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.     

“There are thousands who will claim to have been ‘out’ during Easter Week.”: recognising military service in the 1916 Easter Rising

ABSTRACT

Using recently released archives from the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), this article assesses the archival evidence available for assessing how many rebels are recognised as having military service in the Easter Rising of 1916. It argues that while the MSPC contributes towards a more accurate estimation of the number who participated in the Rising, especially in the regions outside Dublin, it does not constitute a definitive figure for rebels active in Easter week. Through an examination of the assessment criteria for military service pensions, it shows how the decision to grant recognised pensionable service for the Rising was affected by geography, politics, legal challenges, the timing of an application, and the subjective assessment of individual assessors.     

The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

The 1892 General Election and the Eclipse of the Liberal Unionists

This article seeks to establish that the 1892 general election marked a major change in the relative positions of the parties in the Unionist alliance. Not only did it reveal the limitations of the Liberal Unionist Party's strategy and appeal in an age of increasingly organised, mass politics, but it also acted as a brake on the ambitions of the new leader of the Liberal Unionists in the house of commons, Joseph Chamberlain. It argues that the Liberal Unionist Party suffered a more severe setback in 1892 than has been recognized hitherto and that Chamberlain's attempts to revive his party both before and after the general election were now prescribed by the reality of the political position in which the party now found itself. Rather than regarding the fluid political circumstances of the 1890s as the outcome of an emerging struggle between increasingly polarised ideologies, it seeks to reinforce the significance of local political circumstances and the efficacy of party management in the growing dominance of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour and the Conservative central organisers.     

The texted and textured construction of Irish identity in the theatrical world of Charleston,South Carolina

On the eve of the American Civil War, the Irish who had immigrated to the United States as a result of the Great Famine were in the process of constructing an Irish working-class identity in Charleston, South Carolina. A “legacy” for such construction had been created in the previous century: those who had come from Ireland then had used public displays of celebration and concomitant rhetorical devices to create the impression that they were willing and eager to assimilate. Their rituals at banquets and other public occasions “set the stage”, so to speak, for the next century's generation of immigrant Irish who also found it necessary to articulate publicly their claim to an ethnic American identity. Theatrical venues and staged performances served the Famine Irish well in this endeavour.     

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.     

Medbh McGuckian's source texts and the challenge to authorial identity in “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”

This article contends that Medbh McGuckian's “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”, from her 2006 volume The Currach Requires No Harbours, offers an example of the poet's direct engagement with and rejection of negative commentary regarding her opaque style and incorporation of material from source texts. This article first presents a contextualising overview of the main strands of criticism of McGuckian's work. Following this, two detailed readings of this poem are offered. The first of these readings foregrounds McGuckian's challenge to the possibility of stable meaning in any linguistic act. The second reading identifies McGuckian's source texts and examines how their content and nature underline her deliberate destabilisation of identity and meaning.     

Embodied intergenerationality: family position,place and masculinity

The aim of this article is to further understandings of performances of family position, place and masculinity in what I call ‘embodied intergenerationality'. I build on research with 38 men across three generations within 19 families of Irish descent to discuss masculinity, intergenerationality and place. These men are living, or have recently lived, in the region known as Tyneside, in the North East of England. Secondary to this contribution is an acknowledgement of the significance of changing positionalities as research insider and participant observer by addressing both intersectional and intergenerational identities involved in geographic research. The article therefore responds to recent work in the discipline which has called for more critical attention towards experiences in the field, with its central contribution – embodied intergenerationality – advancing knowledge of masculinities and place for those who analyse masculinities within the research encounter. This work explores the performances and relationalities of masculinities amongst men of Irish descent on Tyneside as well as between the participants and the researcher. In working with men of different ages both within and between families, I draw conclusions on masculinity, intergenerationality and place: the roles of researcher and participant can become embodied as ‘son' and ‘father' in the research encounter and where the research takes place matters.