Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.     

Unpacking the discursive Irish woman immigrant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland

From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, Irish migrants journeyed to Newfoundland to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative Newfoundland cod fishery. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay explores constructions of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood as articulated by local British officials, the Catholic Church, and male-centred family history narratives. These discourses located women at the margins of early settlement experiences or rendered them invisible altogether. Yet Irish-Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within this discursive terrain, finding spaces for identity construction in the disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experiences. Some resided more immediately under the hegemonic gaze and struggled to break free from dominant narratives. But most became essential workers in household fishing production outside the capital of St John's, and their vital contribution as shore crews gave them considerable power and authority both in their households and in the broader community. Performing demanding physical work on stages and flakes (elevated wooden structures) or in gardens and fields, carrying out various economic activities in their own right, they were hardly the unproductive, unruly bodies of British official discourse or the passive flowers of civilisation narrated from Catholic pulpits. And far from being absent from the migration story, they were central players in community formation and the economic life of the island. In this historical context, proximity to/distance from hegemonic knowledge production created variations in identity construction within a group often represented in the literature as homogeneous and powerless.     

Translating the Vatican: Paul Cullen,power and language in nineteenth-century Ireland

This paper examines how one of the most influential figures in nineteenth-century Ireland, Cardinal Paul Cullen, used language and translation to further his career and his vision for the Catholic Church in this period. It shows how Cullen's language skills served him throughout his life in his role as an agent and liaison, a linking figure between different worlds. The paper demonstrates how Cullen's linguistic abilities and translations gave an early jump-start to his career and subsequently expanded his sphere of influence from the confines of the Vatican to the vast expanses of the Catholic English-speaking world. Through language, Cullen positioned himself as a vital conduit for Irish–Vatican relations and came to be the dominant force in Irish Catholicism for almost thirty years, connecting Ireland to Rome and translating his ambitions and those of the Vatican into reality in Ireland. The paper will demonstrate how language was a forceful tool for change and an instrument of power when wielded by Cullen.     

Rewriting the history of Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.     

Irish language education and the national ideal: the dynamics of nationalism in Northern Ireland

Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland conflict in the late 1960s, Irish nationalism has been identified as a prominent force in the political culture of the state. Recent studies have suggested, however, that the ‘Nationalist’ population has become increasingly content within the new political framework created by the peace process and the aspiration for Irish unity diminished. In placing the Northern Ireland situation within the theoretical framework of nationalism, this paper will analyse how these changing priorities have been possible. Through an analysis of Irish language study in Northern Ireland's schools, the paper will examine how the political ideals espoused by the nationalist Sinn Féin Party reflected the priorities of the ‘nationalist community’. It will be contended that the relationship between the ideology and ‘the people’ is much more complex than is often allowed for and that educational inequalities are a significant contributing factor to this.