Race, politics, and Irish America: a Gothic history

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Notes

1. See, for example, Diane Negra, ed. The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2006); David Lloyd and Peter O’Neill, eds., The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Lauren Onkey, Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Sinéad Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2013); and Kathleen Gough, Haptic Allegories: Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (New York: Routledge, 2013). A concern with race and racialisation is similarly evident in three of the five essays published in MELUS’s 2019 forum devoted to “New Directions in Irish American Literature.”

2. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 127.

3. I am riffing, here, on Matthew Frye Jacobson’s term “variegated whiteness” in Whiteness of a Different Color, 41.

4. See, for example, Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001); and Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Atlantic, 2016).

5. See, for example, John C. Charles, Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2013); and Stephanie Li, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014).