Dr. Eoin Ó Cuinneagáin is a decolonial thinker, researcher and an oral song practitioner.
He is a Postdoctoral Fellow based at the School of Trans-Disciplinary Research and Graduate Studies (STRGS) at the University of South Africa (UNISA), investigating Irish-language indigenous methodologies and their coalitional engagements with other autonomously-voiced indigenous perspectives.
He completed his PhD at Linnaeus University, Sweden under the advisement of Dr. Barzoo Eliassi, Prof. Madina Tlostanova and Prof. Lillis Ó Laoire.
His PhD thesis concerned the oral singing practice of amhránaíocht as a disobedient epistemology. Placing amhránaíocht in non-hierarchical dialogue with other indigenous ways of knowing he proposes the concept of songing as a decolonial methodology of intervention.
Dr. Ó Cuinneagáin offers editing services for academic publications.
He can be contacted via eoinocuinneagain@gmail.com
Photography by Kevin Settee
Links to Publications
Estudios Irlandeses, Special Issue 18.2, 2023, pp. 11-27.
Abstract
This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with “The Enlightenment” in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift’s project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality’s rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces.