Diasporic identifications: exile,nostalgia and the Famine past in Irish and Irish North-American popular fiction, 1871–1891

During the nineteenth century, “exile” became a key term to describe the Irish-diasporic community in North America. More recently, scholars in the fields of diaspora studies and Irish studies have described this community as a “victim diaspora” with connotations of forced expulsion, exile, and nostalgia for the homeland. Moreover, among scholars and within the Irish-American community, the notion exists that the Great Irish Famine (1845–1851) constitutes the Irish-American “charter myth”, that it was the starting point of an Irish-American identity. This article sheds a different light on these (self-)identifications by discussing the concepts of origin myth, exile and nostalgia and also considers the concept of diasporic belonging in the context of Irish and Irish North-American works of popular “Famine fiction” written between 1871 and 1891. Consequently, the impact of these late nineteenth-century literary considerations on present-day conceptualisations of the Irish-American community as a victim diaspora are discussed.     

Approaching a folklore archive: the Irish Folklore Commission and the memory of the Great Famine

Using the Irish Folklore Commission's centenary survey of local accounts of the Great Famine (1845–50), this article posits a tripartite taxonomy of collective memory: the “global,” the “popular” and the “local.” Global memory was structured by meta‐narratives, the explanatory accounts of the Famine derived from the Catholic Church and nationalist political organisations. Local memory dealt with named individuals and places. The intermediate level of popular memory drew on both the local and the global (although the Church's interpretation of the famine had proved more acceptable among the rural, landowning farmers who made up the majority of the Commission's informants), but also on folk narrative tradition to create a coherent system of representation in which motifs were replicated over a large area (and over time).     

The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars

The importance of Ireland to an understanding of Oscar Wilde has been the subject of contentious discussion in recent years. For one group of critics Wilde has been considered “a militant Irish republican”, an Irish “terrorist by another name”, whose literary practices resembled those of “guerrilla warfare”, an ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, and committed Irish nationalist whose work is suffused with references to Ireland and the Irish Question, very influenced by his Irish background and political views, possibly shaped by a genuine interest in and awareness of Irish folklore and the Irish oral tradition, and deeply engaged with issues of Irish identity and culture. For an opposing set of critics Wilde should at best be considered a “reluctant” Irish patriot, who referenced his Irish “identity” only when it suited him commercially, was more interested in exploiting intellectual fashions and fads than making genuine political points, was a shallow thinker in most areas of life and certainly didn’t use his writing to pursue Irish nationalist issues, was probably more of a British imperialist than an Irish nationalist, knew precious little about Irish folklore or Irish oral traditions, and his works contain few if any references to Irish issues or themes. The differences between these two interpretive communities certainly seem quite large, and these differences have been emphasised in a disputatious manner which has shed more heat than light on the messy matter of Wilde’s national identity. In this article I want to begin to clear up some of the misunderstandings I think have crept into this critical dispute and suggest fruitful ways in which opposing critics can come together in if not harmony then perhaps a less acrimonious, more productive way.     

The Irish rent … and mended: transitional textual communities in nineteenth-century America

In this paper, traditional folkloric forms that were ritualised and practised in pre-Famine Ireland are examined. So, too, are the strategies that storytellers employed in disseminating the imaginative aspects of the oral tradition to their audiences. Following the disruption of the storytelling tradition precipitated by the Great Famine and emigration, the fabric of Irish storytelling lay threadbare, both in Ireland and abroad. Of interest is the fact that in America the less “heroic” and more subtle strands of Irish folklore resurfaced in the theatrical venues that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, namely, minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. By the turn of twentieth century, the Irish were responding to other “heroic” depictions of themselves, not only with protestation but also with “tongue-in-cheek” laughter. Their grounding in a variety of folkloric texts in Ireland enabled them to transition to multiple kinds of accommodation and expressive resistance.     

Coarse cloth and clerical tailoring: negotiating Boston-Irish cultural imperatives in the Famine era

Recent calls for updated approaches to the Irish-American historical experience recommend more systematic attention to complexities inherent in Irish immigration and settlement. They also seek further contextualisation of the history of the Irish in the USA within broader North American, transatlantic and global frameworks. The need to review and potentially reappraise longstanding, essentialist perspectives on Irish arrival and assimilation is equally evident. This article expands on foundational narrative histories of the Boston Irish to re-examine Famine-era settlement and contending agendas within spheres of religious affiliation and political activism. The character and evolution of Irish-American ethnic identity, and the tragic imprint of the Famine under consideration here pave the way for new readings of traditional orthodoxies. Collectively, they reveal Boston's Irish historical terrain to be more complex than the record currently suggests.     

Exploring textures of Irish America: a new perspective on the Fenian invasion of Canada

Within an Irish nationalist history, for those at “home” and especially for members of the Irish American diaspora, venerating heroic rebels and recollecting attempted insurrections are quintessential narratives used to define Ireland's turbulent past. However, on the fringes in that regard has been the American-based Fenian Brotherhood's attempted invasion of Canada in 1866. Arguably a successful effort – although a very brief one, due to the American authorities' obstruction – its international camber and transnational implications may have kept this history apart from premier narratives of an Irish nationalist past. This paper suggests that although in the long term the Fenian invasion of Canada was largely expunged from the Irish/Irish American nationalist canon, initially it was retained, for a short time at least, in popular expressions of Irishness. By turning to “texts” that contemporaneously venerated the Fenians' efforts and uncovering transnational undertones in the process, this paper offers new suggestions concerning the changing textures of Irish America.     

The weird tales,spicy detectives,and startling stories of Irish-America: Irish characters in American pulp magazines

The pulp magazines that dominated early twentieth-century American popular culture helped shape popular understandings of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, masked hero) were defined in part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. They played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilisation and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic American century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the USA.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

A sense of an ending: late-generation ethnicity and Irish America

Irish America today is at a stage of “late generation ethnicity,” designating an ethnic formation that reaches back many generations in the US and is not being significantly replenished from the country of origin. This is not necessarily a terminal state of ethnic affairs, but it is a transitional one, and the analytical challenge is to identify and understand the features and implications of “lateness,” what the sense of an ending means in the Irish American case. This essay will explore this question, drawing on field study among Irish communities in Chicago, and also consider some of the differences in worldview among Irish-Americans, particularly as these pertain to matters of immigration reform and undocumented Irish in the US.     

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.     

Antiquarianism and abduction: charles vallancey as harbinger of indo-european linguistics

Scholars generally dismiss the ideas of the eighteenth-century founder of the Royal Irish Academy, Charles Vallancey, who argued for links between ancient Irish, Phoenician, and Scythian languages and cultures. Vallancey's antiquarian writings were widely known at the time and impacted upon thinkers such as William Jones, who first correctly articulated the links between Indo-European languages. Earlier, Vallancey had hypothesized similar links and a “common source” of world languages, relying on Irish origin legends and supposed similarities between Ireland and the “Orient.” Though inaccurate, his ideas spurred fuller investigations, prompting philologers in new directions. The father of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, argued for the value of speculative reasoning, outlining the logic of discovery. For Peirce “abduction” is the beginning of the scientific method, the formation of a hypothesis. Reading Vallancey's speculations as abductive suggestions accounts for his prominence at the time and asserts his influence in the history of philology and linguistics.     

Ribbonmen and radicals: the cultivation of Irishness and the promotion of active citizenship in mid-Victorian Glasgow

A secular, at times radical, tradition of organising and representing Irishness in Scotland had been moulded before 1861. However, in that year, local branches of a new Dublin-centred organisation, the National Brotherhood of St Patrick (NBSP), appeared, offering a new sense of purpose. As this article will argue, the Brotherhood probably had at its core local Ribbonmen (some of them in all probability with “advanced nationalist” views in that post-1848 period) and they were now keen to engage in an “open” subscriber association less obviously prone to the accusations of conspiracy which their previous clandestine solidarity had generated. The NBSP and a later association, the Irish National Association of Scotland, provided opportunities for a more public leadership to emerge and gave Irish-Scots workers important associational experience. In the longer term, this associational activity represents a key stage in the development of a social radical discourse, later so characteristic of Irish Home Rule politics in Scotland.     

“Un-Irish and un-Catholic”: sports,physical education and girls’ schooling

ABSTRACT

This article charts the development of physical education and sports in girls’ schools in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It notes how early developments were undoubtedly influenced by traditions and practices in English public schools, with games such as hockey and cricket becoming popular in Irish girls’ schools. The “Swedish” gymnastics movement, which became popular the 1870s, led to the introduction of callisthenics and drill in many Irish schools. By the turn of the twentieth century, drill and dance displays had become a highlight in the convent school calendar of events. Official policy following the introduction of the Revised Programme for National Schools (1900) placed unprecedented emphasis on the importance of physical education. While many embraced these developments, others were critical of girls’ involvement in competitive games and sports, particularly those considered “foreign” and “un-Irish”. Drawing on convent school archives, official sources, and newspaper articles, this article provides new insights into the evolution of physical education and sports in Irish girls’ schools.     

Negotiations of Irish identity in the wake of terrorism: the case of the Irish in Birmingham 1973–74

This article explores the Irish migrant experience in Birmingham during and in the wake of terrorist campaigns carried out in Britain between 1969 and 1975 and attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Beginning with a discussion of the competencies with which Irishness was associated at the close of the 1960s in England, many of which were hinged on a notion of the Irish predisposition towards violence, the article continues on to take the political, cultural and religious “temperature” of the Irish community in Birmingham between 1969 and 1975, and follows on with a discussion of the specific strategies sought out by Irish immigrants to come to terms with the effect of events such as the “Birmingham Bombings” on their daily lives. Principle findings that emerge from the study indicate that IRA terrorism forced the Irish in Birmingham to engage with and adopt a number of distinct linguistic and cultural strategies in the post-1974 period, the cultivation of which indefinitely altered their relationship with Ireland as “home”, their visibility in the public British sphere and their associational patterns and practices within the migrant enclave.     

Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.     

A portrait of the chief as a general paralytic: rhetorics of sexual pathology in the Parnell split*

The O’Shea trial and the ensuing fall of Charles Stewart Parnell occupy an epochal position in accounts of the sexual politics of Victorian Britain and the development of Irish nationalism. This article examines how the “Parnell myth” came to serve (and was constructed from the outset) as a symbolic edifice within which anxieties concerning the relationship between Irishness and sexuality could be foregrounded and negotiated. In particular, it will analyse Timothy Healy’s influential post-split denunciations of Parnell, and the rhetoric of sexual contagion through which they were conducted, a campaign which set the discursive terms of twentieth-century mainstream Irish nationalism. Through an analysis of Healy’s post-split journalism, contemporary political memoirs by T.P. O’Connor, and a range of nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric texts, this article will highlight the ways in which discourses of sexual health were used to reshape Parnell’s public persona at the level of gender and ethno-national affiliation. In doing so, it will illustrate how a sensitivity to the history of medicine can enrich critical understandings of a crucial moment in the political and cultural history of Ireland, and shed fresh light on the vexed collocation of Irish identity and sexual purity which the Parnell split reinforced.     

The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century

"A classic case where out-migration interacted with many other geographical phenomena is provided by rural Ireland in the nineteenth century. The apparent turning point was the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the areas with the greatest suffering from starvation did not necessarily show the greatest population decline, suggesting that other forces were active. Considerable economic and social changes were already taking place before the Famine: fertility was being reduced, later marriage was becoming established and considerable emigration was already taking place. Immediately after the Famine those areas which had been hardest hit often reverted to pre-Famine conditions and did not show strong population decline until the 1870s. The Famine was a most serious event, but the modernization of Irish rural life, which linked emigration with changes in family structure, agriculture and population numbers, was more important in bringing about geographical change."     

On national dress and the problem of authenticity in Ulysses

This article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

International Celebrities and Irish Identity in the United States and Beyond, 1840–1860

This article uses Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to analyze how a relatively small Irish-American bourgeoisie legitimated its authority over the broader Irish ethnic community during the antebellum era. As part of the massive wave of immigrants that left Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, the Irish Catholic middle class was saddled with a dually marginal status. On the one hand, its members maintained only tenuous authority over the hundreds of thousands of peasants and laborers that made up the bulk of the Irish-American community. On the other hand, they were deeply distrusted by important elements of native American society that associated them with the supposed superstition, laziness, and violence of their lower-class fellow countrymen. The bourgeoisie responded by using the celebrity status of Irish political exiles to achieve the twin project of simultaneously obscuring intra-ethnic class tensions while proving its suitability for American domestic politics. Famous personalities and the editors who lauded them employed celebrity to consolidate their leadership status in America.