This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce's works-as well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Luria, Anderson, and Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past and the "nightmare of history" in Ireland and in the American South-from the Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday Agreement, from the Civil War to the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings.

In this first full-length study of race and colonialism in the works of James Joyce, Vincent J. Cheng argues that Joyce wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial subject of an oppressive empire, and demonstrates how Joyce's texts constitute a significant political commentary on British imperialism in Ireland and on colonial discourses and ideologies in general. This is a groundbreaking study of the century's most internationally influential fiction writer, and of his powerful representations of the cultural dynamics of race, power, and empire.