Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Mathieu W. Billings Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, edited by Bryan Albin Giemza, pp. 223. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. $60. Over the past twenty-five years, the history of the Irish in the American South has emerged as a dynamic field of study. From academic claims that Southern culture was essentially “Celtic,” to more popular conceptions of mythical Irish Southerners—such as Gone with the Wind’s Gerald O’Hara—the implications are clear: Irish Americans would have felt more at home in the South than [End Page 157] anywhere else in the United States. Yet thorny questions over “Irishness” have blurred some of these assumptions. As one contributor to Rethinking the Irish in the American South notes, “how much can a staunchly Protestant society . . . have in common with the country that until recently was seen as perhaps the most Roman Catholic in the world?” This interdisciplinary and well-edited collection not only challenges the notion that the Irish were somehow “natural” southerners; it proposes a framework for future exploits in the field. Rather than searching for Irish “influences” in the American South, editor Bryan Giemza challenges scholars to “distinguish between analogous experience, shared history, and common cause, and to consider how and why these things are so often muddled together.” With these distinctions in mind, readers should begin this collection at the end, with Conor O’Callaghan’s “Smoke ’N’ Guns”—a literary experience akin to having dessert first. The author’s often-humorous prose and sobering poetry serve as reminders that even today, residents of the South of Ireland and the American South indeed share analogous experiences. Here, this native of the Irish borderlands who later settled in North Carolina makes connections that are compelling, yet hardly romantic. From the tobacco-based, smoke-ridden economies of Dundalk and Winston-Salem, to the violence and intimidation of the IRA and the KKK, O’Callaghan sees two societies, “where the border really does cross backyards and the Civil War keeps on happening in the hapless imaginations of certain aging men.” In “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” O’Callaghan’s analogous experiences in both “Souths” reveal possibilities and expose limitations of projecting a shared history and common cause upon these two similar, yet often very different, societies. Following “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” many of the remaining chapters offer a range of historical, musical, and literary analyses, which explore Giemza’s second analytical category: shared histories. As Patrick Griffin observes in his essay on “Irish Migration to the Colonial South,” the paths of Irish emigrants and the American South first overlapped during the seventeenth century. Yet due to a longstanding teleological lexicon employed by scholars, such terms as “Irish,” “Scotch-Irish,” and even “South” have obscured this shared history. To contemporaries, “Irish” meant any emigrant from Ireland, and the colonial “South” might well have included such places as Barbados, Monserrat, and Bermuda. Emily Kader’s “Shared Traditions,” a study of the roots of Appalachian ballads and whiskey songs, issues a similar warning about anachronistic nationalist categories. By cross-examining secondary sources and contemporary lyrics, she argues that “Irish influences cannot be discarded,” but folk music from Ireland was itself “a hybrid of various international folkloristic strains.” And in a chapter on shared literary histories in the twentieth century, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso explores the “transatlantic friendship” of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Here, the author pushes the [End Page 158] boundaries of the Irish and Southern literary renaissances “beyond the Yeats-Synge partnership” to the strong female characters of Welty and Bowen, who not only upset typecasts but underscored the theme of individual rebirth evident in both literary movements. Overall, such exemplary works indicate that there are vast opportunities for scholars to explore the shared histories between the Irish and the American South. As to Giemza’s distinction of common cause, more than half of the chapters in this collection address the issues of race and whiteness. Noel Ignatiev’s argument that America’s Irish “became white” when they ceased to “be green” is nearly twenty years old, but it...