Is there a Postcolonial Scotland?

This post starts from a couple of places. First, Marc Gunn's blog, where he writes about the differences between Scottish and Irish Celtic music in the context of his experience with each:

"It’s like the Irish songs were seeped in hundreds of years of oppression and Scotland broke free from that feeling. Oh wait! They did!"

Now, reading this from where I am now, analyzing a series of historial fantasy/fiction that dramatizes the  definitive defeat of the Highland clans and the aftermath of that conflict seen through the lens of a fictional Highlander and various 20th Century characters, it struck me that this conclusion was a bit too... easy, perhaps?  So I posted a couple of responses on Facebook:

You might say that the English crushed the opposition more definitively in Scotland in the 18th C, so there wasn't the festering subversive element as in Ireland. The clans didn't really survive as such. The Irish didn't have the obvious social/political structure in place, so it wasn't as easy to rout out. And even in the 18th C, Scotland was more influenced by Protestantism. In Ireland, the English Protestant landowners formed a superstructure on top of the native Irish--with more integration in Ulster. You might say that the religious question was already native to Scotland, so it wasn't an imposition from without as in Ireland.

And specifically with reference to music:

Also - I would venture that the complex stories are there in Scottish ballads, but those aren't the songs we remember as being quintessentially Scottish. I think the songs we remember as quintessentially Scottish are the ones with bagpipes and brogues. Many of the songs that we think of as *Irish* actually appear among the ballads collected by Frances James Child in the Nineteenth Century in England and Scotland!

So really, it's more complex in terms of folk-tradition.  Why is there this connection?  What was the folk culture exchange between Ireland and Scotland?  I'm sure someone has written on this subject.  And politically, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with the idea of Scotland more easily accepting its position relative to England.

Now, on this blog, I have posts that ask postcolonial questions.  But I am not really asking them of Scotland, but of the novels--which are 20th and 21st Century American novels. Not British.  Not Scottish.  So really, the novels don't tell us anything at all about Scotland, only about the perception of Scotland that the novel represents.  A historical novel has the potential to act as a piece of historical commentary, arguing more effectively than any textbook or essay that the reader should view the past from a certain perspective.  Films do this, too.  Consider Gone with the Wind, for example--because it's an easy one, and both a film and a novel.  It definitely presents a very specific view of the South from before and after the Civil War. The problematic character of Scarlett O'Hara might make each work's sympathies harder to sort out.  By contrast, the reader's lot in the Outlander novels is cast irrevocably with Jamie's sympathies and experiences, even if sometimes tempered by Claire's 20th Century hindsight.

Scotland was never a colony.  Ireland was.  America was.  Scotland and England have shared monarchs, dynasties, land mass,  religious movements.  As an English major and History minor, I never learned about Scotland as separate from England.  The one reference to Scottish history I will never forget was my history professor Dr. Schlunz, who said that James I looked around at Parliament and said, "I know what you are!  You're a bunch of goddamned Presbytarians!"  Irish history, I learned through studying Yeats and largely under the tutelage of Dr. Mary FitzGerald (and to a degree, O'Flaherty's Irish Pub).  But there was no "in" for me in Scottish literature--Burns?  Not someone I ever liked, in part because I had no real interest in the 18th Century, and no real interest in Scotch Gaelic.  I studied French, Latin and Greek, and considered Irish, but I wanted my English literature in English.  I didn't give Old English any serious attention until grad school, and didn't really have the patience for Chaucer's Middle English.  So only through some Celtic music, like "Culloden's Harvest" by Deanta, which I enjoyed but didn't investigate, and now through the Outlander books, do I get a sense of Scottish history.  (And I've read a few bona fide history articles, though not a lot.)

America was a colony.  So it makes sense that I grew up feeling a hefty sense of righteous indignation toward Imperialists--England, and especially Spain, which was vilified in all textbooks of the 1980s and early 90s, to my knowledge.  I have an affinity for postcolonial criticism and literature--Marxism notwithstanding.  I like the idea of a center and a periphery, and an exchange between the two--that the colonizer is influenced by the colonial subject.  I like the idea that by exercising power over others, the colonizer is debased.  I like subtle subversion of colonial power.  I do not think we would be better off had the Spanish not wiped out the Aztecs, nor if Christianity had not spread.  I am definitely an imperfect postcolonialist.  I do think that England caused immeasurable, lasting global political harm with its Empire.  But...  Scotland was not a colony.  So when I look for that postcolonial sentiments in Outlander, it is to satisfy my own righteous indignation at the atrocities committed in Scotland, by the English, in acts that were similar to the oppression/suppression under colonization, but not technically colonization.

Scotland has nationalism, but not postcolonialism.  The clans--who would offer resistance to English rule--were well-organized, and easily stamped out.  Robert Burns may have actually been fairly typical of the non-Highland response to the Jacobite rising, if you consider his version of the Anti-Jacobite/anti-war "Ye Jacobites by Name":

YE Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear.	5
What is Right, and What is Wrang, by the law, by the law?
What is Right and what is Wrang by the law?
What is Right, and what is Wrang?
A short sword, and a lang,
A weak arm and a strang, for to draw.	10
What makes heroic strife, famed afar, famed afar?
What makes heroic strife famed afar?
What makes heroic strife?
To whet th’ assassin’s knife,
Or hunt a Parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?	15
Then let your schemes alone, in the state, in the state,
Then let your schemes alone in the state.
Then let your schemes alone,
Adore the rising sun,
And leave a man undone, to his fate.

It might be summed up as "don't rock the boat," or "why can't we be friends?" And perhaps the Jacobites were to blame.  (Come to think of it, Bono from U2 might be the Irish equivalent of Robert Burns in "Ye Jacobites by Name."  Turn that one over for a moment!)  But it seems that there was an element of identity at stake--personal identity, religious identity (for the Catholics), and national identity.

Because it is the clans and the plaids--and the symbols of the past that was so definitively cut off by Culloden--that signify Scottish Nationalism today.  When you look to representations of Irish Nationalism in popular culture, they're not always pretty--Patriot Games, for example.  (Also see Patriot Games and "The Patriot Game.")  But the examples are contemporary.  When we look for movies that celebrate Scotland--and Patriot Games in no way celebrates Ireland, by the way.  I would look to The Secret of Roan Inish or The Field or The Commitments or even The Quiet Man--when we look for celebrations of Scotland, we get Braveheart or Brave.  One historical, one fantasy--both idealizations of a far, far distant past.  Postcolonial, post-British Nationalist Scotland is, in fact, pre-British Scotland.  As in Outlander.

I think that American audiences, and maybe contemporary audiences, want to see oppression opposed.  And so I look for postcolonial perspectives (for so they are called) imposed onto 18th Century Scotland by the author--to ignite my righteous indignation and to satisfy my innate sense of justice.  And sometimes, I find them.