Irish Diaspora Research Articles

The Northern Subject Rule in the Irish diaspora

Abstract This article examines the Northern Subject Rule in the Irish diaspora, studying letters from two generations of an Ulster emigrant family in 19th-century New Zealand. The study shows that the concord pattern frequently used by the parent generation almost completely disappeared in the language of their New Zealand-born children. The results suggest that the children skipped the stage of “extreme variability” that is claimed to be characteristic of the language of the first colony-born immigrants in the new-dialect formation framework (Trudgill 2004). This study aims to contribute to work on early New Zealand English grammar (e.g. Hundt 2012, 2015a, 2015b; Hundt and Szmrecsanyi 2012) and it adds new insights into the formation of New Zealand English. It, furthermore, contributes to research on dialect contact between Irish English and other colonial varieties of English as well as new-dialect formation.

Shanty singing and the Irish Atlantic: Identity and hybridity in the musical imagination of Stan Hugill

In three major book-length contributions to the field during the 1960s and 1970s, leading folklorist Stan Hugill developed a peculiar understanding of the role of Ireland and Irish music in the international shanty tradition. Born on the Wirral peninsula, 15 miles from Liverpool, Hugill was deeply influenced by the port’s experience as a hub for the Irish diaspora. This article will examine Hugill’s characterisation of ‘Irish’ elements (lyrical, musical and performative) within selected examples, and will suggest that this representation of Irish music as central to the shanty repertoire engages with a range of insights emerging from Liverpool’s status as a key location within the spatial imagination of the Atlantic archipelago.

Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, ed. Niall Whelehan

The quest to refresh the writing of history continues unabated. During the last ten years, ‘transnational’ has found favour as an approach and is now to be applied to Ireland. This application builds on long study of the Irish diaspora and continuing arguments about the possible exceptionalism of Irish developments, as evident in the thrust of the recent Festschrift for Sean Connolly (Ourselves Alone? [2016]). This present collection, edited by Niall Whelehan, mixes the narrowly focused—the Piedmontese reformer Cavour’s observations on what might be learnt from England and Ireland, and responses to Russian rule over Poland during the 1860s—with pieces that encompass several localities and longer periods. Efforts to show how the transnational differs from sustained comparison may not always convince. The editor suggests that early modernists handling Ireland were precocious transnationalists; particularly as they boldly crossed the Atlantic, but also, arguably, thanks to an earlier preoccupation with the general crisis of the seventeenth century (which took them into central and south America and the Pacific). From the eighteenth century, the editor contends, explicit comparison between Irish and non-Irish experiences lessened, with the famine of the 1840s a notable casualty. Yet surprising exceptions are unearthed: Nicholas Mansergh’s Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution (1940) and (much less familiar) a survey by the leading Irish historian F.S.L. Lyons. However, Lyons’s Internationalism in Europe, published in 1963, did not compare Ireland directly with the rest of Europe, despite the author being well placed to do so.

Usability testing of the Letters of 1916 Digital Edition

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the process and implications of usability testing a prototype version of the Letters of 1916 Digital Edition.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the testing, the lessons learned and how those lessons informed the subsequent redesign of the site.FindingsResults imply that a majority of users, even digital humanists, were not looking for a unique and specialised interface, but assumed – and preferred – a user experience that reflects common search systems. Although the audience for digital humanities sites is becoming increasingly diverse, the needs of the different user groups may be more similar than had previously been assumed.Research limitations/implicationsThe usability test employed 11 participants, five of whom were coded as “general public”. Four of these five had previously volunteered to transcribe and upload letters. This meant that they were already familiar with the project and with the Letters of 1916 Transcription Desk. However, their prior involvement was a result of their genuine interest in the site, thus ensuring that their interactions during testing were more realistic.Practical implicationsThe lesson learned may be useful for the Digital Editions of future crowdsourced humanities projects.Originality/valueLetters of 1916 is the first crowdsourced humanities project in Ireland. The theme of the project is topical, emotive and socially important in Ireland and among Irish diaspora today. The project’s content has been created by the “ordinary citizens of Ireland” and they are likely to be the major users of the Digital Edition. The study explores how the Digital Edition can support these users, while also facilitating the range of traditional scholars and digital humanities researchers.

Dublin, 1916 … Phoenix, 2016

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. …

Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal

Reviewed by: Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal Matthew A. Schownir Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870, by Marguérite Corporaal, pp. 303. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017. $34.95. Though the Famine has long been a seminal topic of Irish Studies, a vexing misconception persists that Irish literature written during and immediately after the Famine dared not mention the cataclysmic event. The notion that survivors found the Famine too existentially traumatic an episode to recount even in fiction is an understandable, if false, assumption. In Relocated Memories, Marguérite [End Page 150] Corporaal not only sets the record straight on this matter, but recontextualizes midcentury famine fiction as a transnational exercise for Irish writers and readers to memorialize and cope with the tragedy. Drawing on an impressively broad collection of novels and stories written in Ireland, Britain, and North America, Corporaal demonstrates the extent to which Irish writers embraced the Famine as a subject of Irish storytelling and identity. Indeed, famine fiction became a site of collective memory where Irish writers who experienced the event could employ “specific narrative and generic techniques to circumvent certain agonizing details” and thus mediate and reconfigure its trauma for readers. For example, the survivor and writer Mary Ann Hoare often wrote tangentially of emotionally painful episodes in her 1851 collection of stories Shamrock Leaves. Rather than make her main protagonists describe the death of an infant or a family’s slow starvation through first-person descriptions, Hoare instead opts for her narration to make vague, passing mentions of these events in order to displace and assuage the visceral memories of characters in the broader narrative. By decentering the experientiality of particularly gruesome and emotionally taxing moments in her story, Hoare attempts to temper literary accounts of famine suffering for her Irish audience. Other authors used similar narrative methods to accomplish the same goal. The narrator of a story published in 1847 laments that the protagonist’s sufferings are “the most painful part of my sad narrative and I must hasten over it.” This is not to say that fiction writers completely avoided exposition of the Famine’s human toll. Rather, Corporaal locates in the stylistic choices of Irish authors a desire to practice emotional triage through their works, demonstrating the fluidity of famine memory and how it is expressed in fragmented ways. Corporaal argues that although trauma plays a crucial role in shaping these narratives of famine memory, it also speaks to broader notions of how the Irish made sense of postfamine politics, identity, and of their tenuous place in the Atlantic world. Borrowing Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” she examines how Irish writers who did not directly experience the Famine used mediated memories to construct their own narratives and make sense of the event from a geographic or temporal distance. This is especially evident with texts written in British Canada and the United States at the time. Corporaal notes that American Irish writers tended to use different narrative techniques, descriptions, or themes than authors in Ireland. For instance, when using the Famine as a setting or a plot device American Irish authors would omit descriptions of their characters’ emaciated bodies. In contrast, stories written in Ireland often dwelt heavily on the physical aspects of starvation to reflect the experientiality of the author’s recollections. North American writers also portrayed Irish pastoral settings in romanticized, Edenic terms that diverged from the desolated landscapes emphasized by writers in Ireland. The cumulative effect of these differences [End Page 151] is a distinctly “diasporic memory” produced by texts that enshrines a softer, more hopeful, and nostalgic image of Ireland that informed New World recollections of the Famine years. This would seem to be Corporaal’s most prominent contribution: to understand how famine memory was produced and experienced by the Irish diaspora, it must be examined in a transnational context. The rough and irregular shape of famine memory stems from its bifurcated roots on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, it is a product of two mutually informed, but characteristically distinct, worlds. To reinforce this point...

Inspiring Ireland: Building Digital History, Making Shared Memory

Inspiring Ireland:Building Digital History, Making Shared Memory Caroline McGee (bio) and Natalie Harrower (bio) Speaking to the challenges that faced historians in commemorating the Irish revolutionary years, Professor Roy Foster's 2015 lecture in honor of Edmund Burke noted that a more complex understanding of history is inextricably bound up with the shifting nature of human memory.1 In developing his theme, Foster quoted memory-studies theorist Pierre Nora, in whose opinion memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to dialect of remembering and forgetting. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present.2 The interplay of history and memory in the collective effort to document and define the past intensifies during periods of commemoration when the legacy of that past is reviewed, dissected, and analyzed through a contemporary lens. For Ireland the commemorations in 2016 provide a rich moment for understanding how contemporary identity is shaped in relation to the events of 1916. It is in this context that Inspiring Ireland, the collaborative digital cultural-heritage platform by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), developed a series of exhibitions to mark the centenary and add new voices and artifacts to the process of commemoration. Inspiring Ireland 1916: Weaving Public and Private Narratives is a novel approach to writing in the digital age because of its approach to the authorship of history: It [End Page 303] combines exhibitions with archival preservation, public and private content, personal memory, storytelling, and expert commentary, and it preserves these digital historical artifacts for future study. Capable of exhibiting a wide variety of content and formats, Inspiring Ireland is a continually expanding resource that makes Ireland's cultural heritage available in digital form, working to uncover hidden stories and ultimately aiming to contribute more complex historical narratives that reflect a rich assemblage of memory. Inspiring Ireland: The Pilot Phase Inspiring Ireland 1916 is the second phase in an ongoing project to share and preserve Ireland's digital cultural heritage. First conceived in 2013, the pilot phase of the project was funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht with the enthusiastic support of the minister at the time, Jimmy Deenihan, who anticipated that the project would also help to connect with the Irish diaspora.3 While the stated early purpose of the project was to bring together digital cultural objects from across Ireland for preservation and greater public access, it quickly became apparent that the project's additional achievement was to build a community of interest around the preservation of digital cultural heritage. The pilot phase delivered an aesthetically appealing platform with curated digital exhibitions, but just as importantly, it brought together a significant number of content-holders in the cultural-heritage domain, which has enabled additional collaborations and in general helped to develop awareness and capacity in the preservation of digital cultural heritage. DRI partnered with eight of Ireland's national cultural institutions: the Abbey Theatre, Chester Beatty Library, Crawford Art Gallery Cork, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Archives of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, National Library of Ireland, and National Museum of Ireland. To formulate the site's exhibitions, a committee comprising curators from each of the institutions selected material for inclusion on the broad theme of "Ireland's cultural treasures." As this was a pilot [End Page 304] project, it was not possible to determine the constitution of the final audience, so in collecting the digital objects and formulating the exhibition themes, the committee envisaged a global audience with an interest in Ireland, but not necessarily a studied knowledge of Irish history and culture. In terms of thematic construction the stated effort was to create visual stories that would provide compelling user experiences without constructing a unified historical narrative about Ireland. Ireland's national cultural institutions are at various stages of development in the digitization and digital cataloguing of their collections, so themes were proposed based on available materials, as time and budgets did not permit further digitization as...

Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia by Thomas O'Connor

Reviewed by: Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia by Thomas O'Connor Matteo Binasco Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia. By Thomas O'Connor. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. Pp. xvi, 280. $79.99. ISBN 978-1-137-46589-4.) Thomas O'Connor's last book can be considered the ideal continuation of a journey that began in 2008 with the publication of his Irish Jansenists, 1600–1670. Based on an impressive amount of European, Irish, and Mexican sources, this new book aims to provide a groundbreaking analysis of the activities and role played by the Irish migrants in Spain and in the Spanish colonies in America during the early modern period. By examining the three most influential and represented groups of Irish migrants—the clerics, the merchants, and the soldiers—within Spanish society, the author examines their thorny relations with the Spanish Inquisition. In the first part of the book, O'Connor sets the agenda by providing a clear picture of how the various groups of Irish migrants in Spain fitted within the context of the Spanish society during the second half of the sixteenth century. This is a pivotal point, because the author clearly illustrates that the Spanish Inquisition was not a monolithic structure that adopted a dogmatic strategy. Indeed, by focusing on the Irish merchants, the author shows that the Inquisition had to deal with a series of different cases in which the political and religious loyalties of this particular migrants' community were often changing. Due to this the tribunal was forced to use a multilayered approach that took into account the shifting loyalties of the Irish migrants. The section on the sixteenth century also includes the Irish clergy. By drawing on the sources of the local tribunals, O'Connor shows how the Irish clerics who cooperated with the Inquisition played the dual role of interpreters and spies amid the migrants who arrived from the British Isles. The second section explores the seventeenth century, when Irish migration to Spain considerably increased, and even stretched to the Spanish possessions in Central and South America. O'Connor demonstrates how, during this period, a certain number of Irish migrants sought to obtain a role in the Inquisition, a step that would facilitate their process of integration within Spanish society. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to the inquisitorial processes that involved Irish migrants in Mexico. By focusing on the famous case study of William Lamport, O'Connor reveals the complex web of networks and patronage which existed behind the Irish migrants. The last section of the book explores the Irish migration to Spain during the eighteenth century and how this phenomenon brought the Spanish Inquisition to elaborate once again a flexible strategy. O'Connor's analysis particularly focuses on the role played by the Irish merchants, and how this group was increasingly put under control by the Inquisition. This last section also includes a fascinating chapter on the female dimension of Irish migration. Using untapped sources in the inquisitorial records, O'Connor sheds new light on Irishwomen who were involved in cases of sexual offenses. What emerges from his analysis is the suggestion that Irishwomen played a crucial brokering role between the "host" society and the Irish migrant community. [End Page 351] In conclusion, O'Connor's book is an outstanding and extremely well-researched investigation that has contributed to a significant expansion of the historiography on the cultural, political, and religious links that existed between Ireland the Spanish monarchy. By fitting the Irish migration within the difficult and—most of the time—tricky context of the Spanish Inquisition's activities, the author illuminates an unexplored dimension of the Irish diaspora during the early modern period. Matteo Binasco University of Notre Dame, Rome Center Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond. Ed. by Mark Fitzgerald and John O’Flynn

Recent decades have seen a significant growth in publications on Irish music and musical life, in no small part due to initiatives by Harry White and other contributors to this volume, which amply attests to the current vitality of the Irish musicological scene. In an Irish context, it is a pioneering venture—a broad-ranging collection of essays surveying the role played by music and discourse about music in constructing Irish identities from the eighteenth century to the present day, within the island of Ireland itself and across the Irish diaspora. The volume’s scope extends beyond classical music and folk music to encompass various genres of popular music and the musics of immigrant communities. The sixteen essays are grouped under three headings. Those in Part I examine a range of historical figures and contexts that illuminate key issues pertaining to Irish musical identity; Part II explores these questions in regard to recent Irish musical production; and Part III is concerned with the relationship between Irish music, in the most inclusive understanding of the term, and ‘broader conceptions of society, nation state, and intercultural/transcultural groupings’ (p. 14).

Let the people sing? Irish rebel songs, sectarianism, and Scotland's Offensive Behaviour Act

AbstractIrish rebel songs afford Scotland's Irish diaspora a means to assert, experience and perform their alterity free from the complexities of the Irish language. Yet this benign intent can be offset by how the music is perceived by elements of Scotland's majority Protestant population. The Scottish Government's Offensive Behaviour Act (2012) has been used to prosecute those singing Irish rebel songs and there is continuing debate as to how this alleged offence should be dealt with. This article explores the social function and cultural perception of Irish rebel songs in the west coast of Scotland, examining what qualities lead to a song being perceived as ‘sectarian’, by focusing on song lyrics, performance context and extra-musical discourse. The article explores the practice of lyrical ‘add-ins’ that inflect the meaning of key songs, and argues that the sectarianism of a song resides, at least in part, in the perception of the listener.

Refracted Republicanism: Plowden's History, Paddy's Resource, and Irish Jacobins in Western Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Two books of significance to contemporary Irish political radicalism were republished in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century: in 1796 Paddy's Resource, an anthology of songs and toasts; and in 1806 the multivolume history of Ireland authored by Francis Plowden. Together, these literary productions help bring into focus both the centrality of Philadelphia in the percolation of Democratic-Republican politics and the ideas and personalities animating the Irish diaspora of Pennsylvania's western region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Irish American communities in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh became defined through alliance with the Jeffersonian party, ethnic symbols, and in part, the songs transmitted by Paddy's Resource.

Landscapes of the Irish Language: Discursive Constructions of Authenticity in the Irish Diaspora

Almost 2 million people in the North and South of Ireland identify as Irish speakers and an estimated 70 million around the globe can claim Irish heritage. While Irish ancestry may be distant for many, the Irish language is active in numerous locations in the diaspora, as documented in research profiling communities across the globe (e.g. Callahan, 1994; Garland 2008; Giles 2016; Kallen 1984, 1994; Noone, 2012a; O hEadhra, 1998;O Conchubhair 2008; Walsh & NiDhuda 2015 inter alia) and evidenced by the existence of many cultural and language groups. Census figures indicate that at least25,000 people currently speak the language in Canada, the United States and Australia alone (Statistics Canada, 2013; United States Census Bureau, 2015; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012), yet very few in-depth general accounts of Irish-language use in the diaspora exist. Linguistic practices within Irish communities worldwide vary widely with regard to Irish-language use and language ideologies, with each community subject to distinct concerns, histories and discourses. As such, each has distinct possibilities for creating social and cultural meaning, possibilities that are fundamentally shaped by the socio-cultural and politico-historical contexts within which the Irish language has existed in the last 200 years. This paper investigates how the Irish language is recruited in constructions of cultural authenticity in three sites in the Irish diaspora: Boston, U.S.; Melbourne, Australia; and St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Research is based on open-ended qualitative interviews with 41 learners and speakers regarding the Irish language and their own language practices, and in extensive participant observation of cultural and language-related activities in each site. Thematic content analysis of interview data provides the basis for ethnographic descriptions of each site. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse (e.g. Pennycook, 1994; Foucault, 1981, 1972) affords the identification and delineation of predominant discourses within which Irish-language use is implicated as a meaningful social act, and that are enacted or actively resisted within and across communities, as well as key subject positions made available within these discourses. This approach provides the basis for an exploration of (i) the processes of authenticating a cultural practice within discourse; (ii) how such processes shape the changing configurations of who is included and who is excluded within dominant politico-cultural discourses; and (iii) the various formations of community that exist within and across the diaspora space. The paper shows that the role of the Irish language in authenticating Irish cultural identity is subject to reworkings across time and space, as exemplified in the variety of local meanings it has taken on across the three diaspora sites featured.

Citizens of Nowhere: longing, belonging and exile among Irish Protestant writers in Britain, c.1830–1970

Since the 1970s, the literature on the history of the worldwide Irish diaspora has become increasingly sophisticated, with scholars employing a range of innovative techniques to capture aspects of the migratory experience. Many challenges remain, however, in charting the multifaceted experiences of the Irish in Britain. This article makes the case for a cultural study of Irish Protestants in Britain. It examines the contours of the Irish Protestant migratory mind-set, focusing on the writings of a number of creative émigrés, temporary and permanent, such as W.B. Yeats, Denis Ireland, Nesca Robb, and John Hewitt. Of particular relevance are articulations of longing, belonging and exile, which shaped the literary perspective of these writers, and complicated their relationships with Ireland and Britain. Attitudes regarding emigration within Protestant Ireland are also probed to tease out cross-channel ideals and fears.

“Common Joys, Sorrows, Adventures, and Struggles”: Transnational Encounters in Amy Beach's “Gaelic” Symphony

AbstractAmy Beach's “Gaelic” Symphony is the most prominent nineteenth-century American expression of Irishness in music. Despite the reference to another country in its title, the work has largely been interpreted via the lens of American nationalism. Its historiography reflects the immense interest in national style in nineteenth-century American music scholarship. This article initiates a discussion about nineteenth-century American composers’ engagement with the world beyond their own national borders. It explores the “Gaelic” Symphony's transnational dimensions, which engage largely with two groups: concert music composers and the Irish diaspora. Regarding the former, the article illuminates nuances of intertextuality in Beach's style. It revises the historical narrative surrounding the “Gaelic” Symphony as a response to Antonín Dvořák's “New World” Symphony, finding multiple additional models for Beach's work. The “Gaelic” Symphony is positioned instead as a representation of concert music styles that valued cosmopolitan approaches and judged composers on the skill with which they consciously blended multiple streams of influence. Regarding the latter category of the Irish, the article contextualizes the symphony within a revival of Irish cultural practices taking place in the 1890s, revealing how constructions of Irishness in the symphony reflect Gaelic revival values and respond to social tensions between Boston's Irish-American community and the city's upper class.

Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950 ed. by Colin Barr, Hillary M. Carey

Reviewed by: Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950 ed. by Colin Barr, Hillary M. Carey Oliver P. Rafferty S.J. Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950. Edited by Colin Barr and Hillary M. Carey. [McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion, Series 2, vol. 73.] (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 456. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-7735-4570-0.) This is a fascinating study of Irish religious experience as this found expression in America and the British Empire in a 200-year period. The idea of “Greater Ireland” is not simply a synonym for the Irish diaspora. The Irish in “Greater Ireland” continued to be linked by emotional, cultural, and symbolic ties to the old country. Unlike other studies of the global Irish, the sixteen essays in this work emphasize the centrality of religion in Irish Catholic and Protestant culture, at home and abroad. The editors freely admit that this is not a comprehensive study of the topic; some geographical areas are neglected such as the West Indies, Argentina, Western Australia, and Britain, where the complexities are such as to merit individual volumes. Nor is there a chapter on Irish Jews, but John Stenhouse does indicate cooperation between Irish Catholics and Protestants with some leading Jews over social issues in New Zealand in the late-nineteenth century. There is a sense in which many of the characteristics of the Irish in the diaspora are a mirror image of the Irish at home. Sectarian differences were a plague with the expansion of the Orange Order in Canada and Australia that served to keep religious rivalries alive. Diane Hall, however, illustrates the centrality of Orange Lodges in identity formation in Australia. She also warns against the dangers of subsuming Irish Protestant experience under the predominantly English character of mainstream Australian Protestantism. Similarly, Michael Gladwin shows the importance of Irish ministers for the development of Anglicanism in Australia despite what is often regarded as the “quintessentially English” nature of the church there. Irish religious experience could never quite escape the tension produced by Irish political realities. Thus Myrtle Hill, in her chapter on Irish women in Protestant female missions between 1870 and 1914, points out that the Female Association for Promoting Christianity was founded in Belfast at a time when the issue of Home Rule was beginning to come to the fore. Such political tensions also raised questions of imperial loyalty, which, in turn, served to sharpen sectarian animosities. Were the Catholics loyal to the Empire? Whatever the experience at home, the irony is that, by and large, Catholics served imperial interests. In Canada, [End Page 847] according to Mark McGowan, they were consistently imperialistic, but this was facilitated by the fact that the Constitution Act of 1791 gave them religious and political freedoms not available in Ireland. Carolyn Lambert demonstrates that, so far as Newfoundland was concerned, Irish Catholics were marked by both patriotism for Ireland and loyalty to the British Empire. Upon his death in 1914, Archbishop Michael Francis Howley of St. John’s was described as a “true son of Empire” (p. 129). This is despite the fact that he was distinctly muted in his approval of the British side in the Boer War of 1899–1902, quite unlike his wholly Irish Episcopal colleagues at the Cape, who supported Britain against the Boers (Colin Barr, p. 267). Barry Crosbie reminds us that the peoples of the United Kingdom viewed the Empire differently and had varying interactions with indigenous peoples. This gave rise to trouble for Irish priests and bishops over issues of caste in India. But this may have been part of the process of negotiations with local realities that Mia Cowan identifies in her study of Catholic participation in the public school system in Chicago in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. But there were other problems for the Irish in “Greater Ireland.” Squabbles at home over “New Light” and “Old Light” theology within Presbyterianism were exported to colonial America in the eighteenth century. Irish Catholics competed with French Catholics in British North America for dominance of the Church, and ultimately the...

A Message from the Editor

A Message from the Editor Gary Kline [End Page 9] This issue of our journal marks a milestone, which is why I feel a need to address our readers and association members. For us, 2016 has been a time of reflection and change and expectancy. To some extent, our track may be said to mirror the general sense of uncertainty and anticipation with which many today look upon the future. The challenges that we humans face globally seem both daunting and full of opportunity. The headlines generally emphasize the events that inspire fear, sorrow, and revulsion. In such a climate, when people are hard-pressed, they often manifest the most awful and most sublime aspects of our species. However, challenges and change inspire innovations and adaptations that can lead us on a fresh path to a better world. More than ever, perhaps, our association and our journal are needed to help shine a light upon the path ahead. I will return to this point later. First, let me note that the Association of Third World Studies, Inc. held its 34th Annual Conference from November 20-22, 2016 and officially emerged as the Association of Global South Studies (AGSS). By any measure, our meeting at Indiana University Southeast (IUS) in New Albany, Indiana (on the beautiful Ohio River and across from Louisville, Kentucky) was an unqualified success. For that, we can thank the many good hosts of IUS who made us feel so welcome. Foremost, we should thank the conference organizer, Dr. Doyin Coker-Kolo, Dean of the School of Education. Her months of hard work truly culminated in an inspiring event, with stimulating panels and intellectually rich discussions. Participants from sixteen different countries attended the conference, which commenced with a warm welcome [End Page 11] reception with entertainment provided by the renowned jazz musician Jamey Aebesold and his incredible band. The Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at IUS, Dr. Uric Dufrene, gave a heartfelt greeting to the attendees and Dr. Michael Hall of Armstrong State University provided a brief overview of the history of our association. The food was excellent, the desserts were sinful, and everyone enjoyed an evening of great fellowship. As Dr. Coker-Kolo will admit, however, her success would have been impossible but for the support and assistance of numerous others at her institution of higher learning. She was assisted by many of her colleagues in the School of Education, as well as folks in the Center for Cultural Resources, in Marketing and Communications, in the Office of International Programs, and others at IUS. There are too many people to name individually, so we must thank you collectively. I wish to mention, however, that support for our conference went all the way to the level of the Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dr. Uric Dufrene, and the Chancellor, Dr. Ray Wallace, who delivered the outstanding keynote address at our banquet. It was entitled "The 21st Century Irish Diaspora: A Personal Response," and Dr. Wallace tied this topic into current events and into the work of our association brilliantly and with humor. He gave a truly excellent address. Evening entertainment during our banquet was provided by the fabulous IUS student band, The Cold Front. As well, at this meeting Dr. Coker-Kolo assumed the mantle of President of AGSS and, consequently, President Jyotirmaya Tripathy became our Immediate Past President. It must be said that Dr. Tripathy served us as President during a critical and somewhat turbulent year and that we came [End Page 12] through our trials on firm ground largely due to his steady and wise leadership. We in AGSS owe him a great debt. He was rightly recognized at our banquet awards ceremony with the Leadership Award. Additionally, Dr. William (Bill) Head, a "founding father" of our association, took the President's Award, which he so richly deserved. Others were recognized at this ceremony for their works and achievements. The Toyin Falola Africa Book Award was conferred on Mohamed Zayani of Georgetown University for his book, Networked Publics and Digital Contention. The Cecil B. Currey Book Award went to James Pietz of the University of Arizona for The Yellow River: The Problem...

Irish Intercultural Cinema: Memory, Identity and Subjectivity

Irish intercultural cinema looks at the development of a cinematic genre which focuses on issues of Irish migrancy but is produced outside of Ireland. This paper has as its focus the cultural landscape of Irish-Australia. The essay uses methodologies of ethnographic and documentary theory plus textual analysis of film and written texts to establish a throughline of Irish intercultural film. The essay begins by contextualising the place of the Irish diaspora within the creation of Irish identity globally. The discussion around migrancy is widened to consider the place of memory and intergenerational tensions within not just the Irish migrant population, but also within the diverse cultures which comprise the contemporary Australian landscape. The historical development of intercultural cinema is then explored internationally within a context of colonial, gender and class struggles in the 1970s and1980s. The term intercultural cinema has its origins in the Third Cinema of Argentinians Solanas and Getino in the 1970s and covers those films which deal with issues involving two countries or cultures. The term was refined by Laura Marks in 2000 and further developed by Hamid Naficy in 2001 in his discussion of accented cinema which narrows its definition to include the politics of production. The paper then traces the development of Irish intercultural cinema from its beginnings in England in the 1970s with Thaddeus O'Sullivan through to Nicola Bruce and others including Enda Murray in the present day. The essay concludes by bringing these various strands together to see where intercultural film might have a place in today's globalised cultural landscape. Common traits within intercultural film such as the notion of place, autobiographical film and personal identity are explored using examples of intercultural filmmaking from around the globe. These commonalities point to a way forward for the future of a sustainable multicultural film culture.

Building New Lives, Maintaining Old Identities: Irish Associations in Michigan’s Copper Country, 1860-1900

Building New Lives, Maintaining Old Identities: Irish Associations in Michigan’s Copper Country, 1860-1900 William H. Mulligan Jr. The celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day is a common event throughout the Irish diaspora. In the United States, its celebration dates back to the colonial period with observances in Boston and Savannah among other cities with Irish populations. Notably, St. Patrick’s Day has not always been an Irish Catholic observance. As Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair suggest in their history of the day, The Wearing of the Green (2002), the holiday deserves more serious attention from scholars than it has received, if only because the celebrations offer a window into each particular community, and how the community defined itself and responded to the challenges it faced at various times in its history.1 That is certainly the case in the Michigan Copper Country, an area in the Upper Peninsula comprising Keweenaw, Baraga, Houghton, and Ontonogan Counties. There, St. Patrick’s Day was the central event in the various Irish communities’ year. However, the observance was only one part of the communities’ efforts to keep in touch with events in Ireland and to maintain Irish identity. In addition to their March 17 celebrations, the Irish of the Upper Peninsula established and supported a number of organizations. Those organizations and their activities give us an insight into the lives and concerns of the Irish in Michigan’s Copper Country, who unfortunately have left few direct records of their lives. Ethnic organizations have been, and remain, an important way in which all American immigrant groups have dealt with the tensions, pressures, and adjustments inherent in migration.2 These organizations played varied roles in the lives of their members. Most provided protection from the uncertainties of life in a frequently hostile and dangerous new environment; others helped continue familiar cultural practices and customs; and all ethnic organizations [End Page 109] provided opportunities to fill positions involving leadership and responsibility often denied immigrants and their children by the larger society. Collectively, such organizations helped to create and sustain a sense of community among newcomers.3 Of course, non-immigrant, native-born Americans were equally active in fraternal and benevolent organizations. For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans participated in social, fraternal, and benevolent societies on a scale that invariably drew the attention and comments of European travelers. In this respect, Irish immigrants in Michigan’s Copper Country during the last half of the nineteenth century were not different from other immigrant groups. They formed a large number of organizations that served various purposes in their new home. No formal records of any of these organizations appear to be extant—or at least, none have yet been found—but their activities were covered extensively in the region’s newspapers, among them the Portage Lake Mining Gazette, the Copper Country Evening News, and the Northwestern Mining Journal. This press coverage makes it possible to reconstruct much of this aspect of Irish immigrant life in the Michigan Copper Country. Many of the organizations that Copper Country Irish immigrants formed were similar in purpose to those of other ethnic groups, both in the Copper Country and elsewhere; one of the most frequent purposes was to provide for a proper wake and burial as well as some modest monetary benefits for surviving widows and children. Nonetheless, distinctly Irish groups and purposes do form part of the associational history of the region. They reflect the continuing interest and involvement of the Irish of the diaspora in political and economic events unfolding in Ireland, such as Fenianism, the Land League, and the cause of Irish freedom most generally. It is difficult to determine if the concerns of these organizations were based on the Irish experience of the men and women of the Copper Country—but they clearly reflect an awareness of and deep interest in events in Ireland The experience of the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants in the Copper Country differed, in some ways, from that of other Irish immigrant communities. They were, to a substantial degree, skilled workers and among the pioneer settlers of the region. A significant portion of the men were experienced...

Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness by Gad Guterman (review)

Reviewed by: Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness by Gad Guterman Christopher Goodson PERFORMANCE, IDENTITY, AND IMMIGRATION LAW: A THEATRE OF UNDOCUMENTEDNESS. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; pp. 248. In this well-researched study, Gad Guterman examines how the growing repertory of theatrical representations of undocumented immigrants “can bring those forced into spaces of nonexistence out of the shadows and, in so doing, mitigate the violence characteristic to those spaces” (4). For Guterman, this repertory has received scant attention, and, given the “screaming rhetoric” within the immigration debate, he seeks to answer the question, “How does theatre participate in making undocumentedness visible?” (10, 4). Avoiding an analytical structure based on nationality or ethnicity and instead foregrounding questions of movement, labor, and family, Guterman inventively titles his chapters with headings from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. He thereby unifies the plays through a legalistic framework, highlighting both the shifting frontier of undocumentedness and evolving US policy. Guterman concludes his first section by examining US immigration law, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to Arizona State Bill 1070. In chapter 2, Guterman borrows Diana Taylor’s concept of the repeatable “scenario” and offers the “border scenario,” examining Genny Lim’s Paper Angels, which depicts Chinese immigrants at California’s Angel Island Immigration Detention Center, and Culture Clash’s Bordertown, a comedic take on Mexico/US border issues (34). For Guterman, both plays highlight the frailty and ambivalence of US law, as well as the border’s inherent theatricality. The plays, each depicting entry attempts into the United States, “expose the role that performance plays in maneuvering border interactions” (41). Guterman’s methodology is not limited to close readings of the texts, as he draws from both archival video and live performance. The live body is essential for him because not only does an actor’s ability to “cross-document” challenge an audience’s understanding of legal labels of identity, but real-world “performances of credibility” are integral to the immigrant experience, whether crossing the border or taking a citizen’s entrance exam (47, 41). Although Guterman applauds the intention of such plays, he ends his chapter with an incisive materialist analysis that shows how the work risks being de-historicized by a push to fit into ethnic cubbyholes. He uses chapter 3 to spotlight plays that exhibit the skewed power dynamics and unsustainable situations faced by domestic workers while at the same time provoking his readers to consider theatre-making’s deep entanglement with the exploitive practices that rely upon undocumented labor. While Guterman commends Lisa Loomer’s Living Out, Milcha Sánchez-Scott’s Latina, and Octavio Solis’s Lydia for their sympathetic depictions of female laborers at odds with the isolating conditions of domestic work, he also uncovers what he feels to be the ineffectiveness of the plays’ flattened and essentialized characters. Guterman strongly questions how the productions of these plays, imbricated in a capitalist system of labor exploitation (that is, the practices of their corporate sponsors and un-credited theatre custodians), offer any real remedy to those in undocumentedness. Suggesting that the plays perpetuate clichéd images of immigrants within a political economy of theatre that excludes those for whom it claims to advocate, Guterman provocatively suggests that the plays result in the practice of what he calls “undocumentedface,” a kind of questionable ventriloquism in which “the undocumented are representable and represented but not present” (93). Guterman’s next chapter skillfully examines the characters within Teatro de la Esperanza’s La Victima, Janet Noble’s Away Alone, and Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas to expose how US immigration law imposes meaning and value on various relationships, especially in regard to the upholding of heterosexual normativity. For the undocumented characters in these plays, whether in a multigenerational Mexican American family, in the surrogate families of the Irish diaspora, or in the twice-marginalized space of homosexual immigrants in California, the precarious state of legal nonexistence impedes their ability to maintain personal relationships. Although the plays ostensibly challenge the hypocrisies within US law, for Guterman, they often reinforce the compulsory heteronormativity that (in the real world) satisfies immigration authorities. In an...

“No, it is a hobby for me”: Examining the motivations of non-Irish learners of the Irish language in North America

This paper examines how non-Irish learners of Irish Gaelic in Ontario, Canada navigate through questions of authenticity and legitimization as members of the Irish language network. Learners without Irish heritage often convey a happenstance or hobby-like connection, which stands in contrast to motivations common in the Irish diaspora that often connect with participants' sense of who they are as Irish people. Despite viewing their connection as hobby-like, many are fluent speakers with longstanding involvement in the network, and are legitimized by sharing ideologies that stress an ancient quality to the language, and as musicians or holders of valued linguistic and cultural knowledge. While the difference in motivations for attending may be evaluated and ranked hierarchically, it does not have a determining impact on fluency.