In his book, On the Shores of Politics, Jacques Rancière argues that the Western Platonic project of utopian politics has been based upon 'an anti-maritime polemic'. The treacherous boundaries of the political are imagined as island shores, riverbanks, and abysses. Its enemies are the mutinous waves and the drunken sailor. 'In order to save politics', writes Rancière, 'it must be pulled aground among the shepherds'. And yet, as Rancière points out, this always entails the paradox that to found a new utopian island, safe from the perils of sailors and the sea, means crossing the sea once more. Margaret Cohen, in an article surveying the turn towards maritime themes in twenty-first century literary criticism, argues that literary scholars have historically fixed their gazes upon land, with an effort 'so spectacular that it might be called hydrophasia'. But that hydrophasia appears to be ebbing, and the new attention given to the sea, as what Hester Blum calls 'a proprioceptive point of inquiry', in Oceanic Studies, the New Atlantic Studies, and the Archipelagic paradigm gathering strength in British and Irish Studies, promises some degree of liberation from the terra firma overdeterminations of nationalism within literary studies.

When P.H. Pearse proclaimed 'The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic' on Easter Monday 1916, he acknowledged that Ireland of the Rising was 'supported by her exiled children in America'. What assistance did these "exiled children" provide, and how did people in America react to the Easter Rising? This Scholarcast considers these questions by focusing on three individuals central to America's involvement and response. John Devoy, an exile in New York and keeper of the Fenian flame, raised money for the rebel cause and knew several leaders from their visits to America. Joyce Kilmer, who considered himself Irish (though his actual heritage brought that assertion into question), wrote both journalistic articles and poetry about the Rising and its significance for American readers. Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president in 1916 and candidate for re-election that November, sought to avoid international problems with domestic political implications, deliberately keeping his distance from a matter he considered internal to Great Britain. This Scholarcast probes the Easter Rising's American connections.