence, government, and citizenship in the mid-Victorian era. Martin analyzes the assimilationist and authoritarian state of Matthew Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866) and Culture and Anarchy (1869) and the “interventionist” (90) state of John Stuart Mill's “England and Ireland” (1868). She suggests that Fenianism shaped these conceptions in large measure and that Mill as well as Arnold took a hard line against it.

Chapter 3 turns from elite intellectual production to the popular transmission of ideas and affects about political violence, order, and identities. Interpreting cartoons in Punch from the Fenian rising and its aftermath in the late 1860s and the Land War of the early 1880s in terms of an emerging discourse of terrorism, she argues that Britons were more or less effectively interpellated as law-abiding citizens who loyally consented to the state's struggle against radical Irish nationalism and agrarianism. The gendered figurations of the brutish Fenian, frightened Hibernia, and stern Britannia reveal a “politics of identification” (143) that appealed to a cross-class alliance of respectable workingmen and gentlemen. Chapter 4 pivots from anti-Irish and anti-Fenian rhetoric and imagery to pro-Fenian texts. Martin begins with James Joyce's 1907 “The Last Fenian,” a eulogy of sorts for the late Fenian leader John O'Leary. Interested in this exemplar of steadfast “early Fenianism” (160), she focuses on his 1896 memoir, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, and shows how it remained defiant in the face of Fenian reverses by the late Victorian era and skeptical of Ireland's prospects at the hands of home rulers, Catholic clerics, and historians.

Questions of race and nation, people and state, emergency and democracy certainly became bound up with the struggle between the Fenians and the authorities during the mid-Victorian era. I found a number of Martin's readings of texts and images nuanced and stimulating. I was especially intrigued by her discussion of O'Leary's memoirs, from her revaluation of Freudian understandings of mourning and melancholia for a colonial setting, in which the latter can be a form of resistance, to her demonstration of the ways that the text diverges from a format that links individual and national histories according to a “synecdochal logic” (175). However, I was not persuaded by some of Martin's larger claims, which are founded on rather stark and abstract binaries (even if they do mimic each other), about Fenianism, the state, hegemony, and so on. Like Gramsci, I think organic struggles play out in the uneven and uncertain terrain of the conjuncture. A greater attention to contexts and a wider variety of sources may yield still richer readings and sharper insights. Contentious politics are highly interactive and at least partially driven by conflicts within movements, authorities, and publics. I am sorry that Martin judges R. V. Comerford's The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985) to be “wholly unsatisfactory” (62, n. 21). Brian Jenkins's The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874 (Montreal, 2008) does not share Martin's framework, but readers may want to consult his nonetheless valuable treatment of law, policy, and politics. I wish Irish voices were not so muted in Alter-Nations. Nationalist Irish newspapers continued to publish, despite the suppression of the Fenians' Irish People, and the amnesty movement for Fenian prisoners engaged opinion high and low.

Where do we go from here? The ways various movements spoke the language of citizenship, sounded its limits and possibilities, and tried either to silence or to support each other might be one promising point of departure for further explorations in the learning process of contentious politics in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere in the empire from the 1860s to the 1910s.