Non-Nationalizing the Story of Ireland: Transnationalism and Narrative in Oona Frawley's Flight

Abstract

Oona Frawley's 2014 novel Flight interrogates Irish cultural responses to transnational labour since the 1990s. The novel's protagonist is a Zimbabwean refugee named Sandrine, whose pregnant body threatens an exclusionary, racial definition of Irish identity as it is legally codified by the 2004 ‘Citizenship Referendum’. The novel juxtaposes the contrasting experiences of transnational migration in the upper and lower circuits of global capital, and traces the emergence of Sandrine's voice as it develops and impinges on the narrative through solidarity with other transnational voices. Flight thus narrativizes the cultural and social processes by which transnational experience might re-narrate Ireland as a site of meaning.