Dublin, 1916 … Phoenix, 2016

Abstract

It's a long, long way to Dublin from Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Billing itself as Small Slice of Ireland in the Desert, the Arizona Irish Cultural Center (AZICC) attempts to bridge that distance by providing residents of Phoenix and the surrounding area access to range of resources related to Ireland and the Irish diaspora. Located on Central Avenue near downtown, the AZICC complex is a striking architectural anomaly surrounded by bleak mid-century modern office buildings, luxury high-rise condominiums, the Buckminster Fuller-inspired Phoenix Central Library, and the equally unexpected Japanese Friendship Garden of Phoenix. If these environs are decidedly un-Irish, the complex itself has attempted to recreate the look and feel of the Emerald Isle with a replica of a Famine-era Irish cottage, a Great Hall containing a fireplace constructed of stones from County Clare, and, towering over all this, the McClelland Irish Library, modeled on a twelfth-century Norman Castle. These simulacral structures, with their evocative forms and quaint touches, promise to transport visitors to a different world, far from the heat and hustle of downtown Phoenix, where they might connect or reconnect with another way of life, another set of values. Like many other Irish cultural centers around the United States, the AZICC promotes the heritage of Celtic peoples by giving place to a full calendar of cultural programming: language courses, book discussions, genealogy tutorials, film screenings, dance performances, music showcases, traveling exhibitions, and even a Bloomsday Beerfest. There is no doubt that Irish cultural centers provide a valuable service to Irish immigrants, Irish Americans, and their local communities with such programming. And yet these activities and their settings also raise a number of questions for Irish Americans about the preservation and transmission of their cultural heritage: what events in, images of, and ideas about Ireland should be sanctioned? How should the past be reconstructed or reimagined in relation to the present? What objects, narratives, and identities should be recognized as Irish? How should these images of and narratives about Ireland be integrated into the cultural life of the United States? To these we might add the more pointed question of how Irish cultural centers in the United States should negotiate the longstanding divides between Catholic and Protestant, Republic and United Kingdom, cultural nationalism and historical revisionism that have shaped and continue to shape any understanding of what Irish culture is. A significant hazard, of course, is that in their efforts to protect and promote Irish cultural heritage these centers become little more than theme parks of uncritical nostalgia, remote outposts of the heritage industry, where a sanitized and simplified version of Irish culture is presented to their membership and the general public. The centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising, which took place not just across Ireland, but across the United States and the rest of the globe last year, have brought a new urgency to these questions about the preservation and transmission of Irish cultural heritage. In Ireland more than 1,800 official events were scheduled to mark the occasion, events ranging from poetry readings at local libraries and art installations in regional museums to the reopening of the renovated Kilmainham Courthouse and a massive military parade through the streets of Dublin on Easter Sunday. In the century since 1916, the Rising has become central to Irish national memory. Many conceive it to be among the most important, if not indeed the most important, event in the history of the island, marking the beginning of the end of British occupation and spiritual birth of an independent nation. But many in Ireland also expressed concern that official commemorations would offer a one-dimensional heroic narrative of 1916 and still others announced worries that such commemorations of the Rising might reawaken old tensions and animosities. …