A Vision of Empire: Irish Home Rule, the  Scramble for Africa, and Portuguese  Literary Journalism

Soares, Isabel

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/29357

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Soares, Isabel

Abstract(s)

Irish Home Rule, a measure of Irish self-rule, was a heated political and humanitarian issue throughout the nineteenth century. If, historically, Ireland was one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, pro–Irish Victorian perspectives and twenty-first century hindsight show it was administered as a colony. In the late 1800s, the British Parliament conceded to discuss Home Rule for Ireland. This happened at a time when the British Empire, (in)famously styled as the empire on which the sun never set, for expansionist purposes was encroaching on Portugal’s African possessions and thus stressing Anglo-Portuguese diplomatic relations. In this scenario, two Portuguese consuls, who also served as press correspondents from Britain, used their journalistic voices to bring to light, for audiences on both sides of the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic, what they considered the truth behind British imperialism. Through the late nineteenth-century “new” journalism, a pioneering form of literary journalism, these diplomats-turned-unconventional-journalists were among the first critics of formal imperialism. As pieces of literary journalism, their articles on the question of Irish Home Rule are documents of historical meaning, revealing an underlying intention of creating public awareness of the dangers of the British will to imperial dominance, for which Ireland provided an example of territorial occupation and autocratic administration. Their reading of the Irish Question gives evidence that, even at its earliest stages, literary journalism is a journalism of concern about the Other and their plight.