IRISH-AMERICAN PATRIOTISM: THE TRANSATLANTIC POLITICS AND HUMANIST CULTURE OF COLUM MCCANN.

Abstract

This article proposes the novel TransAtlantic, from the IrishAmerican writer Colum McCann, as an example of what Edward Said called a “countermemory.” Such a countermemory facilitates the taking of critical positions against what the British intellectual Tony Judt called the “Washington Consensus:” the ideological ‘pensée unique’ which has dominated the Western world in recent decades, resulting in the substitution of an ethically-informed public conversation by a powerful discourse which prioritises, above all, the values of the so-called marketplace. This article explores how, via his historical novel, his participation as a public intellectual and through his concept of identity as art, McCann gives us a world of different values, values of trans-national and universal solidarity which implicate figures from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama or the Hollywood actor Gabriel Byrne, and are expressed perhaps most radically in the language of what we may call an IrishAmerican “patriotism.”