Irish-American Autobiography


Book Description

Irish-American Autobiography opens a new window on the shifting meanings of Irishness over the twentieth century, by looking at a range of works that have never before been considered as a distinct body of literature. Opening with celebrity memoirs from athletes like boxer John L. Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mack - written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them - later chapters trace the many tensions, often unspoken, registered by Irish Americans who've told their life stories. New York saloonkeepers and South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, setting a pattern of being on the outside looking in. Even the classic 1950s TV comedy The Honeymooners speaks to the urban Irish origins, and the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Catholicism, so key to the identity of earlier generations of Irish Americans, has also evolved. One chapter looks at the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers, and others reveal how traditional Irish Catholic ideas of the guardian angel and pilgrimage have evolved and stayed potent down to our own time. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connection - documenting an "ethnic fade" that never quite happened.




Plural Identities--singular Narratives


Book Description

Northern Ireland is frequently characterised in terms of a two traditions paradigm, representing the conflict as being between two discrete cultures. Demonstrating the reductionist nature of this argument, this book highlights the complexity of reality.




Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland


Book Description

An analysis of UK state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries as an aspect of British military counterinsurgency during the Troubles.




Colonial Consequences


Book Description




Irish/ness Is All Around Us


Book Description

Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.




Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008


Book Description

When Irish culture and economics underwent rapid changes during the Celtic Tiger Years, Anne Enright, Colum McCann and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne began writing. Now that period of Irish history has closed, this study uncovers how their writing captured that unique historical moment. By showing how Ní Dhuibhne's novels act as considered arguments against attempts to disavow the past, how McCann's protagonists come to terms with their history and how Enright's fiction explores connections and relationships with the female body, Susan Cahill's study pinpoints common concerns for contemporary Irish writers: the relationship between the body, memory and history, between generations, and between past and present. Cahill is able to raise wider questions about Irish culture by looking specifically at how writers engage with the body. In exploring the writers' concern with embodied histories, related questions concerning gender, race, and Irishness are brought to the fore. Such interrogations of corporeality alongside history are imperative, making this a significant contribution to ongoing debates of feminist theory in Irish Studies.




Canada and Ireland


Book Description

Canadians have been involved in, intrigued by, and frustrated with Irish politics, from the Fenian Raids of the 1860s to the present day. Yet, until now, scholarly interest in Canada’s relationship with Ireland has focused largely on the years leading to the consolidation of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. Relying on extensive archival research, Canada and Ireland authoritatively assesses political relations between the two countries, from partition to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It reveals how domestic controversies and international concerns have moulded Ottawa’s response to developments such as Ireland’s neutrality in the Second World War, its unsettled relationship with the Commonwealth, and the always contentious issue of Irish unification. In Canada and Ireland, Philip J. Currie painstakingly investigates the origins, trials, and successes of the sometimes turbulent connection between the two countries to shed new light on an important relationship.




Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884-1938


Book Description

This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It analyses how both national movements sought to refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes and create more prideful (and highly gendered) images of their respective nations. Drawing on English-, Irish-, and Hebrew-language archival sources, Aidan Beatty traces how male Irish nationalists sought to remake themselves as a proudly Gaelic-speaking race, rooted both in their national past as well as in the spaces and agricultural soil of Ireland. On the one hand, this was an attempt to refute contemporary British colonial notions that they were somehow a racially inferior or uncomfortably hybridised people. But this is also presented in the light of the general history of European nationalism; nationalist movements across Europe often crafted romanticised images of the nation’s past and Irish nationalism was thus simultaneously European and postcolonial. It is this that makes Irish nationalism similar to Zionism, a movement that sought to create a more idealized image of the Jewish past that would disprove contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes.




Irish Nationalism in Canada


Book Description

According to conventional historical wisdom, Irish nationalism in Canada was a marginal phenomenon - overshadowed by the more powerful movement in the United States and eclipsed in Canada by the Orange Order. The nine contributors in this book argue otherwise - and in doing so make a major and original contribution to our understanding of the Irish experience in Canada and the place of Irish-Canadian nationalism within an international context. Focusing on the period 1820 to 1920, they examine political, religious, and cultural expressions of Irish-Canadian nationalism as it responded to Irish events and Canadian politics. They also look at tensions within the movement between those who argued that Ireland should share the same freedom that Canada enjoyed within the British Empire and revolutionary republicans who wanted to liberate both Ireland and Canada from the yoke of British imperialism. Irish Nationalism in Canada sheds light on questions such as transference of old world political traditions into North America, the dynamics of ethno-religious conflict, and state responses to a revolutionary minority within an ethno-religious group. Contributors include Donald Harman Akenson (Queen's University, Kingston), Sean Farrell (Northern Illinois University), Mark G. McGowan (St Michael's College, University of Toronto), Frederick J. McEvoy (Independent Scholar), Michael Peterman (Trent University), Garth Stevenson (Brock University), Peter M. Toner (University of New Brunswick), Rosalyn Trigger (University of Aberdeen), and David A. Wilson (University of Toronto).