The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822337401 ISBN 13: 9780822337409

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Over the past decade or so, Irishness has emerged as an idealized ethnicity, one with which large numbers of people around the world, and particularly in the United States, choose to identify. Seeking to explain the widespread appeal of all things Irish, the contributors to this collection show that for Americans, Irishness is rapidly becoming the white ethnicity of choice, a means of claiming an ethnic identity while maintaining the benefits of whiteness. At the same time, the essayists challenge essentialized representations of Irishness, bringing attention to the complexities of Irish history and culture that are glossed over in Irish-themed weddings and shamrock tattoos.

Examining how Irishness is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, the contributors explore topics including Van Morrison's music, Frank McCourt's writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers, the movie The Crying Game, and the significance of red hair. Whether considering the implications of Garth Brooks's claim of Irishness and his enormous popularity in Ireland, representations of Irish masculinity in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, or Americans' recourse to a consoling Irishness amid the racial and nationalist tensions triggered by the events of September 11, the contributors delve into complex questions of ethnicity, consumerism, and globalization. Ultimately, they call for an increased awareness of the exclusionary effects of claims of Irishness and for the cultivation of flexible, inclusive ways of affiliating with Ireland and the Irish.

Contributors. Natasha Casey, Maeve Connolly, Catherine M. Eagan, Sean Griffin, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, Gerardine Meaney, Diane Negra, Lauren Onkey, Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains, Amanda Third

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane Negra is Senior Lecturer in the School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom and a coeditor (with Jennifer M. Bean) of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, also published by Duke University Press.

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"This sparkling, sophisticated, and original collection analyzes such diverse topics as the genealogical quest for Irish roots, Celtic white supremacists, and post-September 11 identity politics. Provocatively, Diane Negra suggests that 'Irishness' has become a way for Americans to claim a safe and fashionable ethnic identity. Essential reading for Irish and American cultural studies."--Elizabeth Cullingford, author of "Ireland's Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture"

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The Irish in US

Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3740-9

Contents

Diane Negra The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture................................................1Catherine M. Eagan Still "Black" and "Proud": Irish America and the Racial Politics of Hibernophilia.......................20Sean Griffin The Wearing of the Green: Performing Irishness in the Fox Wartime Musical.....................................64Natasha Casey "The Best Kept Secret In Retail": Selling Irishness in Contemporary America..................................84Maria Pramaggiore "Papa Don't Preach": Pregnancy and Performance in Contemporary Irish Cinema..............................110Stephanie Rains Irish Roots: Genealogy and the Performance of Irishness....................................................130Lauren Onkey Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison's Caledonian Soul................................................161Mary McGlynn Garth Brooks in Ireland, or, Play That Country Music, Whiteboys...............................................196Amanda Third "Does the Rug Match the Carpet?": Race, Gender, and the Redheaded Woman.......................................220Gerardine Meaney Dead, White, Male: Irishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel........................................254Maeve Connolly "A Bit of a Traveller in Everybody": Traveller Identities in Irish and American Culture.....................282Michael Malouf Feeling ire(y): On Irish-Caribbean Popular Culture.........................................................318Diane Negra Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics before and after September 11.............................354Contributors................................................................................................................373Index.......................................................................................................................377

Chapter One

DIANE NEGRA

The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture

In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), the African American comedian Bernie Mac attempts to infiltrate a Dublin-based tanker by presenting a driver's license identifying himself as Paddy O'Malley. When a criminal on the tanker doubts him, Mac launches into a comic tirade of outrage. "You never heard of no black Irish?" he asks. "Who do you think invented the McRib, Lucky Charms, the Shamrock Shake? ... My family suffered for lack of potatoes." This catalogue of associative links to Irishness delivered by a black comedian is but one example of a popular culture increasingly likely to produce comedy tied to the "everything and nothing" status of Irishness. The joke here turns on an assumption the film presumes its audience to share; namely, that whatever else it may be, Irishness is reliably, invariably, a form of whiteness.

Over the last ten years, a particular set of cultural and economic pressures has rapidly transnationalized Irishness. Recruited for global capitalism, Irishness has become a form of discursive currency, motivating and authenticating a variety of heritage narratives and commercial transactions, often through its status as a form of "enriched whiteness." The scene from Charlie's Angels underscores one of the most central concerns of this book-namely, the status of Irishness as a category of racial fantasy. While Irishness surged into a globally marketed identity under the aegis of the Celtic Tiger, its terms in American culture have been particularly functional in accommodating new diversity imperatives. As Catherine M. Eagan observes in her essay for this volume, "in celebrating their Irishness, Irish Americans are also finding a way to celebrate their whiteness." Or, as Vincent J. Cheng contends, "in the United States today, Irishness may be both popular and comfortable precisely because it remains an identifiable (and presumably authentic) ethnicity that is nonetheless unthreatening and familiar." With a greater level of permission now given to claim heritage amidst the cultural romance of identities, Irishness has emerged as an "a la carte ethnicity," the ideal all-purpose identity credential. In this sense, concepts of Irish whiteness play a particular part in what Ghassan Hage has termed "the psychopathology of white decline," the terror that whiteness in America is losing its social purchase.

The Irish in Us seeks to explore some of the coordinates on the expanding map of Irishness in contemporary popular culture, and to investigate the ideological implications of the ways that Irishness has become particularly performative and mobile at the millennium. This book originates in concerns about the imbrication of Irishness with a number of ideological agendas, including the depoliticization of difference, the reclassification of forms of whiteness as "ethnicity," and niche-market saturation leading to a process in which commodities that have lost their luster are reendowed with (ethnic) meaning. Drawing from the tenets of Cultural Studies, the book dispenses with an absolute "truthful" version of Irishness, looking instead to the many fictions that proliferate around Irish identity in our current environment. In this vein, essays on such topics as the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising over the last ten years, themes of Irishness on series television, the genealogical practices of heritage seekers, and performances of Irishness in celebrity culture are brought together in this collection to examine how Irishness is claimed, enacted, and performed in the current transnational environment. Richard Dyer has noted that "whiteness can determine who is to be included and excluded from the category and also determine among those deemed to be within it. Some people-the Irish, Latins, Jews-are white sometimes, and some white people are whiter than others." A strong connecting thread among the essays is their shared concern with the flexible racial status of Irishness (its "complex oscillation between otherness and whiteness," in the words of one contributor) in an era of highly charged racial-identity politics.

Catherine M. Eagan's essay poses questions about the romance of the Irish-black connection that will be addressed by the majority of essays here. These analyses are carried out in line with Hazel Carby's observation that "the last decade of the 20th century was a particularly interesting conjunctual moment between the global production of blackness and Irishness." One of the key phenomena with which this book is concerned is the way that Irishness seems to move between a quasi blackness and a politically insulated ethnic whiteness. It is crucial to candidly assess the implications of the ways that Irishness now functions as a form of identity currency and the way that it stands at the heart of so many mass-marketed white homeland fantasies. In examining the role of Irishness among American fictions and fantasies of race and ethnicity at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, we must acknowledge that assertions of Irish whiteness may well act to displace and/or neutralize the identity claims of blacks and Latinos. Conjunctions of Irishness and blackness are not inevitably conservative formulations, as Lauren Onkey's essay-a nuanced reading of the racialized persona of Van Morrison-demonstrates. Similarly, as Michael Malouf shows, in the Irish context, performances of cross-racial and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822337401
• ISBN 13: 9780822337409
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 388
• Herausgeber: Negra
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande