Based on cultural studies including nationalism, race and racism, and commodity culture, this essay analyses how metropolitan cultural discourses (including cultural nationalism) permeates through colonial commodity culture, how racism or racial disco...
Based on cultural studies including nationalism, race and racism, and commodity culture, this essay analyses how metropolitan cultural discourses (including cultural nationalism) permeates through colonial commodity culture, how racism or racial discourse interacts with it in colonial Dublin, and how James Joyce, a migrant metropolitan writer, sees through it, mainly focusing on Murphy’s Indian postcard, one of the racialized commodities in “Eumaeus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This article provides an account of the way Joyce’s project goes on to construct a postcolonial contra-modernity ultimately overcoming the Irish ambivalence caused by being a colonial subject of Ireland as well as a colonial consumer of metropolitan commodities. This essay, therefore, exclusively deals with racialized images in the commodity culture continually intersecting, modifying, and qualifying in allusive context in the episode for a scrupulous reading of everyday life in colonial Dublin.