Pure Genius: Guinness Consumption and Irish Identity

Abstract

As an Irish person and as a member of the diasporic space myself, and, it needs to be noted, as a Guinness drinker?I have often asked myself, Just what is the attachment to Guinness drinking for me or for any other Irish person living in Ireland or outside?'' This is not an idle question. The act of consuming that dis tinctive national product Guinness is intimately bound up with Irish identity. Further, the role that Guinness and its marketing and advertising producers play in evoking Irishness and in-group membership as a strategy constitutes a com plex and commercially potent element of Irish identity worldwide. In the late 1990s, I undertook a project of comparing the consumption of Guinness as an advertising text by Irish consumers living in Ireland with the meanings given to such texts by Irish immigrants living in London and New York. The findings make it clear that Guinness, its advertising, and the rituals and myths that surround it, play a part in the imagining of a place immigrants call home. As it creates a Guinness of its imagination, the audience effective ly moves the product outside the pub space and outside the text, and in doing so, gives the process of consumption new dimensions, values, and uses. The reader of the text or the consumer of the product is not simply responding to the textual content or the market-led strategies employed by the producer; rather, he or she is usually employing numerous intellectual strategies to read, consume, usurp, critique, and play with these messages.