Although acknowledging an ongoing criticism of postcolonial theory as initiated by Edward Said in 1978, the editors of Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography firmly contend that such theory provides “an enabling and convincing battery of critical and historiographical tools with which to confront the vagaries of imperialisms and empires” (12). Even so, a theoretical examination of postcolonialism by one editor attempts to have it both ways: in “collateral language: empire, theory, and idioms of authority,” Eóin Flannery identifies postcolonial studies as the foremost critical project engaging with “strangulating discourses of imperial modernity” (173); yet he also warns against the movement's subversions by academic orthodoxies, abstractions, and jargons. The volume again gestures toward some critical interrogation of its subject by its inclusion of Linda Connolly's “The Limits of ‘Irish Studies’: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism,” an essay describing the failure of postcolonial studies to incorporate the findings of Irish women's history and women's studies.

Emerging from a 2004 conference at the Centre for Historical Research, University of Limerick, this twelve-essay collection generally conveys the ascendancy of (and satisfaction with) postcolonial theory in Irish studies: two-thirds of the contributors address Ireland directly, one addresses Victorian England, and two eastern Europe (Talinn Grigor's “Transient Constructs: Soviet Monuments and Those of Their Enemies” and Michael Kilburn's “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Post-totalitarian’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial?”). The editors defend this variety—ranging over disciplines, geographies, and chronology—as reflecting the “fluidity of ‘empire’ as both an epistemological concept and as a series of material historical processes” (12).

A powerfully linked group of contributions interrogate a revisionist attempt to write out radical anti-imperialism as a significant force in early twentieth-century Ireland. Claiming to move beyond “official” or vertical versions of history, these essays expose powerful horizontal alliances between dissident anti-imperial groups or excavate material challenging a master narrative that had, authors argue, marginalized or isolated anti-imperial voices during the period. Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin's “`We Are of Necessity Anti-imperialists’: Irish Republicans and Empire, 1922–39” undermines reading of the Free State's political climate as monolithically conservative in its withdrawal from radical anti-imperial positions. Citing often ephemeral republican newspapers, Ní Bheacháin argues that many post-Treaty republicans, who viewed themselves as enemies of empire, theorized “their positions through the prism of anti-imperial politics” (58). In contrast to those who would dismiss such republicans as recalcitrant “die hards,” Ní Bheacháin finds in their writing and activities a sustained and intellectually viable resistance to the Free State's distancing itself from anti-imperial causes. This resistance included the organization of anticolonial conferences that, although ostensibly mirroring commonwealth gatherings, actually rivaled and undermined them.

Angus Mitchell's “Roger Casement: The Evolution of an Enemy of Empire—I” and Brian P. Murphy's “Erskine Childers: The Evolution of an Enemy of Empire—II” contend that the deaths of Casement and Childers, the former executed by the British for treason in 1916 and the latter by the Free State in 1922 for his adherence to republicanism, deprived Ireland of two of its major spokesmen against imperialism. Drawing upon political publications and archival material, Murphy traces Childers's radical shift from a liberal servant of empire to a major nationalist working against the imperial presence in Ireland. Mitchell, one of the volume's editors, makes a compelling case for rehabilitating Casement, another official of empire turned radical anti-imperialist, from marginalization in the history of the period leading to Irish independence. Teasing out the Irish sources for Casement's campaign against imperial atrocities elsewhere in the world, the article locates Casement's role as an Irish nationalist in the international context of his anti-imperial work in the Congo and in the west Amazon—activities that made his writing of interest to international revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. In drawing together Casement's anti-imperial agendas in Africa, South America, and Ireland, Mitchell seeks to undo what he perceives as a fragmented narrative of one of Ireland's major anti-imperial activists and theorists.

Enemies of Empire reflects the emergence and staying power of postcolonial theory in departments of literature and cultural studies through the inclusion of many essays that examine textual representation to provide historical context for imperial activity. Michael Griffin's study of Irish utopian writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explores how narratives of the imagined island Hy-Brazil, an allegorized space depicted as sequestered from or as caricaturing abuses of power, offered a more palatable political geography than that existing in colonized Ireland. In “Fasting for the Public: Irish and Indian Sources of Marion Wallace Dunlop's Hunger Strike,” Joseph Lennon contextualizes the emergence of a central tool for early twentieth-century dissidents in Ireland and India—a tactic appearing with the suffragette Dunlop's 1909 hunger strike in London's Holloway Prison. Lennon suggests sources for Dunlop's strategy in several previous “textual” events in the second half of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries: the publication of early Irish law texts that advocated fasting as a way of forcing justice, of ethnological comparisons between Irish and Indian fasting practices, and of literary texts (such as W. B. Yeats's play The King's Threshold) drawing from versions of Irish saga literature appearing in the period.

Stephen Donovan turns to cultural representation in Victorian England as a means of evaluating public reaction to imperial forays, in this case to Cecil Rhodes's establishment of the British South Africa Company in the 1880s to administer 700,000 square miles and safeguard his mining monopoly. In “Fraudesia: The British South Africa Company and Its Enemies,” Donovan contends that not only political attacks published by organizations like the Aborigines Protection Society, but also imagery in advertising and public spectacle, music hall performance, and the literary genre of colonial romance fiction reflected the controversial status of such imperial adventuring. Donovan makes a powerful claim for literary representation as a gauge of public opinion, arguing that in the Victorian period he explores, literature was regarded by “the great reading public … as a faithful depiction of the reality of world events and individual psychology” (112).

Two articles engaging in theorized analysis of twentieth-century literature investigate how Irish authors have perpetrated or undermined imperial readings of a colonized island. In “The Use of Hiberno-English as a Mouthpiece of Irish Identity in the Irish Theatre: Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and the Contemporary Drama of Martin McDonagh,” Róisín Ní Ghairbhí revives earlier attacks of the literary revival for its invention of the “inferior dialect” of Hiberno-English as a “viable code for the expression of Irish identity,” a code serving the needs of an English-speaking colonial minority (143). The particulars of this familiar attack on John Millington Synge are now buttressed by Pierre Bourdieu's theories of linguistic capital and by praise of McDonagh's Leeane trilogy—a dramatic oeuvre that resurrects stage Irishness for the late twentieth century. However, Ní Ghairbhí's reading of McDonagh's attentiveness to the economic and moral costs of his characters' linguistic marginalization and cultural amnesia is more persuasive than her thesis-driven interpretations of Synge. Reflecting the growing postcolonial preference for James Joyce over the revivalists, Eugene O’Brien's “The Language of Empire and the Empire of Language: Joyce and the Return of the Postcolonial Repressed” suggests how, although writing in English, the great Irish modernist undermined imperial linguistic ascendancy. O’Brien argues, for example, that in Ulysses James Joyce reclaims Shakespeare for Ireland by strategies such as listing “Patrick W. Shakespeare” in a traditional epic catalog of “Irish heroes of antiquity” (164). By reappropriating Shakespeare and stressing his value in an Irish context, suggests O’Brien, Joyce deconstructs and complicates any hegemonic connection between the symbolic order of England's language and literature and its imperial power.