Going out but not away: Resilient subjects and semicolonial everyday life in Joyce’s “An Encounter”

This article reads James Joyce’s “An Encounter” as a narrative of semicolonial resilience. It argues that the story does not simply oppose movement to paralysis, or resistance to domination, but traces the ordinary tactics through which boys learn to survive overlapping regimes of school, church, empire, masculinity, and sexual threat. “Semicolonial” names Ireland’s in-between position within the British imperial order, where authority is mediated through local institutions and everyday conduct. Focusing on truancy, urban movement, encounters with strangers, and the riverbank meeting with the “queer old josser”, the article identifies two recurrent manoeuvres: tactical collaboration and strategic silence or non-uptake. These tactics keep the boys minimally safe, but they also reproduce the conditions that constrain them. By reading resilience and paralysis together, the article shows how Joyce’s story helps postcolonial studies attend to micro-practices of survival beyond resistance-centred paradigms, while foregrounding the gendered, sexualized, and ethnicized limits of semicolonial agency.